You search online for a pair of trainers. Minutes later, similar shoes appear on social media feeds. A shopping site offers a limited-time discount and suggests a matching jacket. This is no longer just an advert shown to millions of people. Increasingly, artificial intelligence is helping decide not only what you see, but which sales pitch is most likely to persuade you.

As AI becomes more deeply embedded in online shopping, researchers like me are asking whether these systems are merely making shopping easier, or quietly encouraging us to buy far more than we need. At the same time, a growing body of research suggests that more mindful shopping habits may offer one of the few effective ways for consumers to stay in control of their decisions.

Advertising has always tried to influence consumers. While mass marketing delivered the same message to everyone, AI can build detailed profiles from our interests and online behaviour, continually adjusting recommendations based on what we search for, click on or leave in an online basket.

On online shopping sites this might mean product recommendations linked to a recent search. On social media, it could be a sponsored post resembling content already holding your attention.

Personalisation can be genuinely useful, reducing the effort involved in finding relevant products. But it also allows advertising to become more adaptive. And potentially more persuasive.

That persuasion works because it reduces the mental effort involved in shopping. Instead of comparing hundreds of options, we are presented with a shortlist that feels relevant. Familiarity, customer reviews and scarcity messages such as “only two left” create a sense of urgency.

Of course, AI didn’t invent these techniques. One-click payment, limited-time offers and personalised recommendations have long been features of online retail. What AI changes is the speed and precision with which companies can learn which combination of messages works best for each person. Experimental research suggests that these kinds of online “dark patterns” can produce small but measurable increases in impulse buying.

Research suggests AI may make this influence even harder to recognise. A 2025 peer-reviewed experiment involving 179 participants found that many people struggled to identify advertising embedded within AI chatbot conversations, often interpreting promotional content as helpful advice rather than advertising.

A more recent 2026 preprint involving 2,012 participants reached a similar conclusion. Researchers found that conversational AI steered users towards sponsored books far more often than conventional search rankings, while most participants did not recognise the promotional influence. Because the study has not yet been peer reviewed, its findings should be interpreted with appropriate caution.

When convenience turns into extra consumption

The concern is not that AI removes our ability to choose freely. Rather, it can shorten the gap between wanting something and stopping to consider whether we actually need it. A recommendation arrives at exactly the right moment, perhaps accompanied by a discount or a reminder that an item is nearly sold out. Decisions that once involved reflection can become almost automatic.

That matters not only for household budgets but also for the environment. Every unnecessary purchase requires raw materials, manufacturing, packaging and transport. In Europe, around 20% of garments bought online is returned, while an estimated 22% to 43% of returned online clothing is destroyed.

So, how can consumers respond without abandoning the convenience that AI-powered shopping offers?

One increasingly discussed approach is mindful consumption. Rather than shopping on autopilot, it encourages people to become more aware of what is influencing their decisions and to pause long enough to consider whether a purchase reflects a genuine need or simply a well-timed temptation.

A 2025 study found that people with higher levels of trait mindfulness tended to report lower levels of impulse buying overall. But a brief mindfulness exercise did not reduce immediate buying urges or behaviour. Awareness is therefore not a magic switch.

Putting the pause back into the purchase

In my research with a colleague, mindful consumption begins with three ideas: noticing what influences our decisions, considering the wider consequences of what we buy, and recognising when enough is enough.

This kind of mindfulness is not about meditating before buying a pair of shoes. Psychologist Ellen Langer has long argued that mindfulness can simply mean actively noticing what is happening around us and questioning familiar habits.

Applied to shopping, it means interrupting the automatic purchase. Before buying something unplanned, ask yourself: did I want this before I saw the recommendation? What need will it actually meet? How often will I use it?

It can also help to create small moments of friction. Leave an item in your basket overnight instead of buying immediately. Turn off retail notifications. Remove stored payment details. Shop from a list rather than an endless stream of recommendations. Check whether a recommendation is sponsored and compare it with alternatives outside the platform making the suggestion.

Responsibility, however, should not rest solely with consumers. As AI-powered marketing becomes more sophisticated, platforms should make it easier to distinguish advertising from advice, explain why recommendations are appearing and avoid exploiting people’s vulnerabilities.

AI’s greatest power is not that it forces us to buy. It is that it makes temptation more personal, more timely and easier to accept. Mindful consumption restores something digital shopping increasingly removes: a genuine moment to decide whether wanting should become buying.

Sharad Gupta is affiliated with British Academy of Management as track co-chair for Sustainable and Responsible Business group.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/08/05/why-ai-wants-you-to-buy-more-and-mindfulness-could-help-you-buy-less/

Around 78% of people who are living with HIV take a daily pill to manage their infection. These drugs work by preventing the HIV virus from multiplying.

Although these drugs are very effective, some people struggle to stick with the daily regimen. There are many reasons for this – including pill fatigue, stigma and accidentally missing a dose.

But our recent research has shown that a once-weekly pill is as effective as daily pills in treating HIV.

The global study included 607 participants with well-controlled HIV from 11 countries. The trial was designed to reduce bias and was a double-blind placebo-controlled study. This means that the participants did not know if they were taking the weekly oral pill or daily pills.

The study found that the weekly oral pill worked for 93% of participants, while the daily pill was 92% effective. Importantly, nobody developed resistance to either of the medications.

It’s impressive that the once-weekly pill worked as well as the daily pill, as the daily treatment we used in our study is recommended as one of the best HIV treatments currently available.

Side-effects were comparable between the two drugs. The most common side-effects for both the daily pill and weekly pill were headache and nausea. Only two out of 304 people stopped taking the weekly pill due to the side-effects they experienced.

The once-weekly pill contains two compounds (lenacapavir and islatravir) that have been combined into a single tablet. These compounds work together by blocking HIV from replicating at two different points in the HIV virus’s life cycle.

The weekly pill requires two “loading doses” to be given for the first two days before it can be given weekly. This is so that the correct drug levels can be reached before starting weekly dosing. If a dose is missed, it will only last in the body for a further week – so taking it weekly is very important.

Treatment options

The once-weekly pill is now in its final phase of testing before we apply for regulatory approval. If it is approved for use, it would give people living with HIV more choice over their treatment.

There are many advantages to having multiple safe and effective treatment choices for people who need to take medication for a long time. We have seen this with contraception, where offering a choice of methods – such as pills, injections, implants or patches – has been transformative in giving people greater reproductive autonomy and choice over the option that works best for their lives.

Weekly pills used to manage other chronic conditions have also been shown to better help people adhere to treatment. For instance, one study into people with osteoporosis found that around 57% of weekly users were still taking their medication a year later compared to 39% of daily users.

Although injectable HIV treatments – which are delivered every two months – are available in high-income countries, implementing these therapies has proven very challenging for strained healthcare systems because people must go to a hospital or clinic every two months for an injection, which is time-consuming for both patients and staff.

As such, a weekly pill option is a welcome innovation which could help many more people to persist on HIV tablets.

However, some potential disadvantages of the weekly pill could be that the weekly pill stops working if missed for more than seven days. People would need to take another loading dose in order for the treatment to be effective again.

For daily pills, people who have missed a pill can restart without requiring another loading dose – but there is also less leeway than there is with the weekly pill if a person has missed a dose.

People who have well-established habits of taking daily pills may find it harder to adjust to taking weekly pills. There is also the risk of forgetfulness as they get used to the new schedule.

Still, having an additional tool in the HIV treatment toolkit could bring us a step closer to reaching global targets for HIV elimination, which would need everyone living with HIV to be taking a treatment that works for them. It will now be up to regulators and health technology agencies to approve the weekly pill for use.

But it will also be key for health agencies to put more work into tackling HIV stigma if they want to achieve this goal.

Stigma still affects most people living with HIV. Research has even found it affects a person’s relationship with treatment – with one survey finding that around 60% of people have hidden their pills from others to avoid revealing their status. Stigma and discrimination can also affect treatment outcomes and adherence.

A once-weekly pill may be a welcome innovation for many people living with HIV. It may allow them to feel less stigma about taking their treatment, which may better help them adhere in the long run.

Chloe Orkin receives research grant funding and honoraria for advisory boards, lectures and travel scholarships from Gilead Sciences, MSD and ViiV Healthcare

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/08/05/once-weekly-hiv-pill-as-effective-as-daily-dose-research-shows/

Imagine the scene: tourists riding in a jeep through Rocinha, Rio de Janeiro’s largest favela. With their cameras at the ready, they listen to stories of gang violence and gawp at people’s homes, believing they are learning about the “real” Rio beyond the glamorous beaches of Copacabana and Ipanema.

Far away from the South American warmth, tourists arrive in Finnish Lapland eager to meet a man in a red suit with a big white beard, maybe taking part in a “shaman ceremony” staged as an authentic piece of Sámi culture.

On the surface, these might seem like examples of tourism with good intentions to engage with local culture. But a closer look reveals the same old historical struggle: who gets to decide what a place is, who profits from it, and the consequences that follow.

In our research, we have spent years investigating the favela and Christmas tourism markets. Using news articles, archival material, tourism brochures, government documents, videos and photographs, we traced the controversies that have arisen in the process of marketing Rocinha and Lapland as tourist destinations. We found that controversies over tourism are, at their core, disputes over space.

Whose place is it?

Both Rocinha and Lapland are rife with disputes over space. Tours in Rio de Janeiro’s favelas – the sprawling urban communities often described as “shantytowns” – have been marketed for decades, especially those in Zona Sul (South Zone).

At their inception, many tours were operated by businesses outside the favelas, and involved a “safari”-style experience with tourists in jeeps cruising through the area. Jeeps signalled favelas as places to observe at a distance rather than engage with, while driving profits out of the community.

The 2010 Brazilian census itself labelled these communities as “subnormal clusters” occupying land irregularly, a language that did well to summarise decades of exclusion from public investment, and continued to fuel policies of eviction.

When a new metro station opened across the street from Rocinha ahead of the 2016 Olympics, it was named after the wealthy neighbouring São Conrado instead.

Around the same time, so-called decorative panels went up along the motorway from the airport, screening favelas from arriving visitors and athletes. Both were quiet decisions about geography that carried a loud message: this place doesn’t, or shouldn’t, exist.

Similar practices can be observed in Lapland. The Sámi are the indigenous people of the region known as Sápmi, which spans the northern parts of Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia, with around 10,000 Sámi living in Finland today.

They have inhabited and worked this landscape for centuries — fishing, herding reindeer, and maintaining cultural traditions including the gákti, their traditional clothing. Yet from the 1950s, tourism marketing increasingly cast the Sámi as exotic inhabitants of the wild north.

The land and nature have been staged as empty wilderness for tourism to make use of and visitors to explore. However, that “wilderness” is also the Sámi homeland – a living cultural landscape, rather than simply an untouched frontier. Elements of Sámi culture, most notably the gákti, are reproduced on souvenirs and worn by hired performers welcoming tourists or taking part in invented ceremonies that borrow elements of Sámi tradition to stage a “mystical” Lapland.

In both cases, the ways in which the space was staged, represented and used by tourism became contested and questioned by local communities.

Recognition and respect

Indigenous communities’ dissatisfaction with how their places were marketed compelled them to change how tourism is done. Favela entrepreneurs began running their own “reality tours” to counter the jeep tours.

This format means visitors walk through the neighbourhood, eat at local restaurants, and visit a local art atelier or watch a capoeira performance, an Afro-Brazilian martial art disguised as dance. Crucially, visitors get to hear the community’s own history rather than a script written by outsiders, and profits stay in the community.

In Lapland, a number of local bodies, including the Sámi parliament and the Sámi craft association, pushed back too. They insisted the gákti was not merchandise and issued detailed guidelines on how the Sámi could be represented in photographs and marketing.

In 2018, the Sámi parliament published formal principles for ethical tourism, illustrated with images contrasting a crowded, exploitative “future we do not want” with a respectful alternative built around genuine Sámi livelihoods.

Notably, in both cases, local communities didn’t reject tourism outright. Instead, they did what we termed “temporary shapeshifting” – stepping into the role of market-makers, becoming tour guides, marketing consultants and policy negotiators while remaining residents the rest of the time. They moved between being subjects of a market and active participants shaping it, rather than being permanently cast as either powerless victims or savvy business owners.

Lessons for sustainable tourism

Our research shows how markets are rooted in real places, among real communities, and disputes about these spaces (who belongs where, whose land counts as “empty”, whose name goes on the map) are often where conflict lies. That has implications beyond favelas and Santa’s Lapland.

Any business built around a place carries the same risk of writing some people out of the map while selling their homeland to someone else. The lesson from Rio and Lapland is that resolving these tensions rarely means shutting tourism down.

It means recognising that the people who live, work and do business in a place – residents, entrepreneurs and community members alike – all have a stake in how it is represented, used and sold. The most sustainable way forward is a collaborative one, where the market is shaped by local communities and recognition and respect is at the centre of conversations.

Josiane Fernandes has received funding from Lancaster University Management School (LUMS) PhD scholarship.

Teea Palo has received funding from British Academy Leverhulme Small Research Grant.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/08/05/indigenous-communities-arent-rejecting-tourism-they-just-want-to-shape-it-themselves/

Inflation is often misunderstood as a force that makes everything more expensive. In reality, it’s a term economists use to describe a general increase in prices across the economy.

Inflation does not mean every price is rising. Some goods become more expensive, some become cheaper and others barely change. Inflation measures the overall direction of prices.

In 2022, inflation in Canada reached eight per cent, its highest level in decades. By February, it had fallen to 1.8 per cent before rising again to 3.2 per cent in May and then easing to 2.7 per cent in June.

To understand these swings in inflation, it helps to understand how it’s measured and what forces push individual prices up or down.

Inflation is an average

In Canada, inflation is measured using the consumer price index (CPI), which tracks monthly price changes for hundreds of goods and services. The CPI is a weighted average, meaning some categories have a larger influence on the overall measure than others.

The largest components are housing, food and energy. Housing accounts for about 30 per cent of the index, food about 17 per cent and energy roughly seven per cent. Energy is a relatively small component, but fuel prices affect the cost of many other goods and services.

Prices generally rise for one of two reasons. First, demand for a product can exceed supply, pushing consumers to compete for limited goods. Second, businesses can face higher costs for labour, energy, transportation or materials and pass those increases on to consumers.

The reverse can also happen. When supply grows faster than demand, prices can decline. And when production costs fall, businesses facing competition may pass those savings on to consumers.

These forces help explain why some parts of the economy experience strong inflation while others remain stable.

Housing drove much of the inflation surge

Housing was one of the biggest sources of inflationary pressure in Canada because demand increased faster than supply.

Following the COVID-19 pandemic, unusually low interest rates allowed many households to take out larger mortgages and bid up home prices. At the same time, rapid population growth driven by record levels of immigration increased demand for housing.

Supply could not keep pace, causing both rents and home prices to surge. More recently, this trend has started to reverse. Changes to immigration policy have slowed population growth, while higher interest rates have reduced the size of mortgages many buyers can qualify for.

The result has been falling home prices and rents in some parts of the country.

Food prices rose as costs increased

While population growth increased demand for groceries, supply challenges have been a major factor behind rising food prices.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 increased global energy costs, making food production, transportation and storage more expensive. It also disrupted fertilizer markets, as Russia had been a major global supplier. These higher costs were eventually passed on to consumers through higher food prices.

Read more:
How the war in Ukraine will affect food prices

Meat prices show how these pressures can accumulate. Increased production costs, combined with a decline in cattle stocks, have caused beef prices to rise. Since the pandemic, the price of beef top sirloin has roughly doubled.

As beef became more expensive, some consumers shifted toward chicken and pork, increasing demand for those products. Prices for chicken breast and pork loin have both increased by about 22.5 per cent as a result.

Other foods have also been affected by weather conditions, labour costs and transportation expenses. Lettuce, for example, is often imported from the United States and Mexico, making it vulnerable to supply disruptions and higher shipping costs.

But not all grocery prices move in the same direction. Some, like cucumbers and strawberries, can vary widely in price depending on growing conditions and whether Canadian-grown supplies are available. Other products, such as canned tuna, have changed very little over time.

Energy prices can quickly change inflation

Energy is one of the most volatile parts of inflation because prices are shaped largely by global events. Changes in global oil markets affect gasoline and diesel prices, increasing costs for Canadian families and businesses.

Fuel is an important input for transportation and production, so changes in energy prices can spread throughout the economy. When fuel costs rise, businesses may face higher expenses for moving goods and providing services, and some businesses have started adding fuel surcharges to customer orders.

Global events can quickly disrupt energy markets. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 upended global energy networks. More recently, the United States’ war with Iran has caused another oil price shock.

When energy prices rise, they put upward pressure on the CPI. When they fall, they can help bring average inflation down. But global energy markets are largely outside the control of Canadian households and policymakers.

What goes up doesn’t always come down

Unlike energy prices, which are largely driven by global markets, housing and food are areas where Canadian policies can influence supply over time.

Canada faces a significant shortage of affordable housing. Reducing red tape, lowering development charges, adjusting tax policies and subsidizing new construction could help increase housing supply over the coming decade.

Read more:
What’s behind Canada’s housing crisis? Experts break down the different factors at play

A significant increase in both market and public housing will be needed to bring shelter costs back to more affordable levels.

A similar challenge exists with food. Grocery prices have risen faster than the overall inflation rate for 16 consecutive months and in 50 of the past 55 months. Increasing domestic food production could help ease some of these pressures.

Recent federal tax changes and funding announcements aimed at expanding greenhouse production are intended to strengthen Canada’s food supply chain, but it’s too early to know how effective they will be.

Even if these efforts succeed, lower inflation does not mean prices will return to where they were before. Inflation measures the average change in prices over time, not which specific prices are rising or falling.

Each month, some goods become cheaper while others become more expensive. The CPI is an average across all those price changes. In most cases, the price increases for some goods outweigh the price cuts for others, which is why the overall average goes up — sometimes by a large amount and sometimes by just a small amount.

Colin Mang does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/08/05/inflation-is-slowing-but-the-cost-of-living-story-is-more-complicated/

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 had an almost immediate impact on global energy markets and the movement of food around the world. During the first year of the conflict, international crude oil and natural gas prices rose sharply. Disruptions to exports of wheat, maize, sunflower oil and fertilisers from Russia and Ukraine contributed to record global food prices.

Kenya was badly affected as the country imports about 92% of the wheat it consumes.

I am a global health researcher and was interested in tracking how the war in Ukraine affected Kenyans’ ability to afford food and cooking fuel. In 2022, I worked with a team in Mukuru, an informal settlement in Nairobi, to understand how the war had affected the way families used liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) for clean cooking.

Read more:
How Russia-Ukraine conflict could influence Africa’s food supplies

Most Kenyan households still rely on biomass fuels like wood for cooking, but LPG is used by about one-third of Kenyans. LPG is much more commonly used in Kenyan cities (about 60% use) compared with rural areas (about 10% use). Since Kenya does not produce any LPG domestically, changes in global energy prices and supply disruptions can greatly increase cooking costs.

During 2022, after Russia invaded Ukraine, food inflation in Kenya nearly doubled from 8.9% to 15.4%. This sharp price rise was driven by rising global food and transport costs and also a multi-year drought, which reduced harvests across the region.

Read more:
Kenya’s cost of living crisis: expert unpacks what’s driving it and what should be done

We analysed data from families’ smart meters, which showed how often they cooked with gas and how much they spent on fuel. We also surveyed the households to understand how rising food and fuel prices changed what they ate during 2022.

We found these drastic changes in dietary and cooking behaviours:

• three-quarters of families in our study changed the foods they cooked. More than half ate less meat and fish in 2022. They consumed more ugali (maize porridge, a staple food in Kenya), vegetables and fast food.

• half of families skipped more meals

• one-third reduced the amount of gas they consumed for cooking.

Following families through the food price crisis

Mukuru is a large informal settlement, with a population of 500,000-800,000 people. The families we surveyed were customers of a company called PayGo Energy. The company allows customers to pay for gas in smaller increments rather than having to purchase a full cylinder of gas at once.

As purchasing a full gas tank can be very costly for families living below the poverty line, a pay-as-you-go option can make cooking with gas more accessible for families. These families might otherwise cook with cheaper biomass fuels, like wood, that often generate more air pollution when burned.

Read more:
Kenya’s maize price has doubled in a year: 6 ways to avoid a staple food shortage

Because PayGo Energy monitored their customers’ gas use using smart meters, we measured their use before and after the start of the Russian-Ukrainian war to estimate the change in their consumption. We also surveyed the families and held focus group discussions.

We used a United Nations World Food Programme tool which measures the steps households take over the previous week to cope with food shortages. We also asked participants whether they were skipping more meals or eating different foods than usual.

Families used less gas

We found that households greatly lowered the amount they cooked with gas in 2022 compared with 2021. Families only used their gas stove for an average of eight days a month in 2022 compared with 19 days a month in 2021. Their total cooking time per month decreased from 12.8 hours to 8.3 hours.

These results matched our survey findings, in which 63% of participants reported changing the type of food they consumed, 50% shared that they skipped more meals and 30% stated that they cooked with gas less frequently in 2022 compared with 2021. One participant said:

I have shifted to rice and spaghetti because it takes less time to cook hence saves gas.

People ate less food

Another person said:

There has been a high rise in food and fuel (prices). We have had to create a balance by lowering the food and maintaining the gas usage.

Reducing their cooking time led households to spend an average of 86 Kenyan shillings (US$0.66) less per month in 2022 compared with 2021. One person told us they were decreasing their spending on cooking and skipping meals:

Our children have a feeding programme at school which is advantageous so we adults can just skip meals and wait for supper to save.

Finding policy solutions

Although our research studied the effects of the Russian-Ukrainian war in 2022, geopolitical conflicts will likely continue to threaten global food and energy security, as demonstrated by the war between the US and Iran.

In 2026, the Strait of Hormuz closure disrupted energy markets and raised concerns about fertiliser supplies and food prices. The impacts in east Africa are likely similar to what they were in 2022.

Read more:
80% of Africa’s fertiliser is imported: how food systems can adapt to the Iran shock

As economic crises will continue to occur and as climate change intensifies, national and global policies can help protect against food insecurity risk. This will require direct safety nets for families, including cash transfers or payments from the government.

The government could also subsidise nutritious foods that are cheaper and faster to cook, such as canned beans, frozen vegetables and fortified foods.

Read more:
Russia-Ukraine conflict is driving up wheat prices: this could fuel instability in Sudan

Supporting small-scale farmers with better seeds, access to credit and water-saving farming methods can also help communities produce more food and become more resilient to drought and climate change. Taken together, making these investments can help build a more adaptable food system.

Matthew Shupler receives funding from The National Institutes of Health in the US and National Institute for Health and Care Research in the UK.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/08/05/drought-and-the-war-in-ukraine-changed-what-families-in-kenya-could-afford-to-eat-research-tracked-food-and-cooking-gas-use/

Durante milenios, el pueblo wounaan, que habita en algunas zonas de lo que hoy son Panamá y Colombia, ha tallado y esculpido diversos tipos de madera. El palo de rosa cocobolo, Dalbergia retusa, es especialmente apreciado para la talla de bastones ceremoniales utilizados en la medicina tradicional y en el arte comercial que representa plantas y animales tropicales.

Los wounaan son solo uno de los pueblos de todo el mundo que han utilizado los palos de rosa para fabricar una amplia variedad de artículos, entre ellos culatas de armas, muebles e instrumentos musicales. En la actualidad, hay más de 140 especies de árboles que se comercializan como palos de rosa, todas ellas de una madera lustrosa y densa que, por lo general, tiene un tono rojizo.

Desde finales de la década de 2000, la demanda mundial de palo de rosa superó la oferta legal. Estas hermosas maderas se convirtieron en inversiones populares, especialmente durante el auge inmobiliario en China, así como en maderas tonales de gran renombre, utilizadas en la fabricación de instrumentos musicales. Para 2012, el valor del cocobolo en China se había disparado hasta superar los 13.000 USD por metro cúbico. Hoy en día puede costar tres veces más, un precio considerablemente superior al de, por ejemplo, el roble rojo, que ronda los 1.500 USD por metro cúbico.

En 2011, algunos madereros empezaron a talar de manera ilegal árboles de palo de rosa en los bosques maduros del este de Panamá, hogar del pueblo wounaan. En Panamá, la mayoría de los wounaan y muchos emberá no cuentan con derechos legales sobre esas tierras boscosas, pese a haberlas habitado por generaciones. Tras la invasión de los taladores ilegales, las autoridades wounaan elegidas por sus comunidades presentaron denuncias ante diversos funcionarios panameños tanto locales como nacionales, al tiempo que buscaban el apoyo de la prensa y de la opinión pública.

Pero este fue apenas el comienzo.

Durante esa primera temporada de tala se dio un enfrentamiento de tres meses entre los madereros ilegales y los miembros de las comunidades wounaan. Un maderero asesinó a una autoridad tradicional elegida, hapk’ʌʌn Aquilino Opua Puchicama. En respuesta, el maderero, Ezequiel Batista, fue asesinado.

Los wounaan comprendieron que los madereros estaban dispuestos a matar con tal de obtener el palo de rosa.

Durante los cuatro años siguientes, la tala ilegal fue intensa. En 2014, el pequeño Panamá ocupó el puesto 16 en el mundo por el volumen de madera en rollo vendida a China y el puesto 11 por el valor de la madera. Ese año, China registró la importación desde Panamá de 10.827 metros cúbicos de troncos de palo de rosa y 4.731 metros cúbicos de madera aserrada de palo de rosa, valorados conjuntamente en 55,5 millones de dólares estadounidenses. Antes del auge del palo de rosa, la Unión Internacional para la Conservación de la Naturaleza había clasificado el cocobolo como «vulnerable, con un alto riesgo de extinción en estado silvestre». Sin embargo, en 2019 fue reevaluado como «en peligro crítico de extinción».

Esa es una forma de contar la historia: como una secuencia más o menos lineal de acontecimientos trágicos y catastróficos. No obstante, al realizar y presentar nuestra investigación, optamos por una forma diferente, una que refleja y abarca las vidas, los valores, la ciencia y las experiencias de los wounaan, y que no solo devela pérdidas, sino también la alegría de la resistencia y del cuidado de los demás.

Una perspectiva amplia y otra local

Formamos parte de una iniciativa para compartir esta investigación en un nuevo libro, “Interwoven Rosewood: Collaborative Ecologies, Colonial Entanglements, and Indigenous Resistance.” El libro es el resultado de una colaboración de varios años entre el Congreso Nacional Wounaan (Wounaan Podpa Nʌm Pömaam), que representa a todo el pueblo wounaan de Panamá; el Congreso Local Wounaan de la comunidad de Majé (Wir Haigpai Podpa Nʌm Majé), que representa a una comunidad con numerosos artistas del cocobolo y que estuvo entre las más directamente afectadas por la tala ilegal; y una profesora universitaria que estudia de manera colaborativa con las comunidades temas relacionados con el ambiente y la conservación.

Desde el comienzo, nuestro objetivo ha sido poner esta investigación al alcance de un público amplio. Esto implica contar las historias entrelazadas sobre el palo de rosa en el mundo, sobre lo que ocurrió en Panamá y sobre la experiencia del pueblo wounaan, así como compartir su ciencia y su sabiduría ancestrales, todo esto en el contexto de siglos de ataques contra las vidas y las tierras indígenas que han continuado hasta el presente.

Cultivar la colaboración

Los wounaan, como muchos pueblos indígenas del sur de Centroamérica y el noroccidente de Suramérica, hacen énfasis en el cuidado de las relaciones. Una de las maneras en que ejercen este cuidado es compartiendo y redistribuyendo concienzudamente alimentos, dinero y sabiduría, entre otras muchas cosas, para fomentar la equidad.

Este enfoque colaborativo se opone a una mentalidad extractivista que puede permear no solo la tala ilegal sino también la investigación científica: concebir a las personas y los lugares como recursos que han de explotarse.

Es por esto que, al conformar esta investigación, tanto los wounaan como quienes no lo son nos comprometimos a cultivar la colaboración investigativa y la coproducción de los materiales que estábamos recopilando.

Planeamos conjuntamente la investigación y nos fijamos el objetivo de difundir ampliamente lo aprendido, en lugar de aspirar a publicar en revistas académicas especializadas, que sobre todo están disponibles – y resultan útiles – para los investigadores vinculados a universidades. También procuramos respetar específicamente los derechos wounaan sobre sus conocimientos y su sabiduría ancestrales, para lo cual creamos un acuerdo formal de investigación que garantizaba, entre otras disposiciones, que el pueblo wounaan contara con «soberanía sobre los datos» con respecto a la información recopilada, así como el derecho a decidir qué uso se le daría.

Entretejer los temas

En la cestería wounaan, los artistas utilizan hebras de fibra teñidas con tintes naturales para tejer alrededor de un núcleo central, incorporando cada color cuando es necesario para conformar el diseño.

Nuestra versión de la investigación sobre la tala ilegal de palo de rosa entreteje tres hebras: el entorno tropical de las tierras bajas, la sabiduría y la ciencia ancestrales wounaan y las fuerzas combinadas del capitalismo y el colonialismo. Ninguno de estos temas puede realmente desconectarse de los demás ni estudiarse de forma aislada.

Reconocer el pasado en el presente y el futuro

Para los wounaan, los cuentos ancestrales preservan su relevancia en el presente: estructuran y orientan la vida actual y la que está por venir. El cuento ancestral wounaan de la creación, por ejemplo, incluye los consejos del Creador sobre cómo corregir los errores iniciales cometidos al formar a los seres humanos, mostrando así la importancia de hacer mejoras para dar lugar al cambio.

Asimismo, la metáfora de la cestería en espiral muestra cómo el pasado forma parte activa del presente y del futuro. Por ejemplo, la extracción de oro a comienzos del periodo colonial español no fue muy distinta de la extracción de palo de rosa por parte de empresarios chinos en el siglo xxi.

Celebrar las relaciones

La vida cotidiana wounaan acoge la «convivialidad»: vivir de manera respetuosa e interdependiente con otros seres humanos y no humanos. Al tallar una pieza de palo de rosa cocobolo, un artista wounaan resalta la veta. Así como la madera revela su veta al tallador, los seres no humanos también pueden comunicarse y actuar por cuenta propia.

Los wounaan prestan atención a las complejidades, las obligaciones y las sinergias de las vidas y fuerzas entretejidas que dieron y siguen dando forma al mundo, como las que existen entre plantas, leyes, aves, mapas, animales, investigadores, insectos, infraestructura, hongos, funcionarios, enfermedades, comercio, tráfico ilegal y cambio climático.

En los sitios web breves sobre el libro, disponibles en inglés y español, la diseñadora web Mavila Trujillo utilizó ilustraciones, videos, fotografías y grabaciones de audio acompañados de textos cortos para hacer más visible parte de esa convivialidad. Por ejemplo, utilizó un audio de música de flauta wounaan relacionada con el agutí, un pequeño animal que dispersa semillas, junto con ilustraciones animadas del propio animal y de una persona wounaan que danza al ritmo de la música.

Respetar las experiencias de múltiples voces

Para los wounaan, así como para muchos otros pueblos indígenas, el conocimiento solo puede adquirirse a través de la experiencia. La sabiduría se adquiere mediante el cuerpo y sus interacciones con otros en la tierra y en las aguas, a partir y a través del movimiento y de múltiples sentidos, como la música, la danza, los aromas, el tacto, el gusto y la vista.

Para expresar múltiples perspectivas sobre la lucha que durante años han librado contra la explotación, las autoridades wounaan elegidas y los miembros de las comunidades propusieron a distintas personas en virtud de sus conocimientos y su experiencia. Con el consentimiento de sus familias, se incluyeron aportes de colegas wounaan fallecidos, entre ellos cuentos ancestrales y escritos recientes. También contribuyeron dos colegas no indígenas de larga trayectoria cuyo trabajo se ha enfocado por décadas en los derechos indígenas.

Poner al descubierto el colonialismo y el capitalismo

Durante siglos, los wounaan han sufrido —y siguen sufriendo— los devastadores efectos del «colonialismo de asentamiento»: la práctica de explotar a las personas y los espacios, despojándolos no solo de bienes materiales, sino de la tierra misma, y también de sus vidas, derechos, lenguas y ciencia.

El colonialismo de asentamiento y el capitalismo pueden actuar de la mano, valiéndose de la educación, las leyes, las prácticas corporativas e industriales, el tráfico ilegal e incluso las iniciativas de conservación ambiental de maneras que perjudican a las personas, incluidos los pueblos indígenas.

Los wounaan han opuesto resistencia a esas fuerzas por siglos, luchando contra quienes se apropian injustamente de sus tierras y sus derechos. Esta historia comprende las rebeliones de la época colonial, el uso de drones para monitorear invasiones de tierras y presentar denuncias ecológicas formales, y las protestas contra leyes nuevas o propuestas.

Mostrar la vitalidad de la lengua wounaan meu

La lengua wounaan, el wounaan meu, como muchas otras lenguas indígenas, hace énfasis en la acción y reconoce que las personas y los demás seres siempre se están desarrollando o convirtiéndose en formas renovadas de sí mismos.

La difusión amplia de la información, sin embargo, suele implicar traducirla. En ese proceso pueden perderse matices fundamentales, al convertir, por ejemplo, la acción en pasividad o al asignar un género a una palabra que originalmente no lo tenía. Para asegurarnos de que la investigación celebrara el wounaan meu incluso al traducirse al inglés y al español, procuramos emplear palabras que reflejaran los significados wounaan, como la diferencia entre «médico tradicional» y «chamán», o que respetaran la etimología indígena regional, como al traducir la expresión de wounaan meu «jap» como «piragua», en lugar de «canoa».

Para algunos de los elementos que conforman el libro, dos de nosotros – Chenier y Doris – grabamos a wounaan mientras hacían narraciones en wounaan meu y después transcribimos y tradujimos cuidadosamente esos materiales para preservar la riqueza del pensamiento y la lengua wounaan.

Nutrir la alegría y la belleza

En definitiva, nuestra investigación colaborativa acoge la autodeterminación y la alegría y la belleza que esta trae consigo. Integra tanto el «wajaup hʌidʌm» (cuya pronunciación aproximada es wa-HOWGP OIU-dum), estar bien o en buena relación con otros, como el «hãba poso honee nʌm» (cuya pronunciación aproximada es ug-BA po-so OH-ney nuom), trabajar juntos con alegría.

Nuestra cocreación colaborativa continúa. Se encuentran en proceso una versión en español del libro con el traductor Alfonso Conde; un libro abreviado en español centrado en los capítulos de autoría wounaan; un análisis de los capítulos hablados en wounaan meu y escritos en español; y un sitio web multimedia para estudiantes wounaan en edad escolar.

Seguimos, de este modo, respetando la sabiduría y la ciencia ancestrales para cultivar los futuros justos que los wounaan imaginan para sí mismos.

Traducido por Alfonso Conde.

Julie Velásquez Runk recibió los siguientes fondos: para la investigación de campo, una subvención de investigación posdoctoral de la Fundación Wenner-Gren y una subvención de antropología comprometida; una subvención de viaje para consultar colecciones que financió la investigación en las Colecciones Especiales y de Estudios Regionales de las Bibliotecas George A. Smathers, de la Universidad de Florida; una subvención para la elaboración de un libro y una subvención de escritura de verano del Instituto de Humanidades de la Universidad de Wake Forest; una subvención del Fondo Nacional para las Humanidades (National Endowment for the Humanities) otorgada por el Centro Nacional de Humanidades (National Humanities Center), y una subvención de investigación para docentes del Centro Willson de Humanidades y Artes de la Universidad de Georgia. El proyecto del libro también recibió el Premio Norm y Sibby Whitten a la Subvención para Publicaciones.

Como miembro del Congreso Nacional Wounaan, Chenier Carpio Opua colaboró en las subvencións de la Fundación Wenner Gren y en la concesión de la subvención para la publicación del libro.

Como miembro del Congreso Nacional Wounaan, Doris Cheucarama Membache colaboró en las subvencións de la Fundación Wenner Gren y en la concesión de la subvención para la publicación del libro.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/08/05/el-pueblo-indigena-wounaan-ha-hecho-frente-a-la-tala-ilegal-de-palo-de-rosa-y-a-siglos-de-explotacion-con-sabiduria-y-belleza/

When people think about the roots of a child’s struggles in math class, they may picture a tough teacher, a missed unit or a sudden loss of confidence around fractions. Our new study suggests we should be looking much earlier, at kindergarten, or even before.

Using linked provincial data from more than 25,000 Ontario children, we tracked students from kindergarten through Grade 9 to see how each child’s “school readiness” — their cognitive, language, social, emotional and physical skills at school entry — related to their math performance nearly a decade later.

The results, published in the Canadian Journal of Behavioural Science, show that the children who started behind in kindergarten were, on average, still behind in Grade 9. The gap didn’t necessarily widen, but neither did it close.

This matters because math achievement is closely linked to later educational opportunities, participation in STEM fields and labour market success.

At a time when provinces across Canada are trying to address post-pandemic learning loss and reduce educational inequities, our findings suggest that efforts to improve educational outcomes must begin in the early years. Our study is among the first in Canada to provide this kind of large-scale longitudinal evidence from Ontario.

What we measured, and how

In Ontario, approximately every three years,
kindergarten teachers complete the Early Development Instrument (EDI) for each child in their classroom.

The EDI is a measure of children’s school readiness reflecting their development in five areas: physical health and well-being, social competence, emotional maturity, language and cognitive skills, and communication and general knowledge.

We linked these kindergarten profiles to students’ results on standardized provincial math assessments in Grade 3, Grade 6 and Grade 9, along with information on neighbourhood socioeconomic status, sex, English-language fluency and school characteristics.

Among the different aspects of school readiness, children’s language and cognitive development at kindergarten entry emerged as the strongest and most consistent predictor of later math achievement. Children who entered school less prepared in this area performed substantially worse in Grade 3 math than their peers who were developmentally on track, and this disadvantage persisted into Grade 9.

This pattern is consistent with earlier Ontario research, which found similar links between EDI scores and Grade 3 achievement, as well as a study from British Columbia that linked kindergarten development to well-being and academic scores in middle childhood.

Social competence and physical well-being also predicted later math achievement. In some cases, these factors were as powerful or even more powerful than characteristics such as sex or first language.

In other words, how ready a five-year-old is to engage with learning, follow classroom routines, interact with peers and develop early literacy and numeracy skills tells us a great deal about how they are likely to perform on math assessments years later.

Early inequities persist, but schools still matter

One of our most important findings is that most of the variation in math achievement occurs among individual students rather than among schools or school boards.

Children begin school with different family circumstances, access to early learning opportunities and community supports. These early experiences shape the skills they bring to school, and those initial differences can persist throughout their educational careers.

Policy efforts focused only on under-resourced schools or boards may miss where most of the actual disparity lies. However, this does not mean schools are unimportant. The achievement gaps we observed remained relatively stable over time, suggesting that, at the very least, Ontario schools do not contribute to widening existing inequities.

Why this matters for policy

Educational conversations in Canada tend to focus on interventions during the school years: tutoring, smaller class sizes and curriculum reform. Our findings suggest a complementary, and perhaps more powerful, approach: investing in children’s readiness before they ever walk into a Grade 1 classroom.

Ontario already has a related policy in place. The full-day kindergarten program, introduced more than a decade ago, was designed in part to give all children more structured time to build early skills.

Read more:
New research shows quality early childhood education reduces need for later special ed

Our results support the logic behind that kind of universal, early investment, rather than waiting to intervene once gaps are already visible on a report card. Research on the EDI across multiple Canadian provinces consistently shows that children’s vulnerability at school entry reflects broader social determinants, which makes universal programs even more important.

Because readiness extends beyond academics, children’s physical well-being and social skills matter too. The most promising interventions are therefore likely to be holistic rather than narrowly academic to address the full range of development that shapes how children arrive at school.

Our findings send a clear message: many achievement gaps begin long before children write their first standardized math test. If Canada wants to narrow achievement gaps and improve long-term educational outcomes, investing in children’s earliest years may be one of the most effective places to start.

Fatemeh Ameli receives funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Eric Duku receives funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Magdalena Janus receives funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada

Scott Davies receives funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/08/05/math-gaps-between-ontario-kids-start-in-kindergarten-and-often-persist-through-grade-9/

American filmmaker George Lucas is one of the latest to indicate he’s open to AI in the movie industry.

In a recent interview, the director said resistance to the technology was “very much like sitting here saying: ‘Well, I believe the horse and the buggy is really where it’s at. These cars, they break down, they need gas, there’s all kinds of problems with them and pretty soon they’ll be making them into tanks, and then they’ll be killing people. It’s terrible.’”

The Guardian story was headlined: “George Lucas likens AI sceptics to luddites clinging to horses and carts.”

“Luddites” have sometimes stood in for enemies of progress: those destined to be swept aside in the forward march of history.

The label of “neo-Luddism” or “digital Luddite” is also being reclaimed by people concerned about labour conditions, society and democracy in an era of AI expansion twinned with personal profit.

Read more:
Digital Luddites are rising. They want to democratise tech, not destroy it

But who exactly were the Luddites? They were a collective reaction to the traumas of the industrial revolution, in early industrial England.

Their legacy has been profound, as suggested by both negative and positive polemics related to them in intellectual and cultural commentary, art and literature and popular histories produced as digital technology continues to grow.

When trade unions were illegal

As the new political economy, fuelled by transatlantic slavery and colonial extraction, began to transform work practices in England and introduce new forms of mechanization, skilled artisans and weavers resisted. They sought to protect their livelihoods, their ways of life and their communities.

Trade unions were illegal and the workers did not have political representation. Co-operative societies did not yet exist and state welfare was a distant dream. The only alternative to acquiescence was what historian Eric Hobsbawm memorably called “collective bargaining by riot.”

Food riots, destroying machinery or setting fire to factories were in-your-face ways to get employers and local authorities to pay attention to their legitimate grievances.

When the English cartoonist Charles Williams depicted a veterinarian and a blacksmith violently attacking dandies on bicycles for undermining traditional horse-drawn transportation in 1819, the blacksmith’s smashing with a mallet was a clear reference to the spasm of machine-wrecking earlier in the decade.

Williams’s caricature came within a few years of the mass outbreak in Britain when the terms Luddism and Luddite became commonplace.

Famous episodes of Luddism

Historians agree that the most famous episode of Luddism began in 1811 in Nottinghamshire in the English Midlands.

A group of stocking weavers formed a secret organization, purportedly led by a certain Ned Ludd, a fictitious figure also styled as Captain, General or King Ludd.

In the context of widespread economic misery caused by the war against Napoleon, the weavers blamed new, wide-frame knitting machines for stealing their jobs, reducing their earnings and making a bad situation worse. In targeted attacks, they smashed more than 1,000 of the stocking frames, and the property destruction then spread to the textile weaving and spinning districts of Lancashire and Yorkshire.

Fearing the revolutionary potential of this wave of violence — and that English plebeians might follow the French example and overthrow the old regime — the government cracked down hard. It sent in 12,000 troops to quell the riots, and members of Parliament voted overwhelmingly to make frame-breaking a hanging offence.

The ruling classes managed to restore order, despite sporadic outbreaks until 1816, punctuating their clampdown with exemplary hangings and sentences of transportation to Australia. Their determination to prevent revolution, protect property and enable unfettered economic expansion was patently clear.

So do the Luddites deserve such a bad rap? As a historian who has examined industrial-era English history, along with many others, I say: absolutely not.

The Luddites were not blindly lashing out but sending a message; to some extent at least, that message was heard. Along with the political radicals and the labour campaigners over the course of the 19th century, they took part in a prolonged struggle waged for rights, dignity and justice. That struggle partially succeeded, forcing the ruling classes to compromise rather than continuing to rely on brute force.

As historian E.P. Thompson famously put it in his book The Making of the English Working Class, the Luddites need to be rescued “from the enormous condescension of posterity.”

Luddites in verse, literature

One of the few aristocrats to express sympathy for the Luddites was the poet Lord Byron. In his maiden speech in the House of Lords, Byron lamented that “absolute want” and “unparalleled distress” had provoked the riots and, rather than compassion or an attempt to remedy wrongs, all the government could propose was “dragoons and executioners.”

A few months later, he penned a bitingly satirical poem in a London newspaper with a similar message:

“Some folks for certain have thought it was shocking,

When Famine appeals, and when Poverty groans,

That life should be valued at less than a stocking,

And breaking of frames lead to breaking of bones.”

Fellow poet Percy Bysshe Shelley reacted with similar rage. His 1813 poem Queen Mab, a paean to a utopian future, combined an attack on the state, organized religion and the soul-destroying capitalism of the new machine age.

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, wife of Percy and daughter of feminist philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft, was also inspired by Luddism in her writing of the 1818 novel Frankenstein. Victor Frankenstein’s creation, the Monster, like Ned Ludd, only became violent and destructive when horrendously mistreated.

The message was clear: technological progress was not necessarily in itself evil, but if the outcome was a vicious zero-sum game of winners and losers, then industrial capitalism was deeply inhumane and resistance was inevitable.

These were just the earliest writers who reacted to the Luddites. Notable later novelists tilling the same furrow included Charlotte Brontë and Samuel Butler.

Brontë’s 1849 novel Shirley, set in the Yorkshire textile district in 1811-12, combined sympathy for the plight of the workers with a criticism of violence and a call for paternalism from the mill owners.

Butler’s 1872 novel Erewhon, the ultimate Luddite fantasy, featured a society that outlawed machines and destroyed inventions to prevent them from taking over and enslaving humanity.

Not blindly lashing out

The Luddites may have partly lost the battle in Regency England; the state and the propertied classes may have prevailed.

But it’s a mistake to see them as no more than victims crushed by industrialization.

Caricatures of the Luddites as history’s losers are simply false. We have not stopped talking about them ever since.

Brian Lewis does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/08/05/who-were-the-luddites-their-legacy-ripples-through-politics-cultural-commentary-and-literature/

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Last May, the Trump administration launched a website designed to track down and arrest undocumented migrants across the United States.

• Playing on the ambiguity of the term ‘aliens’, the online platform portrays Washington’s anti-immigration policy as a system combining science-fiction entertainment with large-scale surveillance.

• A linguistic analysis of this website highlights a digital process of dehumanising undocumented migrants, who are portrayed as hidden threats that need to be flushed out and deported.

Launched on May 29 2026, the White House webpage Aliens.gov appears to belong to the world of science fiction. Its visual universe evokes secrecy, extraterrestrial life, government files, hidden truths, and UFO mythology.

The page uses dark colours, luminous green lettering, references to “declassified” information, and the dramatic sentence “They walk among us”. The reader is invited to scroll through what looks like a playful, conspiratorial, X-Files-style interface.

Then comes the twist: the object of the page is not declassified information about the existence of extraterrestrial life. The aliens in question are migrants described as “illegals”.

This shift is the page’s central rhetorical mechanism. It plays on the double meaning of alien: a legal term for a non-citizen, and a popular term for a being from another planet. By activating the second meaning before redirecting it toward migrants without regular status, the page turns a legal category into a scene of strangeness, secrecy and threat.

From non-citizen to non-human

Before the page makes any explicit argument, one word has already shaped the meaning.

Call someone an “undocumented migrant” and the reader may think of law, paperwork, or border policy. Call the same person an “alien”, surround the word with UFO imagery, and a different picture appears: not a person with a story, but a strange and dangerous presence to be detected.

That is where the dehumanising work begins. The page does not need to state that undocumented migrants are less than human. It weakens their personhood by making them appear first as a category of threat rather than as people with names, voices, families, motives or histories.

Nick Haslam’s work on dehumanisation helps explain this mechanism. Dehumanisation can deny people full human recognition by representing them as animal-like, machine-like, object-like, or as lacking the qualities associated with ordinary human personhood. On Aliens.gov, undocumented migrants appear through precisely this kind of reduction as aliens, arrests, map points, suspicious presences, and objects of return.

The result is both anti-immigration rhetoric and multimodal dehumanisation. Words, colour, visual genre, mapping, pronouns and institutional links all work together to produce the same figure: the undocumented migrant as an alien presence inside national space. The question is no longer only “What legal status does this person have?” It becomes “How do we find them?”

Not just a joke: when policy speaks in pop-cultural form

The humour of the page is part of its political efficiency.

In an NBC10 Philadelphia In Depth with Lena Tillett segment on Aliens.gov, political and media historian Brian Rosenwald notes that Trump’s supporters are likely to read this style as “tongue-in-cheek” humour: provocative, amusing, and deliberately irritating to critics. In that reading, the joke does more than entertain supporters. It also shapes opponents as humourless or excessive – people “going crazy” because they supposedly cannot take a joke.

Humour gives the message a protective layer. If critics object to the page’s dehumanising imagery, the response is already available: they missed the joke. Political disagreement is recast as emotional overreaction.

But the opposition to the page is not only a matter of taste. NBC10 Philadelphia reported that immigration advocates in Philadelphia condemned the site, with the Pennsylvania Immigration Coalition describing it as “an embarrassment” and “taxpayer-funded Internet trolling”. The same report notes concern over the site’s tip-line logic, which advocates read as encouraging neighbours to turn on neighbours.

This is where the joke becomes strategy.

The page condenses a wider official grammar already present in Trump’s immigration discourse: invasion, emergency, protection, criminality, removal and national restoration.

Executive orders signed in January 2025 describe undocumented migration as a “large-scale invasion”, an “unprecedented flood of illegal aliens”, and a “grave threat” to the nation. The border is shaped as a place of emergency, territorial defence, and military support. Another order, titled “Protecting the American People Against Invasion,” links immigration enforcement to national security, public safety and the economic well-being of Americans.

The Aliens page translates this official grammar into another language.

The executive orders provide the doctrine. The webpage provides the spectacle.

What appears in executive language as emergency, sovereignty, and enforcement reappears on the page as a viral form of political entertainment. This is policy discourse redesigned for a digital attention economy.

That is why the shareability of the page matters. Virality is not separate from ideology, as it is one of the ways ideology travels. The page borrows the entertainment value of UFO culture, then attaches it to arrests, reporting, and deportation. It becomes an official interface of deportability.

‘They walk among us’

“They walk among us” is the sentence that turns the page from a joke into a warning.

Its force comes from the word “among”, via which the border disappears. The imagined threat is no longer arriving from outside, but it is already inside the everyday spaces of national life.

It may be in the street, at work, next door, in the crowd, as the sentence describes an unsettling intimacy.

It also creates, in four words, a political community. There is a “they” and there is an “us”. The “us” is never defined, because it does not need to be. It is the presumed national public: innocent, addressed, endangered, and entitled to protection. The “they” are physically present, but symbolically expelled. They are close enough to be feared, but never close enough to belong.

This is the classic grammar of “othering”. As Teun van Dijk argues in his work on ideology and discourse, political language often organises the world by enhancing the virtues of “us” and the dangers of “them.” Ruth Wodak’s work on the politics of fear shows how this opposition becomes especially powerful when a group is turned into a scapegoat for social anxiety. The White House page performs that operation with unusual visual efficiency, as it both names an out-group and teaches the in-group to search for it and inform about it.

The quiet violence of “it”

One of the page’s most revealing sentences reads: “The Alien is in good hands. We will take care of it… and return it safely to its place of origin.”

The sentence sounds almost gentle. “In good hands.” “Take care.” “Safely.” These are words denoting protection.

But the grammar tells another story. The Alien is “it”. In English, “it” is used for objects, abstractions, animals in some contexts, and non-human beings. On a page already designed around extraterrestrial imagery, the pronoun extends then fiction into grammar. The person is not he, she or they. The person becomes “it”.

The phrase “return it safely to its place of origin” replaces biography with origin. There is no home, no family, no fear, no legal claim, no community, no history. There is simply an origin to which the object can be returned.

This is not the loud violence of insult. It is the quieter violence of administrative objectification. Removal is made to sound like care. Deportation is phrased as safe handling. The state appears calm, almost benevolent, while the person is grammatically reduced.

The map and the making of a neighbourhood watch

The Alien Arrest Map is one of the page’s most consequential features.

Maps carry a quiet authority. They seem factual, almost self-explanatory. In this case, the map does not show migration routes, labour patterns, asylum claims, family separation, court backlogs or community life. It shows arrests. The undocumented migrant enters the visual field through the moment of enforcement.

Therefore, a person becomes a point. A life becomes a location. A legal situation becomes a trace on a dashboard.

The page then goes further by linking to an ICE tip line where users can report “suspicious aliens”. This changes the reader’s role. The visitor is no longer simply receiving a government message. The visitor is invited to become an informer.

The word “suspicious” is elastic. Most people cannot know someone’s immigration status by looking at them. Suspicion can attach itself to accent, language, skin colour, workplace, neighbourhood, clothing, movement, or simply to the perception of foreignness. A page like this risks making suspicion feel like civic participation.

This is the most serious political effect of the interface. It turns the public gaze into part of the enforcement apparatus as it builds the perceptual world in which deportation feels obvious. It makes an old vocabulary of exclusion feel contemporary, clickable and official. Once a human being has been redesigned as an alien presence, removal can be made to look less like a political choice and more like common sense.

From illegality to invasion

The page’s final movement is from “alien” to “invader”. It declares that these “Aliens” are “illegals” who “invaded” the country.

Once undocumented migration is described as invasion, the political imagination changes.

One can debate policy toward undocumented migrants: due process, border administration, asylum, labour, regularisation, detention, deportation, family unity, local economies. But invasion belongs to another register. Invasions are not managed; they are repelled. This is how fear becomes policy logic. The page does not only construct “Aliens” as a danger to “every American family, every community, and the future of our nation”. It also turns Trump into the figure who recognised the threat first: “President Trump was the first to call out the real danger Aliens pose.” The result is a familiar rescue narrative: a hidden danger, a vulnerable people, a leader who dares to name it, and removal presented as protection.

The page compresses a whole politics into a short sequence. First, undocumented migrants are made strange through the figure of the alien. Then they are brought close through “they walk among us.” Then they are visualised with the help of a map. Then they are made reportable through the ICE link.

Finally, they are named as invaders and assigned the remedy:

“Deport them all.”

Fatima-Zahra Aklalouch ne travaille pas, ne conseille pas, ne possède pas de parts, ne reçoit pas de fonds d’une organisation qui pourrait tirer profit de cet article, et n’a déclaré aucune autre affiliation que son organisme de recherche.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/08/05/they-walk-among-us-the-white-houses-aliens-page-and-the-dehumanisation-of-undocumented-migrants/

Philadelphians who live near industrial land and major roads – those who live in the Port Richmond and Bridesburg neighborhoods along I-95, or the Delaware River port-industrial corridor, for example – face worse air pollution and are more likely to have asthma than residents who live farther from those sites.

Philly neighborhoods with a higher percentage of green areas, by contrast, have lower levels of diesel particulate matter, nitrogen dioxide and other toxic air pollutants, which inflame and irritate the respiratory system. Many of them have lower asthma rates too.

We are urban and regional planning professors and a graduate research fellow with expertise in environmental planning, environmental health and climate resilience. In 2025 we studied 766 census tracts across nine counties in Pennsylvania and New Jersey that fall within the Philadelphia metropolitan area. This region has a mix of cities, older suburbs and lower-density communities.

We wanted to see how air pollution affects the Philadelphia metro area, how it relates to asthma rates, and whether high-pollution areas overlap with historically redlined neighborhoods. Redlining was a discriminatory practice, formalized in the 1930s by federal agencies, by which banks and insurers marked minority neighborhoods as “high-risk” on maps and denied residents mortgages and other financial services. This cut off investment to these neighborhoods for decades.

To do our analysis, we combined land use and road data from the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission, demographic data from the U.S. Census Bureau, asthma estimates from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, pollution measures from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and historical redlining maps from the University of Richmond’s Mapping Inequality project.

Among other findings, we were able to rank the tracts with the highest percentages of adults with asthma diagnoses. The top five in order were Franklinville in North Philadelphia, Stanton in North Philadelphia, Bartram Village in southwest Philadelphia, Strawberry Mansion in North Philadelphia and West Chester University in Chester County.

A significant difference in asthma rates between communities is the result of environmental and social pressures that accumulate year after year.

For example, we found that neighborhoods in the Philadelphia metro area with more Black residents and more adults without high school diplomas had higher rates of asthma. These differences remained even after we statistically controlled for measured pollution levels, meaning pollution alone did not explain the gap.

Zoning decisions affect local asthma rates

Greater Philadelphia earned straight Fs for its air pollution in the American Lung Association’s 2026 State of the Air report. The region ranked 17th worst among more than 200 U.S. metropolitan areas for year-round particle pollution.

This means that Philly residents face unhealthy air exposure throughout the year.

Patients, families and physicians often think of asthma as a medical problem. Our findings show that it is also an urban planning problem.

Zoning and infrastructure decisions shape where pollution sources are located and who lives near them. Industrial zoning can mean homes, schools and childcare centers end up close to factories, warehouses and other emission sources. Transportation investments can route highways, truck traffic and freight corridors through particular neighborhoods, which increases residents’ exposure to diesel particulate matter and nitrogen dioxide.

City planning decisions also determine where trees, parks and other green buffers are preserved or added. When industrial activity, heavy traffic and limited green space overlap, residents may face several environmental risks at once. These cumulative burdens are often concentrated in communities that have experienced long-term disinvestment, including limited infrastructure spending, fewer business loans and lower property investment, often rooted in practices such as redlining.

Partially redlined areas fared worse than mostly redlined areas

Redlining maps were available for only four of our nine counties. For a more straightforward comparison, we grouped the four federal Home Owners’ Loan Corporation gradings into two categories: “Favorable” versus “Unfavorable.” We considered the “Best” and “Still Desirable” ratings as “Favorable,” and the “Declining” and “Hazardous” ratings as “Unfavorable.”

Within those counties, asthma rates did not rise steadily as historical grades worsened, which is what we expected to see.

Instead, the highest asthma rates appeared in neighborhoods where “Declining” or “Hazardous” grades covered a middling share of land, rather than in areas that were mostly redlined or mostly favorably graded.

These in-between areas often contained a mix of residential, commercial and industrial uses, and many appear to have changed continuously in the decades since the maps were drawn in 1960s. They may have been especially exposed to later redevelopment, traffic growth, remaining industry and population turnover, as well as uneven reinvestment – where new investment reached some blocks but not others, or brought new burdens such as truck traffic alongside new development.

Our data cannot pinpoint when these changes occurred, only that these areas today carry the heaviest combined exposures.

This finding does not make historical discrimination less important. It suggests that the health consequences of discrimination unfold through decades of subsequent decisions about land use, housing and infrastructure.

A case for studying Kensington and Grays Ferry

Our findings can be used to identify places where asthma risks are concentrated, but they do not explain any one person’s health. Our data could not measure indoor asthma triggers such as mold, pests or poor ventilation, and we lacked information on smoking, occupational exposure to pollutants or irritants, and how much time residents spend outside the neighborhood where they live.

We also could not account for residents’ access to healthcare, including insurance coverage and the availability of nearby providers. These factors affect whether asthma gets diagnosed and treated in the first place.

We observed neighborhoods at a single point in time and did not track how pollution or land use had changed in the years or decades prior. We hope that future studies capture more detailed pollution monitoring and land-use data collected over time.

We would also like to see more research on how traffic, industry, housing and green infrastructure – such as parks, street trees and vacant lots converted to green space – interact to affect residents’ health in mixed-use and redeveloping neighborhoods such as Grays Ferry in South Philadelphia and Kensington in North Philadelphia. Stronger evidence from these areas can help local planning and health agencies choose the right mix of protections and investments for each community.

Read more of our stories about Philadelphia and Pennsylvania, or sign up for our Philadelphia newsletter on Substack.

Qian He receives funding from the National Science Foundation, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the New Jersey Department of State Office of Planning Advocacy, and the South Jersey Institute for Population Health.

Mahbubur Meenar receives funding from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the National Science Foundation, the New Jersey Department of State Office of Planning Advocacy, and the South Jersey Institute for Population Health.

Sean Olcese receives funding from the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/08/05/philadelphias-failing-air-quality-hits-hardest-in-neighborhoods-near-industry-and-highways-where-asthma-rates-soar/

Leer en español.

For millennia, the Wounaan people, who live in parts of what is now Panama and Colombia, have hewn and sculpted various woods. Cocobolo rosewood, Dalbergia retusa, is particularly favored for carving ceremonial staffs used in traditional medicine and commercial art depicting tropical plants and animals.

Wounaan are just some of the people around the world who have used rosewoods to make a wide range of items, including gunstocks, furniture and musical instruments. There are now more than 140 tree species commercialized as rosewoods, all with lustrous, dense and typically reddish wood.

Beginning in the late 2000s, global demand for rosewood exceeded the legal supply. The beautiful woods became popular investments, particularly during China’s real estate boom, and also are renowned tonewoods, or woods used for musical instruments. By 2012, cocobolo’s value in China had skyrocketed to over US$13,000 per cubic meter ($371 per cubic foot). It can now cost three times that – much costlier than, for example, red oak at about US$1,500 per cubic meter ($43 per cubic foot).

In 2011, loggers started illegally cutting rosewood trees in the mature forests of eastern Panama where Wounaan people live. In Panama, most of the Indigenous Wounaan and many of the Emberá peoples do not have legal rights to those forested lands, despite having lived in them for generations. Once the illegal loggers invaded, Wounaan authorities elected by the communities filed legal complaints with local and national Panamanian officials, while also seeking support from the media and the public.

But that was only the beginning.

During that initial logging season, there was a three-month standoff between illegal loggers and Wounaan community members. A logger killed an elected traditional authority, hapk’ʌʌn Aquilino Opua Puchicama. In response, the logger, Ezequiel Batista, was killed.

Wounaan realized that loggers were willing to kill to get the rosewood.

The illegal logging was intense for four years. In 2014, tiny Panama was the 16th-largest supplier of rosewood to China, exporting US$55.5 million worth of it there. Before the rosewood boom, cocobolo was listed as “vulnerable, having high extinction risk in the wild” by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. But by 2019, it was reassessed as “critically endangered.”

That’s one way to tell the story – as a more-or-less linear sequence of these tragic and catastrophic events. But in conducting and presenting our research, we have chosen another way, reflecting and encompassing Wounaan lives, values, science and experiences, finding not only loss but also the joy of resistance and care for others.

A broad perspective, and a local one

We are part of an effort to share this research in a new book, “Interwoven Rosewood: Collaborative Ecologies, Colonial Entanglements, and Indigenous Resistance.” It’s a multiyear collaboration by the Wounaan National Congress (Wounaan Podpa Nʌm Pömaam), which represents all Wounaan people in Panama; the Wounaan Local Congress of the Majé Community (Wir Haigpai Podpa Nʌm Majé), representing a community with many cocobolo artists that was among those most directly affected by illegal logging; and a university professor who collaboratively studies with communities on the environment and conservation.

From the beginning, our goal has been to make this research available to a wide audience. That involves telling the intertwining stories of global rosewood and what happened in Panama, the Wounaan experience, and sharing Wounaan ancestral science and wisdom – all against a backdrop of centuries of attacks on Indigenous lives and land that continue all the way to the present.

Cultivating collaboration

Wounaan, like many Indigenous peoples of lower central and northwestern South America, emphasize tending to relationships. One way in which Wounaan do so is conscientiously sharing and redistributing food, money, wisdom and the like to foster equity.

That collaborative approach runs counter to an extractivist mindset, which can permeate illegal logging and even scientific research, of seeing people and places as resources to be exploited.

So in assembling this research, we – Wounaan and non-Wounaan alike – committed to cultivating research collaboration and co-production of the materials we were assembling.

We planned the research together and set goals for sharing widely what we learned, rather than aiming to publish in scholarly academic journals primarily available to, and useful for, university-affiliated scholars. And we specifically sought to respect Wounaan rights to ancestral insights and wisdom, creating a formal research agreement that ensured, among other provisions, that Wounaan people have “data sovereignty” over the information we assembled and the right to decide what would be done with it.

Interweaving themes

In Wounaan basketry, artists use naturally dyed strands of fiber to weave around a central core, picking up each color as necessary to make the design.

Our version of the illegal rosewood research weaves together three strands: the lowland tropical environment, Wounaan ancestral wisdom and science, and the combined forces of capitalism and colonialism. None of these themes can truly be disconnected from the others or studied separately.

Recognizing the past in the present and future

For Wounaan, ancestral stories have relevance today, structuring and guiding life now and yet to come. For example, the Wounaan ancestral story of creation includes advice from the Creator on how to revise initial errors made in forming humans, showing the importance of making improvements to create change.

The metaphor of spiraling basketry illustrates how the past is an active part of the present and the future. For instance, the extraction of gold in the early Spanish colonial era was not that different from extraction of rosewood by Chinese entrepreneurs in the 21st century.

Celebrating relationships

Everyday Wounaan life embraces “conviviality” – living respectfully and interdependently with other humans and nonhumans. When carving a piece of cocobolo rosewood, a Wounaan artist features the grain. Much as the wood reveals its grain to the carver, nonhumans can communicate and act on their own as well.

Wounaan pay attention to the complexities, obligations and synergies of interwoven lives and forces that shaped and are shaping the world – such as those among plants, laws, birds, maps, animals, scholars, insects, infrastructure, fungi, officials, diseases, trade, trafficking and climate change.

In short websites for the book in English and Spanish, website designer Mavila Trujillo used illustrations, video, photos and audio recordings with short text to make some of that conviviality more visible. For example, she used audio of Wounaan flute music about the agouti – small animals that disperse seeds – with animated illustrations of the animal itself and a Wounaan dancing to the music.

Respecting the experiences of many voices

For Wounaan and many other Indigenous peoples, knowledge can only be gained through experience. Wisdom is learned through the body and its interactions with others in the land and waters, from and through movement and multiple senses, such as music, dance, fragrance, touch, taste and seeing.

To express multiple perspectives on the yearslong struggle against exploitation, Wounaan elected authorities and community members nominated people based on their expertise and experience. With consent from their families, contributions from deceased Wounaan colleagues included ancestral stories and recent writings. Two senior non-Indigenous colleagues who have done decades of work on Indigenous rights contributed as well.

Exposing colonialism and capitalism

Over centuries, Wounaan have experienced – and continue to experience – devastating effects of “settler colonialism,” the practice of exploiting people and spaces – taking and extracting not only physical items but land itself – as well as people’s lives, rights, languages and science.

Settler colonialism and capitalism can work hand in hand, using education, laws, corporate and industrial practices, illegal trafficking and even efforts at environmental conservation in ways that do people harm, including Indigenous peoples.

Wounaan have spent centuries refusing and resisting those forces, fighting against those who take land and rights unjustly. That history includes colonial-era rebellions, using drones to monitor land invasions for legal ecological complaints, and protests against new or proposed laws.

Showing liveliness in the Wounaan meu language

The Wounaan language, Wounaan meu, like many Indigenous languages, emphasizes action, recognizing that people and others are always developing or becoming updated versions of themselves.

Yet sharing information widely often involves translation. In that process, key nuances can get lost, turning action into passivity, for instance, or adding a gender to a word where none existed in the original. To ensure the research celebrated Wounaan meu even when translated into English and Spanish, we took care to use words that reflect Wounaan meanings, such as the difference between “traditional doctor” and “shaman,” or respect regional Indigenous etymology, such as translating the Wounaan meu “jap” as “pirogue” instead of “canoe.”

For some elements, two of us – Chenier and Doris – recorded Wounaan speaking their material in Wounaan meu, and then transcribed and carefully translated them to preserve rich elements of Wounaan thought and language.

Nurturing joy and beauty

Ultimately, our collaborative research embraces self-determination and the joy and beauty that accompany it. It integrates both “wajaug hʌidʌm” (pronounced like wa-HOWGP OIU-dum) or being in good and positive relations with others and “hãba poso honee nʌm” (pronounced like ug-BA po-so OH-ney nuom), joyfully working together.

We are continuing our collaborative co-creation: In the works are a Spanish version of the book with translator Alfonso Conde, an abbreviated Spanish-language book centered on the Wounaan-authored chapters, an analysis of the spoken Wounaan meu and written Spanish chapters, and a multimedia website for Wounaan schoolchildren.

In this way, we carry on respecting ancestral wisdom and science to cultivate the just futures that Wounaan envision for themselves.

Julie Velásquez Runk received the following funding: for the field research a Wenner-Gren Foundation Postdoctoral Research Grant and Engaged Anthropology Grant; a Travel to Collections Grant funded research at the George A. Smathers Libraries Special and Area Studies Collections, University of Florida; a Book Development Grant and a Summer Writing Grant from the Humanities Institute at Wake Forest University; a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship from the National Humanities Center, and a Willson Center for Humanities and Arts Faculty Research Fellowship at the University of Georgia. The book project also received a Norm and Sibby Whitten Publication Subvention Award.

As a member of the Wounaan National Congress, Chenier Carpio Opua was a collaborator in the Wenner Gren Foundation grants and the book subvention award.

As a member of the Wounaan National Congress, Doris Cheucarama Membache was a collaborator in the Wenner Gren Foundation grants and the book subvention award.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/08/05/wounaan-indigenous-people-have-opposed-illegal-rosewood-logging-and-centuries-of-exploitation-with-wisdom-and-beauty/

Severe storms, heat waves and wildfires can shut down the social life of a community, flooding out festivals, canceling community events and keeping people indoors.

They’re also evidence of how climate change isn’t just changing the environments we all live in, but also impeding our ability to connect with one another.

Around the world, social connection is increasingly recognized as essential to individual and collective well-being. It keeps our brains active and can lower stress levels. During emergencies, social ties can also save lives. Relationships are conduits for timely information sharing, mutual aid and collective action. When temperatures soar, friends and neighbors share heat warnings, check on older adults or other community members who may need help, and coordinate community cooling shelters when formal systems are overwhelmed.

Yet, the effects of climate change may be weakening the very social fabric that helps communities thrive.

As extreme weather becomes more common and disruptive, the effects can impair relationships, interrupt routines and communication, and damage gathering places and the foundations of community traditions.

As an assistant professor of social work at the University of Tennessee, I study converging social and environmental crises, including social disconnection and extreme weather. I’ve found that one of climate change’s most overlooked impacts may be its ability to worsen the continuing loneliness epidemic.

Studies show the amount of time Americans spent interacting with friends and family in person was declining even before the COVID-19 pandemic shut down a lot of social interaction starting in 2020. My team’s recent research in rural Appalachia has found several ways that extreme weather is further hindering social activities.

Extreme weather keeps people apart

Extreme heat has dominated global headlines this summer. When outdoor temperatures become dangerous, people retreat indoors to stay in air conditioning or near electric fans. This can come with a social cost.

“I don’t remember it being this hot growing up,” one 28-year-old social worker told my research team. “People don’t want to leave their house if it’s that hot. People don’t want to go to community events and be out in the community.”

Severe storms and flooding can make travel unsafe or impossible, preventing people from leaving their homes, reaching family or attending social gatherings. These disruptions can erode the everyday interactions that help people feel connected.

Power outages sever communication

Extreme weather can also cut off the communication channels that help people stay connected. Severe storms, flooding, winter weather and extreme heat are all associated with power outages, which can leave residents without electricity, sometimes for weeks.

Electricity failures are often coupled with internet and cellular service interruptions, hindering communication via text messaging, phone calls, social media and email at precisely the time it’s needed most.

As one 74-year-old rural resident explained to my team: “We’re so isolated. We do not have any cellphone service other than through Wi-Fi. So when the power’s out, we have no cellphone service … without your phone, you really lose all your connections.”

The loss of shared places and traditions

Another way climate change can weaken social connection is by altering places and traditions that hold cultural and community significance.

I witnessed this firsthand when Hurricane Irene and Tropical Storm Lee hit my hometown of Cherry Valley, New York, in 2011. After floodwaters broke the dike, a treasured community place known as “the reservoir” – a small lake where families swam and picnicked – was emptied, leaving our rural community without one of its few gathering spaces.

In my team’s Appalachian study, residents described how an extreme drought paired with prolonged heat affected places where people gather, share traditions and maintain connections across generations.

Water levels in lakes and rivers dropped too low for recreation, wildfires swept through the Wayne National Forest, and crop losses meant fewer of the region’s beloved pawpaw fruit when the annual Ohio Pawpaw Festival arrived.

A 68-year-old resident told us: “I look around and it’s just absolutely horrible. Our streams have gone dry. I had a friend drop off some pawpaws the other night and pitiful … nothing like what normally drops. It’s really bad and I suspect this is going to continue. We’ve got to figure something out.”

This kind of degradation of cherished places and traditions can threaten shared experiences that help communities stay connected.

These disaster often overlap

These fractures of social connection often overlap as communities face increasingly frequent co-occurring weather events. A severe storm, for instance, may trigger flooding and power outages during a heat wave, disrupting transportation and communication during dangerously hot temperatures.

Over time, frequent and consecutive weather hazards can weaken relationships by limiting mobility and social engagement.

People who are already socially isolated, including older adults and those living in rural areas or lacking reliable transportation and internet access, are often most vulnerable. Climate change and extreme weather can leave them even more isolated.

Keeping social connection amid disasters

As global temperatures rise, driven in large part by the burning of fossil fuels, climate change increasingly affects daily life. Social connection is crucial, both for responding to extreme weather and for working together to help the entire community adapt to a changing climate.

One promising way forward is for cities and counties to invest in community hubs, such as public libraries, or create new gathering spaces across communities.

These spaces can bolster social connection year-round by hosting inclusive lifelong learning activities while also serving as cooling shelters and climate resilience hubs, providing resources to help residents prepare for disasters, phone-charging stations when power goes out elsewhere, and an internet connection.

In an era of accelerating climate disruption, social connection may be a community’s greatest asset, and yet one of its most fragile resources to protect.

Fiona Doherty received funding from the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues, The Women’s Place at The Ohio State University, the College of Social Work PhD Program at The Ohio State University, and Grand Challenges for Social Work for the research mentioned in this article.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/08/05/climate-change-may-be-making-us-lonelier-how-heat-waves-and-extreme-weather-disrupt-social-connections-everyone-relies-on/

Babies start out life helpless and stay that way for a long time. They cannot walk, feed themselves or survive without an adult’s continued care. Our dependency timeline has no clear parallel elsewhere in the animal kingdom.

Unlike most mammals, whose young reach basic self-sufficiency within weeks or months, humans remain dependent for years. That helplessness may be central to understanding humanity.

And yet, in societies that prize independence and self-sufficiency, dependence is often treated as something negative to be overcome.

That framing, I argue as a scholar in developmental psychology, is overdue for a rethink.

Where humans fit on the spectrum

Animal newborns are classified on a spectrum of two poles: “altricial” and “precocial.” Altricial species are like rats, born in a large litter and with eyes and ears fused shut. They require intense parental care.

Precocial species are like horses, born as a singleton, and up and walking soon after birth. There are even “superprecocial” species, such as the megapodiidae birds that live and survive on their own immediately after hatching.

Human beings are difficult to capture as either altricial or precocial.

Overall, we are a precocial species, born with our eyes and ears open. But, in other ways, humans have evolved to become more altricial, especially in our motor development. In comparison, for example, chimpanzees reach motor milestones long before human babies do.

Humans stay dependent for an unusually long time, and retain juvenile features well beyond childhood and into adulthood. Our spine and head alignment, for instance, more closely resembles that of a juvenile chimpanzee than an adult one.

This kind of prolonged helplessness is special to us, and it complicates a common assumption about evolution: that it moves in a straight line toward greater independence and capability.

Why psychologists are paying attention

Evolutionary biologists and anthropologists have wondered whether babies’ evolved dependence explains parts of our social collaboration and cultural innovation. It’s only more recently that child psychologists have begun to examine helplessness itself as a developmental feature rather than a limitation.

Human infant helplessness has often been explained through the “obstetrical dilemma,” the idea that humans face an evolutionary trade-off: walking upright resulted in a narrower pelvis, while our large brains require babies to have large heads. This theory posits that, as a result, humans may have evolved to give birth earlier. But in evolution, even a trait that emerged for one reason can go on to have new consequences.

Child psychologists are now examining helplessness to understand issues such as how evolution shapes childhood and the role this trait plays in social learning.

There are even debates about whether helplessness helps babies build foundational knowledge the way training data shapes an AI system.

In my own research, I build on these ideas to develop a road map to integrating helplessness into future research. I see human infants as uniquely active — we have strong sensory systems paired with weak motor systems, which means we orient more easily to social stimuli — and relational, in that we are dependent on social relations to survive.

I also see helplessness as long-lasting, meaning we shouldn’t judge a baby only as a future adult but examine how adults keep features of childhood.

This road map can then be used to understand morality. My work on helplessness grew out of research on prosocial behaviours. In studying how helping behaviours develop in infancy, I wondered whether the role of helplessness, which requires that infants are the recipients of care, could explain aspects of how they learn to be caring.

If care is something infants first receive rather than give, then perhaps the capacity for empathy doesn’t emerge in spite of helplessness, but because of it.

Helplessness and dependence as weaknesses

When British psychiatrist and psychoanalyst John Bowlby coined the word “attachment” for attachment theory, he had considered using the word “dependence.” He did not do so because he was concerned about the term’s negative connotations.

The word “helplessness” shares those associations. But is there anything wrong with being dependent on others?

Feminist and Indigenous worldviews have placed far greater emphasis on the importance of dependence and interdependence. Most social and language learning happens not in isolation, but in community settings.

Seen this way, dependence isn’t a deficit to be corrected but a structure that makes learning, culture and care possible in the first place. The critical point is how well an infant or child is supported in the relationships they depend on rather than how quickly they become independent.

Independence is not humanity’s story. The truth is, humans have evolved and developed to depend on each other.

Stuart I. Hammond does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/08/05/why-being-born-helpless-may-be-one-of-humanitys-greatest-strengths/

The ability to cross oceans has long been a marker of human endeavour, but when did the seas change from being barriers to movement into the maritime highways we know today?

For many years the answer was thought to lie in the Neolithic period – the time when humans made the profound transition from hunting and gathering to practising agriculture and living in settled societies.

Our team’s discovery of the presence of European hunter-gatherers on the tiny Mediterranean island of Malta, reported last year, has overturned this view. It showed that people reached Malta from their starting point in Europe (presumably Sicily) at least 8,500 years ago.

In a new study, we show that these populations were engaging in repeated long-distance sea journeys of at least 100km, well before the advent of farming.

Researchers have known that the occasional very ancient sea crossing must have been made. The most famous example may be the colonisation of Australia, tens of thousands of years before the present.

However, sustained, long distance sea voyaging – particularly to small and remote islands – was long thought to have been beyond the capabilities of hunter-gatherers, who are dependant on the bounty, or deprivation, of natural resources.

This was also the case for Europe’s last hunter-gatherers, in the period of time known as the Mesolithic, the era before the Neolithic. During the Neolithic, a new population introduced agriculture to Europe from Anatolia (which comprises most of the landmass of modern Turkey).

Enter the recent findings from the site of Latnija, on Malta. Did the surprising presence of European hunter-gatherers on Malta reflect a one off, accidental crossing – or perhaps people who somehow became marooned on the island? Conversely, was this Mesolithic presence a reflection of something altogether different, and more complex?

Shifting seas

To explore these possibilities, we investigated whether Malta could support a viable forager population size that could have lived in isolation for the 1,000 year occupation of the island during the Mesolithic.

First, we explored the impacts of changing sea levels since the Last Glacial Maximum (the height of the last ice age), from around 21,000 years ago. This was when waters began to rise from their lowest levels of around 130m below modern sea level. By doing this, we were able to track changes in the size of Malta and its connectivity with surrounding islands and land masses.

During the Last Glacial Maximum, Malta was connected to Sicily by a land bridge, and this connection remained as sea levels continued to rise until around 14,000 years ago, when the land bridge began to be inundated. Continued sea level rise meant that within less than a thousand years, Malta had become far smaller and remote from Sicily, needing a long-distance sea crossing for connectivity.

By the time of the Mesolithic occupation, Malta had almost reached its present configuration, with no significant difference in distances to Sicily. Having understood how sea level rise impacted the size and accessibility of Malta, we next
explored how its specific ecological conditions impacted its ability to support forager populations. Since hunter-gatherers are reliant on what nature provides, their population sizes have a direct relationship with ecological productivity.

Accordingly, we modelled the relationship between population density among contemporary forager populations and what’s known as net primary productivity – effectively the baseline of wild resources available to hunter-gatherers. We then extrapolated these findings back into the past using high resolution computer models of past climates (palaeoclimate models).

This enabled us to calculate the total population size that could be supported first on the combined landmass of Malta and Sicily, and then as separate islands as sea levels rose.

Our upper estimates for the total population sizes suggest that after the inundation of the land bridge to Sicily, the total population size that could be theoretically supported on Malta dropped rapidly to 319 people by 13,800 years ago.

There is no evidence yet that people were living on Malta this early, but our models showed that any populations present would have continued to drop in size as sea levels rose until around 9,000 years ago, when it could have accommodated around 170-144 people.

Finally, we compared these findings to thresholds, informed by conservation genetic studies, for the long-term viability and stability of a population. These thresholds suggest the need for an effective (reproducing) population size of 1,000 or more, equivalent to a total population size of 2,500-3,000 (because the total population size includes both younger and older people who are not reproducing).

Long distance voyages

This suggests that Malta was incapable of hosting an isolated, viable population that could have lived continuously through the 1,000-year time frame during which it was settled by Mesolithic hunter-gatherers.

Consequently, we can rule out the persistence of a population stranded on Malta as sea levels inundated the land bridge to Sicily. We can also exclude a single, perhaps unintended, voyage leaving marooned mariners on Malta.

The only alternative is that these Mesolithic hunter-gatherers were making repeated, long distance sea voyages between at least Malta and Sicily, the closest land mass, to maintain the genetic connections that ensured at least a millennium of Mesolithic viability on Malta.

These insights are reshaping our perceptions of late European hunter-gatherers and the sophistication of their societies. To maintain repeated, long-distance overseas connections, they must have had, and conserved, an extensive knowledge of land, sea and sky, as well as the technological know-how for building and preserving sea craft.

We don’t know for certain what type of vessels the hunter-gatherers were using, although we know that dug-out canoes existed at this time. The crossings to Malta occurred several thousand years before the earliest evidence for sails – making the achievement even more impressive.

From wayfinding to getting food at sea overnight, they then had to be able to live sustainably on a small, semi-arid island, which required a finely-tuned knowledge of diverse food sources shaped by the seasons.

With these implicit capabilities, we can then start to ask, where else did they go? There is already evidence of connectivity between Europe and North Africa during this time. Previous work using ancient DNA found the distinctive signature of European hunter-gatherer ancestry in people living in pre-Neolithic Tunisia.

All this suggests we may be looking at a hitherto unknown web of overseas links that marked the beginning of the connected world we know today, centuries before the first farmers reached the central Mediterranean.

Understanding how these groups remained ecologically resilient, while also shaping ecosystems to their needs, may yet prove to have important lessons for humanity’s current and future challenges in a rapidly warming world. As we continue to unravel Malta’s unprecedented hunter-gatherer past, we hope to shed light on this lost ecological knowledge.

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/08/05/europes-stone-age-hunters-made-sea-voyages-to-malta-thousands-of-years-before-evidence-of-sails/

In Canada, Europe and around the world, temperatures are soaring and heat warnings are rampant. We are reminded to stay out of the sun and stay hydrated, and in extreme conditions, stay indoors.

We are also told that children are especially vulnerable to heat-related illness.

We are researchers with 20-35 years of experience finding out how children, adolescents and adults thermoregulate when active — that is, how they maintain their body temperature within a normal range despite the stresses of exercise and heat. We are also each parents to children who grew up as very active and competitive athletes, spending many hours training and competing outdoors, in all weather conditions. We write this article as scientists and as parents.

How adults and children regulate body heat

For many years the public has been told that children are at increased risk of heat illness, especially when being physically active in a hot environment. Being cautious in demanding situations or hazardous conditions is obviously warranted. But are children especially at risk?

In 1980, the late Oded Bar-Or, a pioneer of pediatric exercise physiology, published a seminal article describing the risks particularly relevant to children exercising in the heat. Subsequent studies consistently demonstrated that children sweat much less than adults. This was the case regardless of the environmental conditions, whether at rest or during exercise.

When we exercise, our working muscles produce heat which must be lost, and body temperature stay within our normal, healthy boundaries (36.5 to 38.5 C). Inability to lose this heat can result in heat illness symptoms (heat cramps to heat exhaustion to potentially fatal heat stroke).

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Since evaporation of sweat from the skin is the most effective way to lose the heat produced by the working muscles, and since children were consistently shown to sweat less than adults, it was concluded that children are especially vulnerable to heat illness.

However, epidemiological data does not support this conclusion. In fact, studies on heat illness during sporting events or in heatwaves report that children have the lowest heat-related morbidity and mortality rates in Canada and worldwide. So, where is this contradiction coming from?

Response to hot environments

We recently conducted a systematic review of 22 studies that directly compared healthy children and adults in terms of their body temperature response when exposed to hot environments. We found that children were able to thermoregulate just as well as adults. Contrary to claims of children’s increased vulnerability, the increase in body temperature during exercise or rest in a hot environment was similar in children and adults.

The human body is able to regulate its temperature within a very narrow range, typically from 36 to 39 C. Even under unfriendly environmental conditions and prolonged activity, such as triathlon racing, body temperature will rarely increase above 40 degrees.

Heat produced by the working muscles is lost in two ways: through sweat evaporation and through sending more blood from the muscles to the skin, and from there, to the environment (conduction). The higher the sweating rate, the greater the heat lost, as long as the sweat actually evaporates rather than drips or is wiped off. Likewise, the greater the blood flow to the skin and the greater the skin area (body surface area), the greater the heat lost, as long as the skin is not covered.

Sweat vs. blood flow

In the studies reviewed, children exhibited lower sweating rates, whether resting or exercising. Their lower sweating rate was apparent regardless of whether it was measured over the whole body, over specific body segments (torso or limbs), whether expressed in absolute terms (total volume) or relative to skin surface area. In other words, sweating rate and thereby heat lost via sweat evaporation was lower in children.

On the other hand, the increase in blood flow to the skin was higher in children. Skin blood flow is difficult to measure, but in those studies in which it was determined, it was higher in children than in adults. In other words, heat lost via conduction was higher in children.

Consider also that a child’s body surface area relative to their mass is much higher than an adult’s. Heat production is dependent on body mass while heat loss is dependent on body surface area. Therefore, a greater ratio of surface area to mass can be an asset when we need to get rid of body heat. Think of how long a large block of ice takes to melt compared to if that cube were all crushed up.

A 10-year-old’s surface-area-to-mass ratio can be 35 per cent larger than a young adult’s. This provides children with an advantage. So, consider that children sweat less because they don’t need to sweat as much. They lose more heat by increasing their blood flow to the skin.

Sweat and dehydration

While sweating and sweat evaporation is an effective way to dissipate heat, it means that we lose body fluids in the process. Since children sweat less than adults, one may argue that they are actually at an advantage when it comes to hydration. However, this is not the case. Generally, despite current awareness of the importance of hydrating, we do not replace all of our fluid loss during exercise.

In other words, when we exercise, we sweat more than we drink. This is the case for children and for adults. When we dehydrate, our body temperature increases and the risk of heat illness increases.

Again, this is the case for children and for adults. However, the implications of dehydration are more serious in children. The dehydration-related rise in body temperature appears to be faster in children. For this reason, added awareness for fluid replacement during exercise (with water or sports drinks), is especially important in children.

Take-home message

The take-home message is that we should all exercise caution in hot environments — children and adults. Physiologically, children are not at a disadvantage compared with adults. They can increase their blood flow to the skin better than adults and do not need to rely on high sweating rates to keep cool. So, they manage to thermoregulate as well as adults.

We should all stay hydrated — children and adults. While awareness of the importance of hydration is growing, this awareness may not be as established in children, and they may not notice early signs of dehydration and overheating such as headache and dizziness. In those cases, added precaution and direction from parents, coaches and teachers is warranted.

Toby Mündel receives funding from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) of Canada (2023-04492), and Canada Research Chairs Program (100752).

Bareket Falk does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/08/05/children-and-adults-cope-with-extreme-heat-differently-but-are-kids-really-are-greater-risk/