Iran’s threat to target American warships with an enhanced ballistic missile appears to mark a new and potentially more dangerous phase of the Middle East conflict, six months in. Tehran says its solid-fuel Qassem Basir missile enables it to “take action against any threat, even before it is carried out”. Reports have suggested that the Qassem Basir was the missile used in tests Iran claimed to have carried out against US warships on September 5.

Washington acknowledged an Iranian attack on its nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS George Washington and a guided-missile destroyer near the Strait of Hormuz. But it said it was unclear whether the new missile had been used and confirmed its vessels had evaded the attack. But the more assertive rhetoric coming out of the Islamic Republic suggests it is moving beyond the largely retaliatory strategy that characterised much of the war and is increasingly prepared to raise the stakes itself.

Tehran has also announced it is preparing to sign an agreement with Oman which would establish a new corridor through the Strait of Hormuz extending out into the Persian Gulf, although this has yet to be confirmed. Taken together, these developments suggest that Iran is no longer simply responding to escalation – it is increasingly trying to drive it.

This does not mean Iran has the upper hand militarily. Far from it. But Tehran appears to have concluded that prolonging and widening the conflict can improve its bargaining position by making the war increasingly expensive for the US and the rest of the world.

It’s an extraordinary reversal for a conflict intended to force Tehran’s hand and even possibly achieve regime change. Military superiority, while inflicting enormous damage on Iran, has not produced the political outcomes aimed at by the US and Israel.

The regime survives, its missiles continue to operate, the question of its nuclear programme remains unresolved, and its regional network retains offensive capabilities – something seen clearly in the latest attacks by Houthi rebels on Saudi Arabia. Meanwhile, the Strait of Hormuz has become a potent instrument of economic leverage for Tehran.

Never-ending cycle of confict

The war seems to have settled into a cycle: escalation, diplomacy, agreement, renewed coercion and then another return to diplomacy. Far from resolving anything, however, the six-month conflict looks to have taught Tehran that resisting US pressure eventually produces better terms.

The latest escalation suggests Iran is now exploiting that lesson. Tehran does not need to defeat the US navy or completely control the Strait of Hormuz. It needs only to make passage sufficiently dangerous that shipping companies hesitate, insurance premiums rise and energy markets price disruption into every barrel of oil.

Read more:
Iran war has become a lesson in how power really works

Recent shipping data show commodity traffic through Hormuz falling to its lowest level since May. Tehran is now threatening wider restrictions on navigation and “economic warfare” if Washington continues trying to strangle the Iranian economy.

This changes the logic of the conflict. Trump sought to make Iranian resistance progressively more expensive. Iran is now making American coercion progressively more expensive too. It cannot match American firepower, but possesses something Washington cannot eliminate by force militarily: its geography and ability to control one of the world’s most important energy corridors.

The conflict should therefore be measured against its political objectives. The broader ambitions associated with the Trump-Netanyahu campaign were to fundamentally weaken or change Iran’s political system, eliminate its nuclear threat, destroy its long-range missile capability and break its network of regional allies.

Six months later, none of these objectives has been decisively achieved. The still-unresolved issue of Tehran’s nuclear ambitions particularly demonstrates the limits of military power. Bombs can destroy facilities, but not the political incentives that lead states to seek strategic deterrence.

Other regional powers are watching. Saudi Arabia has long sought domestic enrichment capabilities. If Middle Eastern governments conclude that a nuclear capacity provides protection against external attack, proliferation pressures could increase rather than diminish. Ultimately, the nuclear question returns to where it began: negotiation.

Trump’s escalation trap

Meanwhile the costs are becoming global. Energy, insurance and shipping costs have all risen and will surely have political ramifications. Meanwhile, Russia benefits from higher hydrocarbon revenues and China gains strategically whenever US naval assets, munitions and political attention are diverted from the Indo-Pacific.

Gulf states face an uncomfortable lesson too. US bases intended to guarantee their security can also make them targets in a conflict they did not start.

None of this means Iran is winning militarily. Its economy and infrastructure have suffered enormously – and America can still inflict far greater destruction. But Iran does not need to defeat the US. It needs to prevent Washington from using military superiority to force it into political submission while making continued armed conflict progressively more painful.

Trump is therefore caught in an escalation trap partly of his own making. He can tighten the blockade, but Iran can disrupt Hormuz. He can intensify bombing, but Tehran can widen its retaliation against Washington’s Gulf allies. He can negotiate, but Iran now has reason to demand stronger guarantees and potentially better terms than it accepted in June.

And US threats lose their coercive power when repeated escalation keeps bringing Washington back to negotiations.

The latest Iranian actions therefore represent more than another exchange of missiles. Six months after Trump and Netanyahu sought to force Iran into submission by force of arms, Tehran has learned that the longer it survives, the greater the costs it can impose and the stronger its eventual bargaining position may become.

America can still escalate far beyond anything Iran can match. What it can no longer assume is that escalation brings victory closer. Iran’s latest moves suggest Tehran now believes the opposite.

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/2026/09/08/iran-war-tehrans-assertive-rhetoric-signals-a-new-and-dangerous-phase-in-conflict/

The student protests we have been witnessing in India can be explained in large part by the crisis facing the Indian middle class, marked in particular by graduate unemployment and a decline in average purchasing power. This is because the upper middle class has grown wealthier, while the lower-middle class has become poorer.

Until the mid-2010s, the idea that India’s middle class was destined to expand continuously seemed self-evident. India had enjoyed double-digit growth during the decade from 2004 to 2014 under Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, the architect of the economic liberalisation of the 1990s driven by the IT sector and foreign investment. The middle class was expanding at that time thanks to the growth of new skilled jobs. This momentum led to the emergence of a social group comprising corporate executives, engineers, IT professionals and entrepreneurs. This middle class defined itself by its income, its consumption capacity, and a social ethos often associated with the higher castes – particularly evident in its opposition to affirmative action policies.

However, this category has remained difficult to measure, as the criteria used vary widely among organisations: income, consumption, wealth, educational level, type of housing, white-collar employment, or subjective self-identification. In the 2010s, several estimates fuelled the notion of a spectacular rise of the Indian middle class. In 2012, the NCAER estimated that it comprised approximately 142 million people, or nearly 12% of the population. Other researchers, using broader criteria, estimated it at 20% of the population. On this basis, firms such as Ernst & Young, McKinsey, and Goldman Sachs predicted rapid growth in this segment, with some even forecasting several hundred million members by 2025–2040.

Narendra Modi, when he was chief minister of Gujarat and later as prime minister after 2014, even used the term “neo-middle class” to refer to people from rural areas who were entering a form of urban modernity thanks to economic growth. However, this term quickly disappeared from political vocabulary as the momentum for expansion ran out of steam.

Indeed, the Indian middle class plateaued in the mid-2010s. According to the Pew Research Center, in 2017, only 108 million Indians belonged to the middle class – defined as having an income of $10 to $50 per day in purchasing power parity – representing about 8% of the population. When the wealthiest segments – those situated above this group – are included, the proportion remains close to previous estimates, confirming the lack of significant growth of the Indian middle class. This is because real incomes for this social category stagnated between 2013 and 2014 and 2023 and 2024. Real wages even declined in several sectors: manufacturing, mining, energy, and services.

This situation can be explained by persistent inflation, particularly food inflation and by weak income growth. Between 2017 and 2018 and 2022 and 2023, real urban income showed virtually no growth. In certain sectors, such as IT, retail, and logistics, nominal wage increases fell short of inflation.

The social implications of a K-shaped recovery

These averages mask a growing internal differentiation within the middle class. Some households formerly classified in this category have joined the economic elite, while the majority of the middle segments have stagnated or regressed. Data from the World Inequality Lab indeed show a dramatic concentration of income at the top of society: the richest 10% held 57.7% of national income in 2022–2023, compared to 33.5% in 1990. The richest 1% held 22.6% of national income, and the top 0.1% held about 10%. India now has more than 300 billionaires. Conversely, the 40% below the top 10% saw their share of national income drop from 44.1% in 1990 to 27.3% in 2022–2023, while the share of the poorest 50% fell to 15%. This situation has led some researchers, such as Lucas Chancel and Thomas Piketty, to speak of a “missing middle class.”

This polarisation is reflected in consumption patterns. The poorest half of the urban population spends less than 5,000 rupees per month, while the richest 5% spend more than four times as much. Households drew heavily on their savings after the pandemic, but this was not enough: their debt has reached a record high, while demand for consumer goods is slowing. Car sales are telling, as only 12% of Indians are reportedly able to afford a car. Small cars, previously associated with the middle class, are declining, while SUVs and high-end vehicles are growing strongly, as are luxury housing, high-end hotel services, and business-class airline tickets.

This polarisation seems paradoxical in light of India’s officially reported growth rates, which have often hovered around 7 to 8 percent since 2014, excluding the Covid years. How can this paradox be explained? First, these figures have been disputed, particularly due to issues with national accounting and the overestimation of the informal sector. The IMF itself has criticised the quality of India’s data. In reality, growth is believed to have been overestimated by 1.5 to 2 percentage points. This is because several shocks have hit the economy hard: the 2016 demonetisation, which abruptly removed 85% of the currency in circulation and had a lasting impact on the informal economy; the poorly managed introduction of the Goods and Services Tax in 2017, which disrupted small and medium-sized enterprises; and then the Covid-19 pandemic, which caused a collapse in economic activity, a massive exodus of precarious workers, and a major social crisis.

Second, since the pandemic, India’s recovery has been described as “K-shaped” growth: the wealthiest are benefiting from growth, while the working and middle classes are stagnating or declining. In 2024, three quarters of Indians earned less than 15,000 rupees per month – about 140 euros. This unequal recovery explains why macroeconomic growth is not translating into an expansion of the middle class. It primarily benefits an elite capable of investing, consuming high-end goods, and capitalising on the opportunities of globalisation, while college graduates face a deteriorating job market.

Graduate unemployment and turbulence in the IT Sector

Young Indians with higher education face very high unemployment rates. In 2024, according to the International Labor Organization, the unemployment rate among graduates reached 29.1 percent – nine times higher than that of illiterate people. This new paradox stems in part from a mismatch between graduates’ expectations and employers’ needs – both in terms of quality and quantity. Families invest heavily in private education, often at the cost of significant debt, which leads young people to turn down low-paying jobs. At the same time, employers believe that many graduates lack the necessary skills. Top-tier institutions, such as the Indian Institutes of Technology, remain highly selective and train only a small minority of engineers. And even these institutions are facing placement difficulties, with a significant drop in job offers in 2023–2024.

The IT sector, long a driving force behind the rise of the middle class, illustrates this crisis. The growth of India’s IT sector was fuelled by outsourcing from the West – particularly in the wake of the Y2K bug – by the training of qualified engineers, and by supportive public policies, such as the creation of special economic zones. Companies such as Tata Consultancy Services, Infosys, Wipro, and Satyam-Mahindra have made India a global powerhouse in IT services. The sector accounted for 7.4% of GDP in 2022, up from 1.2% in 1998, and its exports exceeded $200 billion in the mid-2020s, with the United States absorbing a dominant share of these exports.

But India’s IT sector is slowing down. Revenue growth has levelled off, investments have declined, and the workforce is no longer expanding. Automation and artificial intelligence threaten a significant portion of jobs. Major companies in the sector have begun to reduce their workforces: Infosys, Wipro, and TCS have laid off employees or scaled back hiring. The Indian IT sector could benefit from the rise of Global Capability Centers, or GCCs. These centers are established directly in India by foreign multinationals to bring certain IT, financial, HR, or innovation functions in-house. By 2025, India had approximately 1,700 GCCs employing 1.9 million people, with an annual growth rate of 19%. They could expand
further due to the cost of skilled labour and visa restrictions in the United States. However, these centers do not recruit large numbers of recent generalist graduates; they primarily seek specialised, experienced professionals with advanced skills in AI, cybersecurity, or cutting-edge technologies. This trend is therefore likely to exacerbate polarisation in the labour market rather than help expand India’s middle class.

Overall, the middle class is not experiencing linear growth, as was imagined in the 2000s, but rather significant polarisation: while the elite is prospering, the lower middle class is becoming increasingly vulnerable. Social mobility – which was based on the three pillars of education, jobs in the service sector (particularly in IT), and urbanisation – is functioning less effectively than before. This situation is particularly problematic in a country where, every year, more than ten million young people enter the job market: it is from among them, and from Gen Z at large, that today’s street protesters are drawn.

Christophe Jaffrelot is the author of Modi’s India (Princeton University Press, 2021. His next book L’ambition indienne: les paradoxes d’une nouvelle puissance (éditions Taillandier) is due to be released in October 2026

Christophe Jaffrelot has received funding from France’s National Research Agency. He is a member of the French Political Science Association.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/09/08/indias-middle-class-crisis-the-great-bifurcation-and-the-gen-z-uprising/

For at least two decades, thousands of Americans have been going to Peru, Ecuador, Colombia and Brazil to look for ayahuasca, a psychoactive brew traditionally used in sacred ceremonies in South America. Ayahuasca contains the psychedelic compound DMT, N-Dimethyltryptamine, and researchers are studying its effects on several conditions, including depression and addiction.

However, another sacred plant is quietly drawing Western seekers as well: huachuma, the Andean cactus better known as San Pedro. The plant contains mescaline, a psychoactive compound that alters perception and mood, sharpening the senses and amplifying feelings of empathy and connection.

Ceremonies and retreats are spreading across the U.S., Latin America and Europe into the thousands, as researchers take a fresh look at mescaline’s effects on depression, anxiety and addiction.

The Conversation asked Pardis Mahdavi, a medical anthropologist who conducts research on psychedelics, to explain what huachuma is, why seekers are turning to it, and what ethical questions come with its growing popularity.

1. What is huachuma?

Huachuma, whose Latin name is Echinopsis pachanoi, is a tall cactus that grows along the spine of the Andes, the mountain range on South America’s western side. Chemists know it as a natural source of mescaline, the same psychoactive compound found in peyote. While the chemistry of the two cacti is nearly identical, the experiences they offer, how they are served and why they are consumed are different.

People in the Andes have used huachuma to heal physical illnesses and treat mental health conditions such as depression and anxiety for a long time. Cactus remains found in a Peruvian cave suggest use stretching back perhaps 8,000 years. At some point before roughly 1300 B.C.E. the plant was carved in stone at Chavín de Huántar, a 3,000-year-old ceremonial complex in the northern highlands of Peru, cradled in the hands of a fanged deity.

In the healing traditions of northern Peru, curanderos, or traditional healers, usually train through years of apprenticeship, often within family lineages. They still work with the plant through the mesa, an altar ceremony in which the healer drinks the brew in order to see the nature of a patient’s suffering.

What strikes me most, after years of studying these traditions, is the pace. In the case of ketamine, an anesthetic that U.S. clinics now offer legally as a fast-acting treatment for depression, an infusion takes about an hour; a person can drive home the same afternoon after taking ketamine.

Huachuma keeps a different clock. In one controlled trial, mescaline’s effects lasted about 11 hours on average, more than double psilocybin’s five.

A huachuma ceremony takes a full day. The bitter tea is drunk in the morning, and the effects arrive slowly, over an hour or two, then build through the afternoon. Participants walk, rest, talk and eat together before the ceremony closes near sunset.

The pace of the ceremony mirrors the pace of the plant. A cactus takes years of cultivation before it is mature enough to harvest, and turning it into tea takes the better part of a day. This is why many healers teach seekers to treat huachuma the way they would treat an elder or a teacher – someone you visit, listen to and learn from over years – rather than as a “fix me” shot.

A young herbalist I visited this summer near the California border would not discuss her tea-making until she had walked us through her garden, introducing her plants one by one. “First, we meet the plants,” she said. “You must know them over years, to honor the cactus in order to honor those you heal.”

2. What has prompted Western seekers to turn to it?

Part of the answer is the broader psychedelic renaissance: More people than ever are seeking out plant teachers, and research is beginning to catch up. One large survey of people who had used mescaline found that most reported lasting improvements in conditions such as depression and anxiety after their experiences.

Over the past three years I have interviewed hundreds of seekers in ceremonies and retreat spaces from Arizona to Mexico to Costa Rica: veterans, police officers, CEOs, nurses, people carrying grief or diagnoses that conventional treatment has not touched. Many came to huachuma after trying nearly everything else: talk therapy, antidepressants, silent retreats, other psychedelics.

What draws them are few things: Huachuma takes you out of your head. It quiets the mind’s constant running commentary: the self-doubt, the criticism, the planning, the to-do lists. The shamans I have spoken with like to say that the word huachuma itself translates to “without head.” In the words of a former special forces operative: “With huachuma, it’s less about thought, and more about feeling.” And when the head quiets, the heart opens.

Researchers describe MDMA, the synthetic compound better known as ecstasy, as an “empathogen” because it increases feelings of empathy and closeness; huachuma opens the same territory.

Where ayahuasca ceremonies typically happen at night – each participant lying down inside a private journey of visions, tears and purging – huachuma ceremonies happen in daylight. People walk the trails and gardens around the ceremony site, often in pairs. They sit in circles telling stories and share a meal as the tea wears off.

Additionally, huachuma is gentler than most of its cousins – in ceremony circles it is often called “the grandfather” because the lore goes that grandfathers are known for spoiling their loved ones while offering gentle guidance. While seekers I interview describe a psilocybin journey as “seven years of therapy compressed into seven hours of mirrors screaming at you,” huachuma is a different kind of encounter.

Mescaline rarely produces the otherworldly visions people expect from psychedelics. Instead, participants stay on their feet, able to walk, talk and reflect the entire time, and that subtlety opens space for self-excavation: grief examined, old decisions revisited, at a pace a person can actually absorb .

None of this means huachuma is safe for everyone. Mescaline raises heart rate and blood pressure. It is not advised for people with cardiovascular conditions, certain psychiatric histories or on some medications. It remains a Schedule 1 controlled substance in the U.S., which means its use, even medicinal, is technically illegal even though the cactus itself is legal to grow.

A homemade brew has no standard dose, and potency varies from cactus to cactus. This is one reason untrained facilitators are genuinely dangerous. A skilled server screens participants for health risks, knows the strength of what they are pouring and stays present for all 10 or more hours.

What are the ethics of using huachuma so it respects Indigenous knowledge and tradition?

As ayahuasca went global, luxury retreats charged thousands of dollars, untrained facilitators set up shop, and ceremonies were stripped of the songs, diets and community obligations that gave them meaning. Indigenous communities that developed the practice saw little of the money. A sacred plant became a wellness product.

The shamans I have interviewed hold clear, consistent beliefs about how to serve huachuma ethically, and for them the work begins long before anyone drinks. “You must grow it,” one told me. You learn the delicate, lengthy process of preparing the tea or the powder: pulling out the thorns, spending hours distilling the flesh into liquid, replanting the arms of the plant. San Pedro grows in columns, called arms, and ethical growers replant a cutting for every arm they harvest, so the plant outlives the serving.

Honoring the lineage also means apprenticing with teachers in the tradition rather than learning from the internet; sourcing cacti from growers rather than stripping wild stands; and crediting the tradition openly, by naming your teachers and acknowledging the practice as Andean rather than presenting it as your own invention. It also means sending support back toward the Andean communities that kept it alive.

“Above all, you take your time,” a healer in San Diego told me. “With huachuma, hurry is its own form of disrespect.”

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

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/09/08/huachuma-the-andean-psychedelic-cactus-is-drawing-western-seekers-and-raising-ethical-questions/

Squinting through my binoculars, I scanned the dense branches of a black spruce, trying my best to catch a glimpse of the thin legs of a small black, white and yellow songbird. I was on the hunt for a yellow-rumped warbler – a bird affectionately called “butter-butt” by bird-watchers after the distinctive buttery yellow patch of feathers above its tail.

Once I spotted a flash of red on one of the bird’s legs, I knew that this individual was special – in fact, it was one that I already knew well. That’s because I had placed identifying bands on it the previous year as part of my Ph.D. research, and it was carrying a very important piece of new technology.

I played the high pitched “warble” of its song through a speaker placed below a mist net of fine, nearly invisible mesh. Thinking another male had intruded on his territory, the bird quickly descended. My tactic worked – he got caught in the net. As I gently removed him, I breathed a sigh of relief as I saw the Tic Tac-size device sitting on his back.

Over the past year, this warbler carried a multisensor geolocator backpack throughout his migratory journey, recording the long trek from his breeding grounds in Anchorage, Alaska, to a yet unknown winter refuge and back again. Working with my Ph.D. adviser, evolutionary biologist David Toews, I deployed dozens of these cutting-edge tags to illuminate the migratory journeys of these high-latitude breeding warblers at a scale not previously possible for small birds.

Now, after a year of waiting, I finally had the data in hand.

How can scientists track small birds?

Researchers began tracking the movements of migrating birds in the late 1960s using radio telemetry, a technique that requires tagged birds to be physically followed with receiver equipment, sometimes aided by a small aircraft.

Then, as GPS became more widely available in the early 2000s, satellite tags let researchers accurately track birds remotely. However, GPS transmitters are hefty – even just the battery that powers them is too heavy to be carried by the majority of small migratory songbirds, which often weigh less than a spoonful of sugar.

To address this problem, researchers developed ingenious little light-level geolocators. These miniature tags minimize weight by containing only a tiny battery, clock, computer chip and light sensor. They store data internally rather than transmitting it – hence my need to recapture tagged birds a year later. Researchers infer a bird’s locations from the timing of sunrise and sunset, which vary predictably across the globe and throughout the year.

Light-level geolocators have opened new windows into the migrations of small birds, but they also have limitations: Their estimated locations can err by hundreds of miles, and this uncertainty becomes impractically high around the equinoxes, when day length is the same worldwide.

More recently, researchers developed a newer method of geolocation that uses atmospheric pressure to circumvent these limitations. When a bird ascends during a migratory flight, a barometric geolocator records a steep drop in air pressure, capturing the timing of departure and arrival for every stop along a bird’s migration route. In between flights, the pressure the tag records reflects the elevation at the bird’s position.

Knowing the bird’s elevation helps to narrow down possible locations, which researchers can then refine further by comparing the change in pressure over time recorded by the tag to global weather data using the computer program GeoPressureR. The unique pattern of rises and falls in pressure acts as a kind of pressure fingerprint for a specific location. Including light and wind data in the model of the bird’s movements can increase precision even more.

New tech answers an old question

We used these new multisensor backpacks to study the migration patterns of myrtle warblers, the northern subspecies of yellow-rumped warbler, which breed across North America’s boreal forest. Myrtle warblers in the northeast are known to winter along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts, but where northwestern populations migrate has been more of a mystery. In 1899, ornithologist Richard McGregor observed myrtle warblers wintering in coastal California, and hypothesized that these birds might breed in Alaska and British Columbia.

Using these new tags allowed us to test whether warblers breeding in Anchorage, Alaska, actually followed the shortest migration route to winter in California. To our surprise – and probably to McGregor’s as well, if he were still alive – we found that all the birds we tracked traveled east across the boreal forest of Canada before shifting south to the Gulf Coast – certainly not the Pacific Coast route we expected.

All told, this 6,800-mile (10,900-kilometer) round-trip journey was much longer than we anticipated for a species commonly considered a short- or medium-distance migrant.

Why take such a circuitous route?

The long, seemingly suboptimal route taken by our Alaskan myrtle warblers is actually mirrored by some other songbird species tracked from northwestern North America, including blackpoll warblers and Swainson’s thrushes.

Part of this pattern may relate back to the glaciations that isolated ancient populations of birds millions of years ago. The thinking goes that as these glaciers spread, they squashed the ranges of formerly northern species into the south. Then, as the glaciers slowly receded, the forests gradually reexpanded.

As more land opened up, birds moved farther north and west into that habitat. Each season some birds went a little farther as the forest available in their northern breeding grounds expanded. For migratory species such as myrtle warblers, the farther north and west their breeding range expanded, the longer the migration to their southern wintering ground became.

Scientists think migration routes are genetically encoded. The birds’ genes may have traced this expansion front, like Hansel and Gretel putting down breadcrumbs as they journeyed deeper and deeper into the forest. Today’s migration routes still trace that incrementally expanded path, even though the glaciers that shaped the original boundaries are long gone.

We’re still not sure exactly where the California-wintering myrtle warblers spotted in the 1800s are breeding. We suspect that a small proportion of the Anchorage-breeding birds may migrate to California, but that most of them travel from more distant, unstudied regions of Alaska or Yukon. Future research, potentially tagging myrtle warblers directly on the California wintering grounds, will shed more light on this population and why certain individuals follow a different migration route.

Barometric geolocation provides new data

Today, this new geolocation approach improves scientists’ ability to study the migrations of small birds and supports more effective conservation actions across the course of the entire year. More precise location estimates help researchers identify key stopover and wintering sites in need of protection and better understand the threats birds face throughout their journeys. These geolocators also reveal the altitude of migratory flights, which is important for understanding the risk of birds colliding with buildings or wind turbines.

Because these new tags capture pressure data for every migratory flight, they’re especially valuable for studying migration timing. Researchers have combined data from over 50 bird species to understand at what time of day or night different birds migrate. Now, as a postdoctoral researcher at the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center, I am integrating multisensor geolocator data with satellite imagery to investigate how arrival and departure decisions throughout a bird’s migratory journey relate to seasonal changes in plant growth.

Scientists have now tracked dozens of bird species with multisensor geolocators, and that number increases every year. Each mapped migratory journey improves our understanding of how small birds migrate, what factors shape their movements and how best to protect them.

Stephanie Szarmach works for the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center. She is currently funded by a Smithsonian Institution James Smithson Fellowship. The Myrtle Warbler tracking study discussed in this article was funded by the Pennsylvania State University, American Ornithological Society, Animal Behavior Society, and Wilson Ornithological Society.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/09/08/tiny-backpacks-reveal-the-secret-sometimes-circuitous-migrations-of-small-songbirds/

“Star Trek” began as a television series but grew into a cultural phenomenon.

When it premiered in 1966, no one could have predicted that it would lead to more than a dozen spinoff shows, more than a dozen movies and one of the most enduring fandoms in popular culture.

“Star Trek” is also unusual for its close connections to NASA, both in its storylines and in the real world. Decades of “Star Trek” adventures have ignited a love of spaceflight across generations, inspiring many who now work as space professionals.

I’m a cultural anthropologist who studies why people work in space exploration. I’ve interviewed astronomers, engineers, flight surgeons and astronauts. Although I focus more on science fact than science fiction, I’ve noticed in my interviews how much the two threads intertwine.

Because of this, I found myself at a “Star Trek” convention in early August 2026, just ahead of the show’s 60th anniversary on Sept. 8. The convention participants included people of widely different ages, appearances and identities. I was struck by just how much those gathered reflected the series’ values.

When NASA met Star Trek

In the original series, the show’s creator, Gene Roddenberry, came up with a philosophy held by the Vulcan people. He called it IDIC: infinite diversity in infinite combinations. It suggests that an ideal society is made up of many different types, all working together.

It represented Roddenberry’s rejection of conformity. It also explained why the Enterprise crew included a Russian alongside Americans, and Black, Japanese and female characters all in positions of responsibility and authority. While many ordinary viewers absorbed “Star Trek’s” lessons of camaraderie and acceptance, those involved in real space exploration also took notice.

Roddenberry established relationships with NASA personnel in the early days of his series. NASA provided photographs of planetary bodies and advice about the realities of spaceflight, as well as stock footage and access to certain NASA facilities.

Leonard Nimoy, who played the popular character Mr. Spock, was even brought to the National Space Club’s Goddard Memorial Dinner in 1967 as a special guest. Then-Vice President Hubert Humphrey gave the keynote speech. Afterward, though, it was Nimoy, not Humphrey, who found himself surrounded by the club’s members, including NASA employees, aerospace engineers, members of the military and government officials, all eager to meet the actor portraying the starship Enterprise’s first officer.

The relationship between NASA and “Star Trek” benefited the show by legitimizing the series. It also helped NASA by publicizing its work and depicting a positive future where its efforts to land on the Moon would eventually lead to visits to distant worlds – and amazing scientific advances like the show’s transporter and warp drive.

The connection between the space show and space agency was reflected in NASA’s decision to name its first space shuttle Enterprise, after some encouragement from the “Star Trek” fan community.

Inspiring astronauts

In 1977, actress Nichelle Nichols, who portrayed communications officer Uhura, was hired to recruit for NASA. The space agency had expanded its pool of astronauts to include scientists and other “mission specialists.” For the first time, an astronaut no longer needed to be a pilot to participate in a space mission.

NASA selected its first Black astronaut candidates and its first female astronaut candidates in 1978. While this move toward inclusivity may not have been directly influenced by infinite diversity in infinite combinations, it was compatible with it. “Star Trek” inspired many of NASA’s future employees. In interviews for my book “The Ultraview Effect,” a quarter of the space professionals I spoke with mentioned “Star Trek” as an influence.

An Apollo astronaut I interviewed, for instance, said he believed humans would eventually “be able to go anywhere in the universe, just like ‘Star Trek.’”

A young engineer who had grown up in the 1990s told me his motivation came from the “opening line of ‘Star Trek’… to explore strange new worlds.”

A space shuttle mission specialist emphasized Roddenberry’s decision to make the starship crew multicultural, explaining: “Today I look at the diversity of it … he was setting the stage back when it wasn’t acceptable [in order] to be acceptable!”

A changing future

That influence has accompanied a changing astronaut corps.

Both the 2025 astronaut class, which for the first time included more women than men, and the crew of Artemis II, which sent the first woman, first Black astronaut and first Canadian on a lunar mission, resemble the future that “Star Trek” imagined.

The “Star Trek” fans at the convention I attended were even more diverse. It was clear to me that Roddenberry’s “infinite diversity in infinite combinations” isn’t just a concept from the series, but something that has become a defining value of contemporary Trek fandom.

One such fan, Bjo Trimble, holds special status. She is credited with “saving ‘Star Trek’” when the series was almost canceled in 1968 after two seasons. Wearing a rainbow “IDIC” pin, she signed autographs at the SyFy Sistas booth, where T-shirts featuring Black “Star Trek” icons such as Uhura and Benjamin Sisko were on display.

However, with the Trump administration’s recent orders to dismantle all of NASA’s diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility programs and policies, institutional support for “Star Trek’s” vision of acceptance and inclusivity, which flourishes in its fan base, is being undone. This rollback occurred just as NASA’s crews were reaching new milestones in representing the diverse future that “Star Trek” has encouraged for decades.

Sixty years later, some of the diverse future that “Star Trek” imagined has become part of everyday spaceflight. Other parts of that ideal remain unfinished.

The author’s husband, Glen E. Swanson, is the author of Inspired Enterprise: How NASA, the Smithsonian, and the Aerospace Community Helped Launch Star Trek, which was used as a source for this article.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/09/08/star-trek-and-nasa-have-intertwined-legacies-the-show-championed-diversity-and-inspired-generations-of-real-space-scientists/

Every time you make a phone call, stream a video or connect to Wi-Fi, your device is sending and receiving invisible signals through the air. So are your baby monitor, garage door opener, your GPS, the weather-monitoring satellites and the radars keeping planes safely apart. All of these rely on the same invisible resource: the radio spectrum.

The demand for wireless data – driven by smartphones, video streaming and billions of connected devices – keeps growing, making available spectrum scarce. But it doesn’t have to remain that way. As an electrical engineer who studies wireless communications, I’m part of a field of research working to address the radio spectrum supply crunch.

The solution engineers and regulators have been developing is dynamic spectrum sharing. The core idea is straightforward: Instead of reserving a portion of spectrum exclusively for one user forever, allow multiple users to share the same frequencies – intelligently, and with clear rules to keep them from stepping on each other’s signals.

Radio spectrum is at the low end of the electromagnetic spectrum, with frequencies below microwaves, light and X-rays. You can think of it as a vast collection of invisible highways, running at different frequencies, carrying signals through the air. Television, air traffic control, cellphones, remote sensing of distant stars – they all travel on different parts of this same invisible road network.

These communication highways span an enormous range, from very low frequencies used for submarine communication all the way up beyond radio waves to the frequencies of visible light. Higher frequencies carry signals over shorter distances but can move more data with wider highways. Because there is only so much spectrum to go around as a matter of fundamental physics, governments have historically managed it by issuing exclusive licenses – dedicating certain highways to specific users and telling everyone else to stay off.

This system worked well enough for decades, especially because the highway network was sufficient for the demand. Studies measuring actual spectrum use over many years have found something surprising: Large stretches of licensed spectrum sit idle much of the time. For example, a military radar system may only operate in certain locations on certain days.

Burgeoning demand for radio spectrum has left some of these roads clogged with traffic jams, while others nearby sit almost completely empty.

Traffic control for radio

Making dynamic spectrum sharing work requires radios that are more flexible than the fixed-frequency devices of the past.

Today’s smartphones and wireless devices are increasingly built on software-defined radio technology, meaning the frequencies they operate on can be adjusted by software rather than being locked into hardware. Think of it like a car that can switch lanes automatically rather than being stuck in one lane forever. Early researchers called the vision behind this “cognitive radio” – the idea of a radio that could sense its environment and adapt accordingly.

This flexibility opens the door to a layered approach to spectrum sharing. At the top of the hierarchy sit incumbent primary users – those who hold existing rights to a frequency, such as the military or licensed broadcasters. Below them, other secondary users can access the same spectrum when and where the incumbents aren’t using it, stepping aside automatically the moment an incumbent returns.

A more everyday version of this kind of sharing already exists in the Wi-Fi frequencies you use at home. Multiple devices – your laptop, your phone, your smart TV – share the same spectrum without a central authority assigning each one a dedicated slot. They do this by briefly sensing whether the channel is busy before transmitting, and by automatically adjusting their speed based on how crowded things get. The protocol resembles drivers at a four-way stop – informal rules that mostly work without anyone directing traffic.

A significant recent example of dynamic spectrum sharing in the United States is the Citizens Broadband Radio Service, or CBRS, operating in the 3.5 GHz frequency band. The Federal Communications Commission created a three-tier system. Incumbent users – primarily U.S. Navy radar systems – sit at the top. Businesses and organizations that pay for priority access sit in the middle. And the general public can use whatever is left over.

A central computer system – the Spectrum Access System – acts as a real-time traffic controller, constantly tracking where Navy radar is active and automatically coordinating access for everyone else. When a Navy ship is not using the spectrum in your area, hospitals, factories, warehouses and campuses can use it for their own private wireless networks. When the Navy needs it back, everyone else steps aside within seconds.

Getting around interference

The biggest technical hurdle in spectrum sharing is interference – what happens when two signals overlap and scramble each other, like two people shouting different things in your ear at the same time. As more devices crowd the airwaves, each with different power levels and different bandwidth needs, keeping signals from colliding becomes increasingly complex.

My lab and other researchers are now turning to artificial intelligence for help. AI can learn from experience and adapt in real time to changing conditions – deciding who transmits when, and at what power level, in ways that older rule-based systems could not. At the same time, new challenges are emerging, such as satellites and ground-based networks increasingly needing to share the same frequencies.

The way radio spectrum is managed may not seem like a kitchen table issue, but it shapes everything from how fast your phone loads a video to whether a factory can automate its floor, to the reliability of a rural school’s internet access. Future wireless technologies, including those that connect self-driving cars and enable remote surgery, will depend on having access to enough spectrum. Dynamic spectrum sharing is how to make room for all of it without dismantling the systems already in place.

The airwaves are finite. But with smarter management, they can do far more than once thought possible.

Aylin Yener has received funding from The National Science Foundation, Department of Transportation, Army Research Laboratory/Office, National Security Agency, DARPA, US Marine Corps, Ben Franklin Technology Partners, Pennsylvania Infrastructure Technology Alliance, Pittsburgh Digital Greenhouse, AT&T Foundation, Cisco Research, Honda R&D Americas, Raytheon, Telcordia.

She is a fellow and a volunteer of The Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). She is a fellow of the American Association for Advancement of Science. She is an elected member of the Science Academy of Turkey.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/09/08/ai-is-helping-ease-competition-for-scarce-space-on-the-airwaves/

Treasurer Jim Chalmers on Wednesday will release projections from the government’s Intergenerational Report to bolster Labor’s argument against One Nation’s proposal to allow homebuyers and renters access to some of their superannuation.

Chalmers casts the next federal election as an “existential moment” for Australia’s compulsory superannuation scheme, which was a major Labor reform.

In the IGR, to be released on September 21, Treasury projects the number of Australians over age pension age will almost double to about nine million by 2066. But the share of this cohort receiving a pension or income support payment is projected to fall, from 66% last year to 52% by 2066.

Spending on age and service pensions is projected to decline from 2.3% of GDP last year to 1.8% in 2066.

The IGR, prepared by Treasury, maps out how economic and social changes are likely to unfold over the next four decades. There have been five previous reports, with the first in 2002.

In a speech to the Super Members Council, released ahead of delivery, Chalmers says superannuation “will be front and centre” of the report.

That’s because super is absolutely crucial to making the future work for us not against us.

It is one of the most important ways we will outperform the world in the decades to come.

There is no better or broader antidote to the serious intergenerational pressures we face together.

Chalmers says our superannuation scheme means “no other developed country will do a better job than Australia at taking pressure off the pension system, while boosting retirement incomes at the same time”

Spending on age and service pensions is projected to be nearly 10% of GDP by 2060 in the United Kingdom, 8% in Canada, 7% in New Zealand, and 6% in the United States.

“Total pension spending is expected to go up in most OECD countries, in Australia spending as a percentage of GDP will go down.”

“Pension spending as a share of the economy will be the lowest in the OECD but even as those costs moderate, retirees will have more economic security not less.”

Chalmers says superannuation makes the budget more sustainable in an ageing society.

The median retirement age balance will near $450,000 over the next decade. “That’s a big leap from a bit over $200,000 in the latest data – another considerable improvement on the $115,000 a decade earlier,” Chalmets says.

“And drawdowns from superannuation are projected to double to around 6% by 2066.”

The $4 trillion super pool is “a key driver of the growth in foreign income inflows, supporting our gross national income,” Chalmers says.

“So while it’s boosting retirement incomes it’s helping to unlock investment here and abroad, reduce reliance on the pension, strengthen international relationships and deepen our capital markets.”

Chalmers says compulsory super, “with preservation at its core”, is facing its biggest threat since it began, intrduced by the Hawke-Keating governments.

The crazy announcement by One Nation and the supportive comments from parts of the Coalition have made this very clear.

They will end super as we know it and millions of workers will be poorer as a consequence.

The next election will be super’s existential moment.

It will help determine whether we make the most of our intergenerational advantages or trash them.

Whether workers are more secure in retirement or poorer.

Chalmers says the Council’s modelling showed a median full-time worker would see their retirement income cut by $25,000. A couple would be more than $50,000 worse off.

“Every dollar a twenty five year old withdraws now would mean they lose around $3 by the time they retire.”

He says One Nation and the Liberal and National parties “would put at risk the fiscal sustainability, higher living standards and stronger economy that the IGR shows will be supported by a strong and maturing super system”.

Michelle Grattan 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/2026/09/08/chalmers-says-intergenerational-report-shows-super-puts-australia-head-of-the-pack-in-containing-pension-spending/

If you grew up in the United States in the 1980s or ’90s, chances are you remember The Oregon Trail. For many like me, it was our first computer game and our first introduction to wilderness survival. We hunted buffalo, forded rivers, broke wagon wheels and, of course, learned about dysentery years before Google even existed, all while hoping our group would make it to Oregon City alive.

Lately, the game has found a second life. Nostalgic social media posts, memes and updated versions of the game have introduced The Oregon Trail to a new generation while reminding millennials just how unforgiving that grainy computer screen journey could be.

As a physician who specializes in emergency and wilderness medicine, I started thinking about how much of what the game taught me about surviving in the wilderness still applies today. After all, modern hikers and campers have access to tools the pioneers could never have imagined.

Surprisingly, I’d argue that more lessons from The Oregon Trail hold up than you might think.

Clean water is crucial

The Oregon Trail game made dysentery famous for an entire generation. Fortunately, advances in sanitation, hand hygiene and antibiotics have made large outbreaks like those that wagon trains and military camps experienced much less common, at least in the United States.

That doesn’t mean gastrointestinal illnesses have disappeared. Traveler’s diarrhea and cholera are still an important cause of illness around the world. Untreated water, poor hand hygiene and contaminated food can still derail any trip.

Simple habits such as purifying drinking water, washing hands before meals and after using the bathroom, and practicing good camp hygiene remain some of the easiest ways to stay healthy outdoors.

Water purification is important with wilderness travel in the United States and in many areas of the world. There are many easy and cost-effective ways to purify water, such as boiling, filtration and treating with chemical disinfectants. Each method has its benefits and downsides.

Boiling is often the most accessible method. While it can kill bacteria, viruses and parasites, it will not remove water contaminants such as heavy metals, including lead and arsenic, or industrial contamination such as pesticides. Consider boiling your water for at least one to three minutes, depending on your altitude, to purify it. Water filtration is an easy option for backpackers but is less effective at removing viruses.

If you’re unable to boil your water, another way to ensure water safety is to filter it, then use another method to disinfect it.

Respect all waterways

You may no longer have to ford the river with oxen, but rivers, lakes and other bodies of water present unique hazards that outdoor adventure enthusiasts can overlook.

Moving water can be more dangerous than people realize. Even the best swimmers can drown in rip currents.

Cross bodies of water only when absolutely necessary. Avoid any water crossings after recent rainfall, as the water level often rises and the current can be faster and stronger. Submerged objects – rocks, fallen trees and other debris – as well as changing weather, flash flooding and strong currents can make crossing more dangerous.

If possible, use a Coast Guard-approved life jacket when you’re crossing water or on a boat.

Be ready to go the distance

It’s not just a broken wagon axle that can send a trip sideways. One thing The Oregon Trail captured well is how distance changes everything. A sprained ankle in a city usually means an inconvenient trip home or to the doctor, but a sprained ankle 5 miles from the trailhead may mean that someone will need to carry you. The same is true for other common wilderness concerns, such as dehydration, heat illness, infections or even blisters.

Preparation is about packing a first aid kit and thinking ahead. Ask yourself what you would do if your hike took twice as long as expected or if you unexpectedly had to spend the night outside. Research your route and carry more food and water than you think you’ll need. Check the weather and be prepared for it to change, with extra clothing and options for rain.

No one tackled the Oregon Trail alone because it meant you would not survive. There is a lesson here in solo travel and solo mountaineering.

Traveling alone means that a minor injury such as a sprained ankle could mean crawling to the trailhead to call for help or waiting until you are identified as missing. If you cannot find someone to travel with you, provide an itinerary and travel location to a trusted person. Make sure they know when you should be returning and plan to check in. If you do not return as expected, they can call for help.

Respect the wildlife

Large animals still pose a threat across the country. While there may be fewer bison than previously seen on the Oregon Trail, animals in nature deserve respect.

No selfie is worth being attacked by a brown bear. If you see a dangerous wild animal, avoid approaching and immediately leave the area.

Venomous snakes are present throughout much of the United States and continue to cause significant injury and death around the world. If someone is bitten, please don’t try to cut the wound or suck out the venom. Instead, keep the person calm, minimize unnecessary movement, and focus on getting them to professional medical care. Antivenom is available in many major hospitals in the United States.

Even smaller and more docile animals such as deer and squirrels should not be fed. It is dangerous for an animal to get used to receiving food from humans. Additionally, animals carry diseases, such as rabies and leptospirosis, that can be fatal to people.

Don’t attempt to get close to any animals, no matter how calm or asleep the animal appears to be.

Technology is a backup, not a plan

One of the biggest differences between today’s outdoor adventures and those of the Oregon Trail is the ability to communicate.

Cellphones, GPS apps and emergency beacons have made it possible to call for help from places that were once completely isolated. However, while those devices are incredibly valuable, they shouldn’t encourage you to take bigger risks, as help may be far away, slow to arrive, and injuries in the wilderness can be fatal.

Travelers can use a smartphone with GPS capacity to avoid getting lost, but downloading any needed maps for offline use can help prevent lack of service from derailing your trip.

Additionally, an unlocked smartphone that isn’t restricted to one carrier is a great way to store and communicate critical data, such as travel plans and copies of your medical history.

Every environment has its own hazards

The Oregon Trail travelers worried about river crossings, disease and harsh weather. Today’s hikers face different challenges depending on where they are.

Desert hikers may struggle with extreme heat and dehydration. Mountain travelers face rapidly changing weather, lightning and high altitude. And coastal explorers can face problems such as riptides, waves, cliffs and unexpected rocky surfaces.

Altitude illness is often unpredictable and can sneak up on you. Most people experience acute mountain sickness within 24 hours of ascent, developing symptoms such as headache, fatigue, nausea or problems with sleep. Any confusion, difficulty walking, shortness of breath or coughing up significant phlegm should prompt an immediate descent.

There are commonly used prescription medications to help prevent and treat altitude illness. The mountain will always be waiting for your next attempt.

Some lessons survive every software update

Part of what made The Oregon Trail game memorable is that every decision mattered. Success often depended less on luck than on planning ahead, and that lesson still applies.

When people ask me what one emergency medicine skill everyone should know before heading outdoors, my answer is usually preparation. Thoughtful planning prevents far more emergencies than any single piece of equipment.

For people who spend a lot of time outdoors, I also recommend taking a wilderness first aid course. These courses teach practical skills to provide medical care in a wilderness environment.

Nature is no less powerful or unforgiving than it was on the Oregon Trail, and treating it with respect is essential. Combining advances in modern medicine with thoughtful preparation helps stack the odds in your favor so that, just as every Oregon Trail player hoped, everyone in the party makes it to the end.

Elaine Reno receives funding from the National Science Foundation through Battelle for consultant work. She provides medical oversight for a remote research outpost in the Arctic circle called Summit Station.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/09/08/could-you-survive-the-oregon-trail-an-emergency-medicine-doctor-offers-tips-on-how-to-not-die-in-the-great-outdoors/

At the recent World Humanoid Robot Games 2026 in Beijing, robots sprinted, boxed, played football and tackled tasks inspired by factories, restaurants and emergency situations. The robot Tiangong Ultra even completed the 100 metres in 8.64 seconds, quicker than Usain Bolt’s 9.58-second world record.

But if we really want to know whether humanoid robots are ready for everyday life, a far less glamorous challenge may tell us more: doing the laundry. Can a robot take a crumpled T-shirt from a laundry basket, work out which way round it is, fold it neatly and recover when the sleeve slips from its hand?

No robot system can yet reliably handle the whole laundry process, from carrying a basket to the washing machine and sorting clothes for different programmes to taking them out, hanging them to dry, folding and ironing them. Even folding remains a challenge: robots need to cope with clothes of different shapes, sizes, materials and levels of creasing.

Running fast is difficult, of course. A humanoid has to coordinate many joints, keep its balance and generate powerful movements without falling over. The task itself, however, is fairly clear. The robot knows where to go, the track is predictable and the finish line does not suddenly change shape.

Laundry is a very different problem. A shirt may be inside out. One sleeve may be hidden underneath another garment. A pair of trousers may be twisted around a towel. Fabric is also soft and constantly changing shape. Pick up one corner of a T-shirt and the rest of it moves.

Humans deal with this without giving it much thought. We shake a shirt out, notice where the sleeves are, feel when the fabric slips and adjust our grip almost automatically. For a robot, every one of those little actions is a problem to solve. This is why an everyday chore can reveal more about robot intelligence than a spectacular athletic feat.

A useful household robot cannot simply replay the same movement again and again. It has to notice when reality is different from what it expected and adapt. That’s important to consider because humanoid robots are increasingly discussed as future helpers in homes and care settings, as well as factories and warehouses.

A factory production line can often be arranged so that parts arrive in predictable positions. A family home is not like that: clothes, toys and furniture move around constantly, while people, children and pets make the environment even less predictable.

Why one robot cannot simply copy another

There is another difficulty. Once one robot learns how to fold a shirt, it might seem obvious that we should simply transfer that skill to every other robot. Unfortunately, physical skills do not work like an app that can be installed on any machine.

Imagine a specialist laundry robot with rigid arms, overhead cameras and grippers designed specifically for fabric. A humanoid may have cameras in its head, five-fingered hands and different joints and balance constraints. The same movement could therefore produce a very different result.

A fixed robot arm can reach forward without worrying about falling over. A humanoid may have to move its hips, legs and feet just to keep itself stable while reaching across a table.

Sensors are important too. One robot may have sensitive touch sensors in its fingers. Another may rely mainly on cameras.

Some knowledge can still transfer. One robot can teach another something about what a shirt looks like, where its shoulders are likely to be, what a good fold looks like or how to recognise when a sleeve is trapped underneath. The receiving robot still has to work out how to carry out those ideas with its own hands, joints, cameras and body.

Research projects such as Open X-Embodiment are exploring exactly this problem by pooling experience from many different robots. The project has brought together more than one million real robot trajectories from 22 different robot types. The hope is that robots can learn useful patterns from one another rather than starting from zero every time.

What should count as progress?

The Humanoid Robot Games are valuable because they make robotics visible and show how quickly the technology is moving.

We should simply be careful about what those demonstrations prove. For robots intended to live and work alongside us, better questions might be: can the robot deal with an unfamiliar object? Can it notice that it has made a mistake and recover without human intervention? How long can it keep working before someone has to step in?

Read more:
Could robots help tackle loneliness? BBC’s Ann Droid raises questions about the future of care

These measures are unlikely to produce viral videos. They are, however, much closer to the abilities that will determine whether humanoid robots become genuinely useful.

A robot that can run 100 metres faster than the human world record time is impressive. A robot that can take a messy basket of laundry, sort it, fold it and recognise when things have gone wrong may tell us far more about whether general purpose robot intelligence has really arrived.

The most important race for humanoid robots may not be against the clock. It may be against the laundry pile.

Wai-keung Fung 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/2026/09/08/humanoid-robots-can-sprint-and-box-but-the-real-test-is-doing-the-laundry/

I’ll admit it, I’m a Trekkie. I blame my mother.

It was on her insistence that my brother and I watched endless re-runs of the original Star Trek series, which is now celebrating its 60th anniversary. She took us further into the unknown with The Next Generation – and I’ve stayed loyal to the franchise ever since.

I’m also a chemist. Was my career choice inspired by Star Trek? Indubitably. What other television series has put the “central science” at the heart of so many episodes? These are four of my favourite storylines.

1. Crude chemistry

Arena (first screened in January 1967) was a formative episode from the original series, based on a 1944 short story by US science fiction writer Fredric Brown.

When Captain James T. Kirk is forced to battle the captain of a Gorn spacecraft on a rocky asteroid, he mixes up a crude form of gunpowder – having remembered a rough recipe and conveniently found piles of sulfur, potassium nitrate and coal to hand.

Despite the flaws in Kirk’s manufacturing process (and my disappointment as a child when I looked in vain for similar mineral deposits in the local park), this episode gave me my first taste of the possibilities offered by chemistry. Kirk uses the gunpowder to shoot tennis-ball sized diamonds at his reptilian-humanoid opponent, severely wounding it.

With the chemistry knowledge I have now, I’d warn the captain that his approach will most likely result in him losing a limb or two. But in the episode, Kirk prevails – and his subsequent decision to show mercy to his defeated opponent is rewarded by god-like Metron observers telling him: “You are still half-savage, but there is hope.”

2. Polywater puzzle

A curious substance known as “polywater” has featured in three different series of Star Trek. It is based on a compound proposed by Soviet scientists Nikolai Fedyakin and Boris Deryagin in the 1960s, with water molecules linked together to form repeating six-sided rings and a higher boiling point than regular water.

Any chemists reading this will hear alarm bells ringing. These properties would imply that polywater is more stable than the regular water in our rivers, oceans and blood, contradicting the laws of thermodynamics.

Even Richard Feynman, who won the 1965 Nobel prize in physics, waded into the theoretical polywaters to discredit its possible existence. Thankfully, the research was eventually debunked: polywater was shown to be nothing more than contaminated regular water.

Nevertheless, it remains immortalised on the small screen, having first appeared in episode four of the original Star Trek series, entitled The Naked Time (September 1966). Polywater causes both hilarity and more than a whiff of danger when the Enterprise crew are accidentally exposed to it during a mission.

The reason is its propensity to remove someone’s inhibitions after reaching their central nervous system. Its most significant achievement? Making the legendarily unemotional Mr Spock cry (after which, actor Leonard Nimoy’s fan mail is reported to have increased dramatically).

3. Heartfelt hydrocarbons

Season four of the franchise’s most recent incarnation, Star Trek: Discovery (2017-24), featured a new alien species, 10-C, with a novel method of communication: a combination of light patterns for context, and a puff of complex hydrocarbons to convey detailed information about their emotional state.

While wincing at the risk that Starfleet captain Michael Burnham took in plunging her hand into an unknown bowl of dust (no chemist would, hopefully, ever do this), I even was more surprised by the premise that the crew of Discovery all share the same receptors as 10-C, and experience the same emotions.

To throw more petrol on this storyline, the fact that the hydrocarbons are depicted as a dust rather than a gas brings into question how easy it would be for the giant jellyfish-esque 10-C (who float amid the dense layers of their gas-giant homeworld) to actually communicate before these hydrocarbons simply drifted away or sank.

There again, chemical communication does exist in a simple form on Earth. The humble fruit fly, for example, is coated in a complex hydrocarbon wax which acts either as an aphrodisiac or deterrent to other fruit flies that come into contact with it.

4. Hellfire and hatred

The chemistry lesson flame test is a right of passage for many schoolchildren – and also, it seems, students at Star Trek: Starfleet Academy taking the “exochemistry” class (which focuses on chemical compounds and properties beyond Earth).

The principle of the flame test is the same as that of modern fireworks. A metal salt is heated, generating an unstable gas radical that may then adopt an excited state due to the heat, before dropping back down to its ground state and releasing energy in the form of light.

The colour of this light depends on the difference in energy between the two states. For strontium salts, this is relatively small, resulting in a red colour. Sadly for the first season’s recurring villain, space pirate Nus Braka, this piece of chemical trivia has passed him by.

If he had known the “red hellfire” that destroyed his mining colony when he was a child was actually caused by strontium burning, rather than Federation weaponry, then a lifetime of hatred of Starfleet and eventual humiliation by Starfleet cadet Caleb Mir in the episode Rubincon (March 2026) might never have happened.

Over the 60 years this groundbreaking franchise has been on our screens, Star Trek has helped to inspire chemistry-related breakthroughs with technology such as handheld tricorder scanners, metamaterials that mimic cloaking devices, and the needle-free hypospray medical device. Writing as both a committed Trekkie and chemist, long may Star Trek fiction continue to become fact.

Gemma Shearman 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/2026/09/08/how-the-chemistry-of-star-trek-changed-my-life-from-a-gunpowder-plot-to-red-hellfire/

This summer you may have wondered why you are seeing so few insects squished on your car’s windscreen, compared to a road trip several years ago.

This is because insects are declining globally at an alarming rate.

One extensive citizen science survey looked at insects numbers over several years by looking at insect deaths on car number plates. They asked people to clean their number plates before a journey and then photograph it afterwards, and count the number of bugs killed.

The survey was conducted from 2021 to 2025. It found the number of flying insects sampled on vehicle number plates across the UK had fallen by 60% in five years. Analysis of records from more than 25,000 journeys showed an annual average decline in bug splats of 19% since the survey began in 2021.

Some people may look at these statistics and wonder why they should care. But the decline of insect life is a significant cause for concern. It’s also not just in the UK where we are seeing declines, but also across Europe and in our tropical rainforests, including some of the most biodiverse spots on the planet. Agricultural land is seeing some of the worst effects.

There’s an estimated 10 quintillion (10,000,000,000,000,000,000) insects alive on this planet, over a million described species, and estimates of millions more yet to be discovered. But we are losing insects far faster than other animals, and at an unprecedented rate.

A review in 2019 suggested 40% of insect species are thought to be threatened with extinction. Ants, bees and wasps (Hymenoptera) the butterflies and moths (Lepidoptera) and dung beetles are thought to be the most affected. More recent reviews show similar declining trends on a global scale.

Why are insects disappearing?

The reasons for losing our insects range from habitat loss, disease pollution and pesticides. Agriculture is a major concern as land is turned over to farming as it may remove existing habitats – essentially removing some insects homes – but agrichemicals such as pesticides, designed to kill agricultural pest outbreaks, are also negatively affecting those non target insects that we want.

Climate change is as a major concern, and one that potentially exacerbates other factors. When it’s hotter water availability becomes harder, plants become more stressed and food availability becomes tricky for insects. In the same way that humans struggle in the heat, this is the same case for other animals. Insects can try to cope with extremes in temperature by using water to cool, fanning their wings or simply going somewhere where it is less warm.

The summer of 2026 saw record temperatures and is expected to be the hottest year on record for the UK. Coupled with intense droughts, wildfires and a changing landscape, this is a tricky world for insects to navigate.

This changing climate is affecting whole communities of insects, where they live and what they do.

With places like the UK seeing a shift from its typical cooler climate to a more Mediterranean one, we are seeing species move from southern Europe to northern Europe. We also see insects changing their seasonal life-cycles, with effects on other species that are dependent upon them. They are even carrying diseases to new populations of humans or animals as climates become more amenable to certain species that may carry diseases or other pathogens .

This loss of biodiversity is often referred to as the sixth mass extinction, or the sixth time in history that we know of that we have lost such a vast number of species in rapid succession.

Why should we care?

Insects have evolved in large numbers because of the extent of what they do in the natural world.

They keep pests under control, they pollinate our plants by transporting pollen from one flower to another, recycle our waste by feeding on and shredding material and generally keep our planet in a good state.

American naturalist E.O Wilson said: “If insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos.”

However, insect populations can recover. Appreciating how fundamental they are is the first step in conserving and restoring what we are losing.

Alex Dittrich 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/2026/09/08/why-should-we-care-if-there-arent-any-squished-insects-on-our-windscreens/

Astronauts who undergo long-duration spaceflight aboard the International Space Station often return with health problems that resemble some age-related conditions in people on Earth.

Remarkably, some of this decline reverses within months of their return but others persist. This raises an intriguing question: what can be learned from these rapid changes and could they help prevent or reverse aspects of age-related decline on Earth?

That question has turned space into a laboratory for ageing research. Spaceflight reproduces many features of ageing. Astronauts also experience unusual conditions, including very low gravity, increased radiation and disrupted sleep. Even so, changes that usually develop over decades on Earth can appear within weeks or months in space, giving scientists an opportunity to observe some ageing-related processes in fast-forward.

A 2026 study, which tracked four astronauts during the nine-day Axiom-2 mission, examined chemical markers attached to DNA that can be used to estimate biological age. This is an estimate of how old the body appears to be based on molecular changes, rather than the number of years a person has lived.

The astronauts’ estimated biological age increased during the mission and began to fall after they returned to Earth. This does not mean that they physically aged by years in a matter of days. With only four participants, the study cannot provide firm conclusions, but it shows how rapidly the body can respond to the conditions of spaceflight.

Why would leaving gravity behind affect the body in ways that resemble ageing? On Earth, muscles, bones, and the cardiovascular system and other organs are adapted to function under the constant pull of gravity. That continual mechanical load helps keep these systems healthy, although their function often declines later in life. In space, many of those demands disappear.

When muscles age in fast-forward

Skeletal muscle provides one of the clearest examples. Astronauts lose muscle mass and strength at a startling rate in very low gravity, even while exercising for around two hours a day to attempt to limit the effects.

Some of the biological processes involved may overlap with those associated with sarcopenia, the age-related loss of muscle strength and mass that increases the risk of frailty, falls and loss of independence.

Scientists are still working out how closely muscle loss in space resembles sarcopenia, because similar effects can arise through different biological processes. The crucial difference is timescale. That compression is exactly what drew our team to space.

Through our UK Space Agency-funded MicroAge mission, we sent lab-grown human muscle constructs to the International Space Station.

These miniature muscles, roughly the size of a grain of rice, were engineered from human muscle stem cells. Using lab-grown tissue, rather than relying solely on the limited number of astronauts available for study, allowed us to compare muscle adaptations in very low gravity with those seen during ageing on Earth. It also allowed us to carry out early tests of possible ways to protect muscle. If some of the same mechanisms are involved in both settings, space could provide a useful opportunity to study years of biological change over the course of months for a single mission.

Our follow-up mission, MicroAge II, will explore the biology of this decline in greater detail. It focuses on mitochondria, the structures inside cells that produce most of the energy those cells need. Problems with mitochondria are recognised as one process involved in muscle ageing on Earth.

MicroAge II will investigate whether similar changes to their structure and function also contribute to rapid muscle loss in space. Why does any of this have significance beyond the space station?

Loss of muscle mass and function is one of the most consequential aspects of growing older. It underlies frailty, falls and the loss of independence that many people fear, yet effective treatments remain limited. Testing potential interventions in populations that age over decades is inevitably slow. Space research will hopefully help scientists identify relevant biological processes and test early ideas more rapidly.

Experiments in space cannot replace final clinical studies involving older people, however. Any treatment suggested by this work would still require extensive testing on Earth to establish whether it is safe and effective but would identify potential drug candidates far more quickly.

Samantha Jones receives funding from UK Space Agency.

Anne McArdle currently receives research funding from the Medical Research Council, the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council and UK Space Agency.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/09/08/how-studying-astronauts-could-help-tackle-ageing-on-earth/

Nearly 1 million 16 to 24-year-olds in the UK are currently outside education, employment or training and the number is currently projected to increase.

We can all see the huge waste of talent this represents for the young people concerned and society as a whole. In his interim report on young people and work, commissioned by the government, former MP Alan Milburn found that although most of the young people in this situation aspire to steady employment, education or training, pathways to achieve their aims are not clear. These issues reflect societal, moral and economic failure.

Milburn identifies multiple intersecting reasons for the current situation. He observes that health, education, social services and legal systems can compound existing disadvantage. Interactions with these systems are often impersonal and transactional, prioritising measurable outcomes over genuine concern for the individual.

Even the term Neet shows how young people are perceived as problems to be fixed, not individuals with dreams and talents. Defining them as “not in employment, not in education, not in training” implies there is something wrong with them. Do I define myself as “not an accountant”?

If using such loaded, discouraging terms limits how society thinks about young people and often how they think about themselves, research shows the benefits of taking a strengths-based mentoring approach. For some, such relationships already exist around them. For others, a formal mechanism can introduce mentors to make these connections.

The value of a mentor

Mentors are trained adults who can offer emotional, practical and developmental support to young people. They help young people understand their goals, strengths and how to bring about change for themselves, rather than pre-determining a problem and imposing solutions.

For my doctoral research, I worked with seven young people, seven mentors, two mentoring coordinators and four referrers in a local authority mentoring programme. This research showed the value of the trusting relationships they formed.

A mentor listened and helped young people express their needs and provided time and space to explore new ideas and address worries. They could explore their strengths and interests, which often lay outside mainstream education. Mentors who valued their curiosity and expertise in reptiles, manga and photography, for example, expanded the young people’s sense of who they were and what they could achieve.

Additionally, mentors were often the trusted adults who supported them through challenging family circumstances such as parents’ mental health crises, homelessness or bullying.

Encouraging young people to make sense of and articulate issues they faced meant they could be supported and signposted to other sources of help. Addressing their preoccupations gave young people the time and space to think about school and future prospects. One young person said:

It’s someone that you can sort of share everything to; that’s why I think it’s like one of the best things to have.

Identifying their goals, strengths and the resources around them increased the young people’s confidence in their abilities and prospects. Combining their skills and knowledge with exposure through their mentor to new experiences, ideas, and importantly, contacts increased resilience and led to transformative change. This renewed sense of purpose and ability to change their situation helped improve their wellbeing and confidence.

By taking an approach centred on the young person, the paths that they chose often addressed the very issues policy frets about.

For example, one person who refused to attend school instead chose online schooling; a young person who had been in limbo realised that working in childcare was within her grasp. Given space to explore what they wanted, young people re-engaged in employment, education or training but in their own way and on their own terms.

Improve existing systems

Milburn called for systemic change, not more unscalable solutions. The beginning of an infrastructure exists already in the youth mentoring organisations spread across the UK. However, the network is fragmented and experiences uncertain funding. It is unevenly accredited and with limited opportunity to share research-based good practice.

A vital part of harnessing existing expertise in youth mentoring is to establish a central agency to assure quality.

Helping young people succeed in navigating complex systems around them would be more cost effective than waiting until they reach crisis point. Schools are already used to mentoring new teachers: this culture could be extended to include young people in education. Indeed, incorporating skills to create trusting and developmental relationships into training for those who work with young people would see great benefits.

Helping young people to help themselves through mentoring relationships is more likely to engage them in returning to education or entering the workplace. This works better than an approach that focuses on their deficits and forces them through pre-determined steps.

Strengths-based mentoring should become a recognised part of the support infrastructure available to every young person who needs it.

Catherine Comfort is a member of the Labour Party and the Ver Valley society

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/09/08/mentoring-based-on-young-peoples-strengths-can-alleviate-the-crisis-in-education-training-and-employment/

For over a decade, children in year six – the final year of primary school in England – have taken the grammar, punctuation and spelling test as part of their Key Stage 2 Standard Assessment Tests (Sats). This GPS test has shaped how grammar is taught in primary schools.

It is mostly a multiple-choice questionnaire test with some short answer questions. It tests pupils’ knowledge of grammar, punctuation and spelling rather than their ability to write.

The GPS test was introduced in 2013 as part of wider curriculum reforms to raise writing standards. It focuses on a vast array of grammatical terms, and uses decontextualised examples that do not represent the complexity of everyday language. For example: “The lion approached silently as the zebra rested in the grass.”

This test has been criticised for narrowing the curriculum. Because the results affect how schools perform in league tables, teachers prioritise GPS content, rather than teaching grammar in context to reading and writing.

It also risks encouraging “teaching to the test” – children learn how to answer test questions, rather than the wider uses of grammar. This finding is supported by a number of studies including my recent thesis.

Rote learning

While the GPS test improves pupils’ ability to talk about grammar and spot grammatical features, it does not necessarily improve the quality of their writing. Pupils are not applying their grammar knowledge in writing.

This is important, given the government’s proposal to change the test. The Department for Education’s 2025 review of the the national curriculum and assessment states that the GPS should include “new tasks to more effectively assess writing composition and the use of grammar and punctuation”. The government therefore accepts that the GPS test isn’t doing its job.

Spanning a ten‑year period, my research adds to the limited amount of analysis on the GPS test. It explores the gap between what pupils can identify about language and what they can do in writing, highlighting the wider tension between policy expectations and classroom reality.

I analysed 29 pupils’ GPS scores, alongside a sample of their writing, at Key Stage 2 (age 10-11) and Key Stage 4, before they took their GCSEs. While the test boosts pupils’ knowledge of grammar and punctuation, this doesn’t automatically lead to better writing. I found common errors in pupils’ writing, such as basic errors with full stops, capital letters and commas.

Both samples included many run-on sentences and sentence fragments. This shows that pupils have a lack of understanding of clauses and sentence structures, despite the same pupils having little difficulty answering questions related to these aspects in the test.

One way the GPS test has been successful is in bringing grammar back into the curriculum. Teaching grammar can no longer be avoided – which is what previously led to the “grammarless generation” after the 1960s, when grammar disappeared from the English curriculum due to research at that time calling its usefulness into dispute. This led to decades of confusion over the usefulness of grammar teaching.

Training needed

Despite the requirement to teach grammar, training for teachers is lacking. Many have reported being self-taught since the implementation of the test.

PGCE programmes are not obliged to teach grammar, unlike phonics, despite its statutory requirement. Subject knowledge enhancement courses, designed to help trainee teachers gain skills before beginning a teacher training course, are not currently available in English language. The system assumes trainee teachers have mastered this knowledge before they start their training.

Teachers have gained skills as a result of the GPS test, but the test itself is not an effective means of helping pupils to become better writers. It leads to teaching for the test and teaching grammar in isolation, taking away opportunities for teaching grammar in context to reading and writing through exploration, discovery and playing with language.

The government’s call for evidence has found that the content at primary level is too “theoretical”. More advanced content could be covered at secondary level.

This suggestion was supported by linguist Michael Halliday, who was a major proponent of the idea that grammar should be a source of “making meaning” – a creative tool for making linguistic choices, rather than a set of prescriptive rules to be learnt by rote.

Primary education should focus on discovering grammatical features through a process of exploration and experimentation. Pupils would be introduced to the basics at meaningful and relevant points.

Ten years of the GPS test has shown that pupils can learn grammar without becoming better writers. As the government rethinks how grammar and writing should be tested, it has an opportunity to bridge the gap between knowledge and application.

It is not enough to test knowledge. Pupils must understand how to apply the tools of grammar to crafting a piece of writing.

Angela Jayne Kilpatrick 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/2026/09/08/compulsory-grammar-tests-in-englands-schools-arent-improving-childrens-writing/

Sweden is imagined as the land of equality, modesty and Jantelagen – the unwritten rule that no one should think they are better than anyone else. But there has also been a fascination within Sweden with its billionaires, especially those who abide by these dominant cultural norms.

In the case of Ingvar Kamprad, the founder of furniture giant IKEA, Swedes appreciated that he drove an old car (a Volvo, of course), engaged with employees working on the floor in his stores, and every year personally handed out Christmas gifts. His (some would say strategic) display of ordinariness made people overlook the fact that Kamprad was one of the world’s richest people and had moved to Switzerland to avoid Sweden’s high taxes.

But things have changed. The Wall Street Journal has written about Sweden’s surprising “capitalist makeover” and the Financial Times has reported on the idea the country is “overflowing with billionaires”. And in 2024 The BBC broadcast a documentary podcast called Super-rich Swedes. There are good reasons for their interest.

We think we know Sweden – a peaceful nation grounded in social democracy, natural beauty, IKEA and Abba. But in 2026, is this still the real Sweden? Ahead of the country’s general election on September 13, The Conversation UK has teamed up with its Swedish partner universities for a series of articles examining why this small nation remains so fascinating.

While for a long time Sweden was a country with some of the world’s highest taxes, this no longer applies to capital taxation. For instance, it no longer has a wealth tax, an inheritance tax or a property tax. The ideal of egalitarianism doesn’t seem to align with patterns of wealth accumulation, especially at the very top.

Forbes calculates more than 50 US-dollar billionaires in Sweden. This becomes even more extraordinary in a country of just 10.6 million people.

We used Forbes and UN data and found that in 2025 Sweden ranked fourth globally, with 4.7 dollar billionaires per million people. When excluding micro-states (fewer than one million people), Sweden is outnumbered only by Singapore (9.9), Hong Kong (9.1) and Cyprus (7.3), but before Switzerland (4.6) in fifth place. It ranks much higher than some of the world’s largest economies like the US (2.7), Germany (2.1), Canada (2.0) and the UK (0.8).

Read more:
‘We got lazy and complacent’: Swedish pensioners explain how abolishing the wealth tax changed their country

It is difficult to say for sure whether changes in regulation and wealth concentration have altered cultural norms, but there are clear indicators. Younger generations are now expressing strong materialistic values. When they rank what matters in life, earning money comes second to being with friends and far more important than being with family or getting an education.

Young Swedes and adults alike dream of building a “money machine” by investing in stocks so they can exit the labour market long before retirement. This might be surprising to some, since Sweden has long been shaped by a strong work ethic, both politically and culturally.

In research for a yet-to-be published paper, we found Swedish tabloids and business magazines show a remarkable rise in reporting about billionaires. This includes a fascination with their personal lives and framing them in positive terms such as “entrepreneurs”, “investors” and “philanthropists” (rather than “capitalists”, for example).

Awe and suspicion

This does not mean that wealth is no longer a sensitive topic in Sweden. When studying articles about billionaires in one of the country’s leading tabloids, we found an ambivalent form of “wealth porn”. In Sweden “wealth porn” tends to oscillate between celebrating it and questioning the luxurious lifestyles of billionaires.

The articles tempt readers with drone images and descriptions of lavish mansions – but they also repeatedly point out how reluctant the billionaires are to display and talk about their wealth. This frames the topic as socially sensitive and sometimes even dangerous to the billionaires’ personal safety. Readers are invited to fantasise about life as a billionaire – the transgressive act of breaking Jantelagen adds spice to the fantasy.

This kind of “wealth porn” remains focused on the moral issues around conspicuous consumption. Even though Sweden has long been a model of social democracy, the processes through which billionaires accumulate fortunes, and the political influence such wealth can generate, largely escape scrutiny.

Swedes’ ambivalence towards billionaires is also illustrated in a recent survey we conducted with a representative sample of the population. We asked people a set of questions about their views on money and wealth – it turned out that many find money a strong personal motivator. These people supported statements like “to have a lot of money is an important driver for me”. This suggests there is no social taboo around trying to get rich.

People also said money matters socially, as they largely supported statements like “money gives status and respect”. This indicates that hiding personal wealth may not be so important. In fact, displaying it might bring social benefits – being seen as a successful entrepreneur and someone to look up to, for example. We also asked about caps on wealth, but found strong support for statements like “one can never have too much money”.

While this indicates that Swedes value wealth, they still hold an ambiguous relationship with the super-rich. People reacted strongly against seeing the rich as “good role models for others”.

Striving to get rich seems to have become more socially acceptable in Sweden. Perhaps it always has been the way, but Swedes just never spoke about it (at least not in public). Actually being rich remains a contested topic. If Jantelagen still exerts any influence, it seems to be centred on shaping attitudes towards the wealthy themselves – rather than as a force to discourage the pursuit of wealth.

Håkan Johansson receives funding from FORMAS, the Swedish research council for sustainable development.

Axel Vikström receives funding from Handelsbanken’s research foundations.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/09/08/how-egalitarian-sweden-became-more-comfortable-with-wealth/