PM Edition: Top 10 Energy Articles on LiveNews.co.nz for May 19, 2026 – Full Text

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) [4]

Formula 1 drivers maneuver for position during the 2026 Miami Formula One Grand Prix in Florida. Chandan Khanna / AFP via Getty Images Formula 1 auto racing is one of the most energy-intensive and logistically complex sports on the planet.

The events involve cars, of course, but also long-haul freight, international travel, temporary event infrastructure, and a global calendar that keeps people and equipment moving almost constantly. Motorsports companies are not necessarily going to lead the transition to cleaner energy sources as the world seeks to limit the climate changes resulting from burning fossil fuels.

But Formula 1 is a global operation with a large audience and a looming deadline for eliminating greenhouse gas emissions.

It also has the same kinds of operational realities many industries face when trying to reduce their emissions: transportation, freight, energy use and the temptation to count the hardest remaining emissions as someone else’s problem.

F1 has pledged to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2030 across its full operations. That means it will emit as little carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases as possible, using methods that include shifting to the use of alternative fuels in race cars.

The organization says it will balance any remaining emissions by capturing carbon back from the atmosphere or purchasing credits from organizations that capture carbon themselves. The organization publishes sustainability data updates to demonstrate its progress.

We used that data in an interactive computer model that lets anyone who wants to explore what it will take for Formula 1 to fulfill that promise in reality. Users can change various assumptions about fuel use, increase renewable electricity use and even change the racing calendar.

Our analysis finds that F1 racing could achieve substantial cuts in emissions – but getting all the way to net zero will still require carbon offsets.

That leaves F1 with choices, gains, limits and then a final question about what counts as “zero.” An interactive dashboard uses real Formula 1 data to allow regular users to adjust various settings in an effort to achieve net-zero emissions, as the organization itself has pledged to do.

Screenshot of https://formula-one-netzero.fewslab.org/ From the track to the road Formula 1 racing has long provided opportunities to test technologies that later appear in everyday transportation.

Hybrid systems that use gasoline and electric batteries to power the engine, regenerative braking that recovers energy when a car slows down, and energy recovery from exhaust heat all advanced through F1 before becoming common in everyday cars.

Starting in 2026, Formula 1 cars are set to run on 100% advanced sustainable fuel made from renewable or waste-derived feedstocks like municipal waste or forestry waste.

The international governing body of auto racing, the Federation Internationale de l’Automobile, and F1 leaders have explicitly described that fuel mix as a drop-in technology that could directly replace fossil fuel gasoline, with potential use in everyday vehicles.

Significant room for improvement Our analysis suggests the sport can make significant emissions cuts through concrete operational changes. Cars can use cleaner fuels; shipping and logistics can choose lower-emission options; and more buildings can use renewable energy.

Our model shows that one of the most effective options is to group races more tightly by geography.

If all the races scheduled for Europe, for instance, took place in successive weeks, followed by several weeks of racing in Asia, people and freight would travel less over the course of a season than they do now, shifting back and forth across continents.

But the race calendar is not dictated solely by logistics. Commercial deals, weather, tourism efforts, host-country priorities and broadcaster demands all help determine which races happen in which cities on what dates. Under realistic assumptions, our analysis is that F1 appears capable of cutting its direct emissions by at least 50% from its 2018 baseline.

But in our scenarios, even significant operational improvements won’t get F1 all the way to net zero by 2030. Under the scenario that includes the most aggressive operational cuts, about a quarter of F1’s yearly emissions still remain to be addressed.

The amount of freight involved in Formula 1 racing is significant, which means spending a lot of energy to ship it around the world. Vince Caligiuri/Getty Images Compensating for unavoidable emissions To achieve net-zero emissions, Formula 1 will need to purchase carbon offsets to cover the remaining gap.

Buying carbon offsets, also called carbon credits, means spending money to make up for emissions a company can’t eliminate itself. For instance, a company could pay an organization to plant hundreds or thousands of trees, which would remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and store it in wood for many years.

The markets in which carbon offsets are bought and sold have faced years of scrutiny over whether credited benefits are real, whether the activities like tree-planting would have happened anyway, and whether they remove carbon from the atmosphere for a suitably long time.

Those questions matter for Formula 1 because the final step from deep emissions cuts to “net zero” depends not just on whether credits exist, but on what kind they are and whether they should count. Members of a community group funded by carbon offset payments plant mangrove trees on the shore of Gazi Bay, in Kenya in June 2022.

AP Photo/Brian Inganga A corporate challenge Other companies are also struggling with these questions about carbon offsets in their climate plans. For instance, Microsoft, one of the world’s largest buyers of carbon removal credits, announced in April 2026 that it was pausing some new carbon-removal credit purchases.

For Formula 1, announcing the target was the easy part. The harder part is deciding what to do when technology and operational improvements get most of the way there, but not all the way. At that point, climate strategy becomes less about innovation alone and more about governance, credibility and what people are willing to count as credit.

Americans will be watching: The Netflix documentary series, “Drive to Survive,” which debuted in 2019 and is now in its eighth season, has significantly boosted Formula 1’s audience in the U.S.

The organization’s sustainability efforts are part of a public story about whether a global entertainment business can align a high-performance identity with changing expectations about climate responsibility.

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

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) [2]

Gas taxes – federal and state – make up only a small piece of the price of a gallon of gas.

AP Photo/Jenny Kane With gasoline prices still high – averaging over US.50 a gallon in mid-May 2026 – President Donald Trump said he wanted Congress to suspend the federal gas tax, which is 18.4 cents a gallon for gasoline and 24.3 cents a gallon for diesel.

A bill has been introduced in the Senate, and one is expected to follow in the House, according to Politico, but their fate is unclear. States also charge their own taxes, ranging from 70.9 cents a gallon for gas in California to 8.95 cents in Alaska.

Indiana, Georgia and Utah have suspended their gas taxes for at least some of 2026, and other states are considering similar measures. As an energy economist, I have seen how suspending those taxes does reduce prices, but not as much as politicians – or drivers – might hope.

Research on past gas tax holidays has found that consumers get about 79% of the reduction in gas taxes. That means oil companies and fuel retailers keep about one-fifth of the tax cut for themselves rather than passing that savings to the public.

Suspending the federal gas tax, which would require Congress to pass a law, wouldn’t help consumers much anyway. Even if oil companies passed on the whole savings to consumers, national average gas and diesel prices would drop only about 4%.

The percentage reduction in high-cost states such as California would be even smaller. Gas taxes are just one part of what drives gas prices. Overall, the price of a retail gallon of gas is the sum of four things: the cost of crude oil, refining, distribution and marketing, and taxes.

In nationwide figures from January 2026, crude oil accounted for about 51% of the pump price, refining roughly 20%, distribution and marketing about 11% and taxes about 18%. That mix shifts with conditions: When crude oil prices spike, that can drive more than 60% of the price; when the price drops, taxes and logistics are larger shares of the cost.

Crude oil is the biggest ingredient Because the price of crude oil is the largest element, most of the price at the pump is derived from the global oil market. Usually, big swings in crude prices come mainly from shifts in global demand and expectations – not from supply disruptions, according to widely cited research in 2009 by the economist Lutz Kilian.

But what is happening in early 2026 with the war in Iran is one of the exceptions: a classic supply shock. Severe disruptions to shipping through the Strait of Hormuz and attacks on Middle East oil infrastructure have taken millions of barrels a day off the global market.

Most drivers generally can’t quickly reduce how much they drive or how much gas they use when prices rise, so gasoline demand doesn’t change much in the short run. That means a jump in crude costs tends to result in people paying more rather than driving less.

Refining, regulations and the California puzzle Refining turns crude into gasoline at industrial scale. The U.S. doesn’t have a single gasoline market, though. Roughly a quarter of U.S. gasoline is a cleaner-burning blend of petroleum-derived chemicals called “reformulated gasoline,” which is required in urban areas across 17 states and the District of Columbia to reduce smog.

California uses an even stricter formulation that few out-of-state refineries make. California is also geographically isolated: No pipelines bring gasoline in from other U.S. refining regions. California’s gasoline prices have long run above the national average, explained in part by higher state taxes and stricter environmental rules.

But since a refinery fire in Torrance, California, in 2015 reduced production capacity, the state’s prices have been about 20 to 30 cents a gallon higher than what those factors would indicate.

Energy economist and University of California, Berkeley, professor Severin Borenstein has called this the “mystery gasoline surcharge” and attributes it to the fact that there isn’t as much competition between refineries or gas stations in California as in other states.

California’s own Division of Petroleum Market Oversight says the surcharge cost the state’s drivers about billion from 2015 to 2024. It’s not exactly clear who is getting that money, but it could be gas stations themselves or refineries, through complex contracts with gas stations.

A tanker truck delivers fuel to a gas station. AP Photo/Erin Hooley Getting the gas into your car The distribution and marketing category covers the costs of everything involved in getting the gasoline from the refinery gate to your tank.

Gasoline moves by pipeline, ship, rail and truck to wholesale terminals, and then by local delivery truck to service stations.

At the retailer’s end, the key factors are station rent and labor, the cost to buy gasoline in bulk to be able to sell it, credit card fees of as much as 6 to 10 cents a gallon at current prices, and franchise fees paid to the national brand, such as Sunoco or ExxonMobil, for permission to put their branding on the gas station.

Most gas station operators net only a few cents per gallon on fuel itself – which is why many gas stations are really convenience stores with pumps out front. Borenstein and some of his collaborators have also documented that retail gas prices rise quickly when wholesale costs climb but fall slowly when wholesale costs drop.

The question of gas tax holidays Gas tax holidays reduce funding for what the taxes are designed to pay for, typically roads and bridges. That pushes road and bridge upkeep costs onto future drivers and general taxpayers.

There is an additional problem, too: Taxes on gasoline are supposed to charge drivers for some of the costs their driving imposes on everyone else – carbon emissions, local air pollution, congestion and crashes. But Borenstein has found that U.S. fuel tax levels are already far below the true cost to society.

Removing the tax on drivers effectively raises the costs for everyone else. Suspending the Jones Act allows foreign-based oil tankers to sail between U.S. ports.

AP Photo/Eric Gay The Jones Act: A small number that adds up The 1920 Jones Act is a federal law that requires cargo moving between U.S. ports to travel on vessels built and registered in the U.S., owned by U.S. citizens, and crewed primarily by U.S. citizens and permanent residents.

Of the world’s 7,500 oil tankers, only 54 meet this requirement. Only 43 of these can transport refined fuels such as gasoline.

So, despite significant refining capacity on the Gulf Coast, some U.S. gasoline is exported overseas even as the Northeast imports fuel, in part reflecting the relatively high cost of moving fuel between U.S. ports.

Economists Ryan Kellogg and Rich Sweeney estimate that the law raises East Coast gasoline prices by about a penny and a half per gallon on average, costing drivers roughly $770 million a year.

In light of the war’s effect on gas prices, the Trump administration has temporarily suspended the Jones Act requirements – an action more commonly taken when hurricanes knock out Gulf Coast refineries and pipeline networks.

What moves the number The result of all these factors is that the price that drivers see at the pump mostly reflects the global price of crude, plus a stack of domestic costs, only some of which are inefficient.

Tax holidays give a partial, short-lived rebate.

Jones Act waivers trim pennies, though permanent repeal may cause more fundamental changes, such as reduced rail and truck transport of all goods, which could lower costs, emissions and infrastructure damage associated with cargo transportation.

Harmonizing fuel blends across states and seasons may lower prices somewhat, but likely at the expense of increased emissions. Ultimately, the best protection against oil price shocks is a more efficient gas-burning vehicle, or one that doesn’t burn gasoline at all.

In the meantime, the best I can offer as an economist is clarity about what that $4.50 actually buys. This article includes material previously published on May 1, 2026.

Robert I. Harris 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.

Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives

serpeblu/Shutterstock A great Tyrannosaurus rex strides through the conifer trees of her territory, sniffing the air. She picks up the scent from the carcass of a dead horned dinosaur, Triceratops, that she was feeding on yesterday.

She walks over and strips off some more shreds of meat, but the smell is foul even for her. She goes down to the lake to drink and small crocodiles and turtles scuttle into the water.

But she hardly sees them. Of more interest is an armoured dinosaur, Ankylosaurus, lurking nearby. However, she knows this dinosaur won’t be an easy kill and she isn’t desperate enough for food to risk a fight.

Little does she know there are bigger dangers ahead. She looks up and sees a bright light racing downwards accompanied by faint crackling and sizzling noises. Our T. rex has excellent hearing for low frequency sounds and she is disturbed by the vibrations she can feel.

But her upset only lasts for a moment. In a flash, she has been burnt to a crisp and her world changed forever. This all happened 66 million years ago, when a huge asteroid famously hit the Earth in the area of what is now the Caribbean.

At the end of the Cretaceous period, sea levels were 100–200 metres higher than today, so the shores of the Caribbean lay far inland over eastern Mexico and the southern United States. The impact happened entirely within these waters.

The event triggered instant changes to our planet and its atmosphere and led to the extinction of the dinosaurs and about half Earth’s other species. But what would it have been like to experience such a gargantuan impact?

What would you have seen, heard or smelled? And how would you have died – or survived? The Insights section is committed to high-quality longform journalism. Our editors work with academics from many different backgrounds who are tackling a wide range of societal and scientific challenges.

As experts on meteoritics and palaeontology, respectively, we’ve created a detailed timeline, based on decades of research, to take you right there. So let’s start by travelling back in time to the very last day of the Cretaceous.

T-minus one day All is calm and the Cretaceous day proceeds as usual. In what will soon be ground zero, it is pleasantly warm, about 26°C, and wet. It often is. For about a week, the asteroid has been visible only at night.

Because the giant rock is heading straight towards Earth, it looks like a motionless star. There is no dramatic tail; this is a rocky asteroid rather than a comet. There was little warning the day before.

Orla/Shutterstock In the last 24 hours, the light becomes visible during the daytime. But it still looks like a star or planet, getting brighter in the final few hours before impact. T equals 0: the impact If you were close by, you would first have experienced a brief light and sound show.

Minutes to seconds before the impact, you’d have seen the bright fireball, and its accompanying crackling or fizzing noises. This sizzling sound is a result of the photo-acoustic effect: the intense light of the fireball warms the ground, which then heats the air above it, causing pressure waves, or sound.

Next, a deafening sonic boom, which occurs because the asteroid is travelling faster than the speed of sound. But the asteroid is so huge, perhaps 10km in diameter, that it almost certainly hits the ground before any living creature near the impact zone has time to run for cover.

The asteroid’s enormous energy forms a crater through a series of processes that together take only a few seconds. As the asteroid collides with the surface, its kinetic (movement) energy is instantly transferred to the surface as a combination of kinetic, thermal (heat) and seismic energy (released during earthquakes).

This results in a series of shock waves that heat and compress both the asteroid and its target. As the shock waves propagate, rocks fracture, break up and are ejected, producing a bowl-shaped depression, or transient cavity, about ten seconds after impact.

The heat and compression also melt and vaporise large volumes of material, including the asteroid itself, releasing a fountain of incandescent vapour (its temperature is more than 10,000 K, or 9726.85°C). Over the next few seconds, the cavity increases in size to many times the diameter of the original asteroid.

Simulations suggest that around 20 seconds after impact, the transient cavity is at least 30km deep – deeper than the deepest depth currently known on Earth, the 11km Challenger Deep valley, part of the Pacific Ocean’s Marianas Trench.

The rim of the crater is over 20km high – more than twice the height of 8,900m Mount Everest. But this enormous feature lasts for less than a minute before it starts to collapse. Within three minutes of the impact, the centre of the crater has rebounded to form a peak several kilometres high.

The peak only lasts about two minutes before collapsing back into the crater. Whether a dinosaur or a dung beetle, if you were near the transient cavity you would have been incinerated instantly by the blast.

But even if you were up to 2,000km from the epicentre, you’d likely have been killed quickly by the thermal radiation and supersonic winds now spreading out from the impact site. T-plus 5 minutes Five minutes after the impact, the winds have “eased” to those of a category 5 hurricane, flattening everything within about 1,500km of the impact.

Destroying everything, that is, which has not already been burnt. Atmospheric temperatures in the region rise to over 500K (226.85°C). This would feel like being inside an oven – causing burns, heatstroke and death. Wood and plant matter ignite, creating fires everywhere.

Because the asteroid struck the sea, the atmosphere is also filled with super-heated steam, making the hurricane-force winds even deadlier. Next come the tidal waves, triggered by the vast quantities of displaced rock and water.

These 100-metre megatsunamis first strike the shores of what is now the Gulf of Mexico, engulfing the land before depositing huge amounts of debris as they retreat. Tsunamis waves were over 100 metres high. FOTOKITA/Shutterstock By now, the crater has almost reached its final dimensions – 180km across and 20km deep.

But making an enormous hole in the ground isn’t the only outcome of the impact. All the rock and vapour displaced during the collision has to go somewhere. Several locations in Northern America show that metre-sized blocks of debris from the impact were thrown distances of hundreds of kilometres.

So if you were 2,000km to 3,000km from the epicentre and survived the first few seconds, you’d most likely die from overheating, earthquakes, hurricanes, fires, tsunami-driven floods or being hit by impact melt. But what is happening much further away?

In the first five minutes after impact, dinosaurs roaming the Cretaceous forests of what are now China or New Zealand are so far undisturbed. But it won’t be long before that changes. T-plus one hour Shockwaves on land and sea are only minor inconveniences compared with the fire that is still radiating down from the sky.

Some of the impact energy has been transferred into the atmosphere, heating the air and dust to incandescence. Big fires everywhere. fluke samed/Shutterstock An hour after impact, a belt of dust has circled the globe.

Deposits of solidified molten droplets (impact spherules) and mineral grains have been found in numerous locations from New Zealand in the south to Denmark in the north. In these locations, you would not have been aware of the tsunamis around the Americas or the wildfires, but the skies would certainly have begun to darken.

T-plus one day By now, huge tsunamis are moving east across the Atlantic and west across the Pacific, entering the Indian Ocean from both sides. They are still around 50m high – causing death and destruction across many coasts around the world.

By comparison, the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami reached heights of up to 30 metres. Tsunamis kill fishes and marine life that are washed high on the shore and then dumped, just as they kill coastal trees and drown land animals.

But the tsunamis gradually fade away and probably don’t wipe out any entire species – at least on their own. The hurricane force winds have also died down, but tropical storm strength winds are whipping up debris and causing further chaos and destruction across the tsunami-affected areas.

The burning sky is also triggering wildfires across the globe – which, in turn, carry ever more soot into the atmosphere. The sooty signature of these wildfires has been found deposited as carbon particles in sediments from the K-Pg boundary – a 66-million-year-old thin clay layer.

Further away, in what is modern Europe and Asia, the skies continue to fill up with dust and soot, as they do everywhere. Temperatures start to drop as sunlight is blocked. Trees and plants in general, including phytoplankton, close down as if for winter, unable to photosynthesise.

Any animals that rely on warm conditions ultimately hunker down and die. T-plus one week It’s getting darker and darker.

Simulations of solar radiation reaching the Earth’s surface following the impact indicate that, after about a week, the solar flux (the amount of heat and light per a certain area) is just one thousandth of that prior to the impact.

This is caused by particles of dust and soot in the atmosphere. The continued decrease in light levels is accompanied by a global drop in surface temperatures of at least 5°C.

This means that most of the dinosaurs and other large flying and swimming reptiles probably die from freezing within the course of this first week (smaller reptiles with slower metabolisms or more flexible diets could survive longer).

Cooling temperatures and cloud cover also lead to rain. But not just any rain. Storms of acid rain fall across the Earth. Two separate mechanisms generate acid rain. The first is down to the geology of the impact region.

The asteroid happened to hit an area of sediments rich in sulphur, which vaporised and caused sulphur oxides (acidic and pungent gas compounds composed of sulphur and oxygen) to be part of the plume of plasma blasted into the atmosphere.

Second, the energy of the collision was sufficient to turn nitrogen and oxygen into nitrogen oxides – highly reactive gases that can form smog. The dropping temperature ultimately allows water vapour to condense into drops, and the sulphur and nitrogen oxides dissolve to form sulphuric and nitric acids.

This is sufficient to generate a rapid drop in pH. Early models suggest that the pH of the rain might be as low as 1 – the same acidity as battery acid. At this point, Earth is not a great place to be.

Rotting vegetation, choking smoke and sulphur aerosols combine to make the planet stink. Plants and animals on land and in shallow seas that have survived the darkness and cold succumb to the corrosive acid rain and ocean acidification.

Acid rain also kills trees by leaching nutrients such as calcium, magnesium and potassium from the soil. Shallow marine shellfish, crustaceans and corals also die as acid seawater destroys their skeletons. T-plus one year Winds die down, wildfires are extinguished and the oceans are once again calm.

It might appear that the asteroid collision is just a scar on the ocean floor. But its effects are still destructive. The atmosphere is still filled with dust and the Sun hasn’t shone for a year.

Temperatures have continued to drop, with the average surface temperature now 15°C lower than before the impact. Winter has come. Any dinosaurs or marine reptiles that survived the first week of freezing conditions would have died very soon after.

A year after the impact, only rotted skeletons of these behemoths remain. Here and there, smaller animals like mammals the size of rats and insects would be nestling in crevices, barely surviving on their reserves and decaying plants.

Indeed, it has not been a good year for life on Earth: over 50% of plants have died out because of the cold and lack of sunlight. And similar losses have occurred among terrestrial animals and species in the acidified, shallow sea waters.

Ammonites soon die out. Domenichini Giuliano/Shutterstock While most plant groups and many of the modern groups of insects, fishes, reptiles, birds and mammals recover reasonably rapidly, things don’t look great for other species.

Dinosaurs and pterosaurs living on land are extinct, as are many marine reptiles, ammonites, belemnites and rudist bivalves in the oceans. Ammonites and belemnites are high in their food chains, and so suffer not only from the cold and acidification but also from the loss of abundant food resources, such as smaller marine organisms.

T-plus ten years The Earth is still in the grip of a fierce winter. Although most of the sulphur has rained out of the atmosphere, dust and soot particles remain. The average surface temperature is still about 5°C lower than before the impact.

The main oceans have not frozen, but inland lakes and rivers around the world are iced over. Clearly, there were no humans about at this time – there weren’t even any larger mammals. But given the only species that survived were those that could burrow or live below water, it is unlikely that you could have survived this long.

Surviving plant and animal groups such as turtles, smaller crocodiles, lizards, snakes, some ground-dwelling birds and small mammals repopulate the Earth at this point. But they are forced back to limited areas of relative safety a long way from the impact site.

These areas are now receiving sufficient sunlight for plants and phytoplankton to photosynthesise again. As leaves and seeds provide the basis for the food chains on land and in the sea, life begins to rebuild.

Eventually, life returns to the devastated landscapes, but ecosystems are very different and the dinosaurs are no more. T-plus 66 million years Today, 66 million years after the impact, the scars of the collision are hidden within geological strata – and scientists have started deciphering them.

It was in 1980 that researchers first reported evidence of the impact. In their classic paper, Luis Alvarez, a Nobel-prize-winning physicist, and co-authors, described a sudden enrichment in the element iridium in a specific clay layer in Denmark and in Italy.

Iridium is rare in surface rocks because most of it was sequestered in Earth’s core when the planet first formed.

However, iridium is found in meteorites, and Alvarez and colleagues inferred that the rate of accumulation of the metal in the sediments was so high that it could only have been produced by impact of a gigantic meteorite.

Because the scientists had only observed the iridium spike in two locations, the impact hypothesis was rejected by many scientists at the time. However, through the 1980s, iridium spikes were identified in clay layers at more and more locations – in muds laid down on land, in lakes, in the sea.

Support for an impact hypothesis strengthened when a crater of the correct age was found in 1991. The crater is buried beneath younger rocks, but clearly visible in geophysical surveys, lying half on land in the Yucatán Peninsula of Mexico, and half offshore.

Since 1990, evidence for the impact has increased, not least when scientists discovered that there was indeed a sharp cooling event at the end of the Cretaceous. Possible T rex footprint from New Mexico. Wikipedia, CC BY-SA In total, it is estimated that half the species of plants and animals alive at the end of the Cretaceous disappeared.

It was once thought that surviving groups such as many plants, insects, molluscs, lizards, birds and mammals somehow escaped unscathed. But detailed study shows that this is not the case – they were all hit hard.

But, by chance or luck, enough individuals and species were able to survive the cold and absence of food, or were in parts of the world where the effects were less extreme. As the world returned to normal, they had the opportunity to expand rapidly into their old niches, but also to occupy the space vacated by extinct groups.

In fact, one important consequence of the extinction of the dinosaurs, apex predators in their heyday, was the successful spread and evolution of mammals. When Alvarez and colleagues first described the drop in temperature following the impact, they called it a “nuclear winter”, reflecting the political climate of the early 1980s.

Now we might be more inclined to describe the effects as a global climate change – similar events are currently resulting from increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere (flooding, temperature fluctuations). It is salutary to think that without the asteroid collision, primates might never have reached the level we are at today.

But it is equally salutary to consider that modern humans are causing some of the same changes to the atmosphere that ultimately killed our reptilian forbears and may one day also lead to our own demise.

For you: more from our Insights series: ‘It ain’t no unicorn’: meet the researchers who’ve interviewed 130 Bigfoot hunters The truth about child IQ: research shows it fluctuates and may be an unreliable predictor of future success Is time a fundamental part of reality?

A quiet revolution in physics suggests not Underground data fortresses: the nuclear bunkers, mines and mountains being transformed to protect our ‘new gold’ from attack Inside Porton Down: what I learned during three years at the UK’s most secretive chemical weapons laboratory To hear about new Insights articles, join the hundreds of thousands of people who value The Conversation’s evidence-based news.

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Monica Grady receives funding from the Leverhulme Trust for an Emeritus Fellowship and from the STFC. She is affiliated with The Open University, Liverpool Hope University and the Natural History Museum, London.

Michael J.

Benton 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.

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) [4]

A researcher checks on corals in Banco Chinchorro, off Quintana Roo, Mexico. Lorenzo Alvarez-Filip Living by the sea in the tropics means being exposed to some of nature’s most powerful forces. Hurricanes can bring storm surges, flooding and destructive waves that threaten homes, infrastructure and livelihoods.

For many communities, coral reefs are a natural first line of defense against these storms. The reefs’ rugged structures break the incoming waves, reducing the waves’ energy by as much as 97%. Globally, reefs prevent about US billion a year in storm damage.

Without them, studies suggest, the damage would double. Yet, these vital ecosystems are under increasing pressure.

Rising ocean temperatures, pollution and coastal development are driving the loss of reef-building corals – the species that create the physical structure of coral reefs and underpin their ability to protect coastlines and provide habitat for marine life.

Protecting key coral reefs from these human-caused stresses could help the reefs continue to reduce future storm damage. But which reefs should be prioritized? Reefs visible just offshore protect the coastline of Puerto Morelos, Mexico, in part by breaking waves during storms.

Lorenzo Alvarez-Filip We study coral reefs and marine environments.

In a new research paper, we examined the likely impact that future warming will have on reefs across the Caribbean over the coming decades, including which reefs are most likely to persist under rising temperatures.

Then we looked at which reefs were likely providing the greatest protective benefits for coastlines based on their functional characteristics. The results show that about half of all the reefs with the greatest potential to continue to protect coastlines as the oceans warm are currently unprotected from human harms.

The Caribbean’s hidden coastal defenders The value of coral reefs is evident along the Mexican Caribbean coast, where tourism is a major economic driver and the main source of income for local communities. The tourism industry there can generate up to billion in a single year.

Much of that value depends directly or indirectly on healthy coral reefs.

Losing the reefs would not only affect fish that rely on coral structures for habitat, and the livelihoods of people who depend on them, it would also cost millions of dollars in increased storm damage.

An estimated 105,800 people, along with buildings and other infrastructure worth $858 million, are located in coastal areas protected by reefs in the Mexican Caribbean alone. Elkhorn corals (Acropora palmata) are among the most important corals in the Caribbean.

They can form dense clusters that are highly effective at taking the energy out of waves. Lorenzo Alvarez-Filip The role of reefs becomes especially clear during extreme events. In 2005, Hurricane Wilma, a Category 5 storm, struck the coast of Quintana Roo in the Yucatán Peninsula, Mexico.

Near the small town of Puerto Morelos, the coral reefs broke the waves, helping lower the wave height that had reached nearly 36 feet (11 meters) offshore to less than 6 feet (2 meters) near the coast. The reefs near Puerto Morelos are part of a protected national park where public access to the reefs is heavily regulated.

Not all reefs protect the coast equally However, not all reefs provide the same level of protection for coastlines. Our research shows that the differences depend on the reef engineers – the coral species that built the reef.

Reefs dominated by large, complex and rigid corals, such as thickets of elkhorn corals, create rough, elevated structures that can break and slow incoming waves, providing the greatest protection. In contrast, reefs made up of smaller or flatter species offer less resistance.

Knowing which reefs deliver the greatest structural protection can help countries and communities prioritize protecting them from human pressures, such as pollution and ship traffic. We found that of the highest-priority reefs – based both on functionality and how well they are expected to survive rising water temperatures by midcentury – only 54% were protected.

In the Caribbean’s western, southwestern and Florida ecoregions, priority reefs were most likely to be in formal marine protected areas, while the Greater Antilles and Bahamas had several unprotected reefs. The Bahamas, Puerto Rico, Turks and Caicos, and Cuba have many high-value reefs that remain unprotected, meaning there are opportunities to increase protection on these important reefs.

The reefs that we identified as important for conservation based on their physical functionality have also been reported to support high levels of biological diversity. Reefs dominated by complex and rigid structures are often the most functional for protecting coastlines.

They also provide important habitat for fish.

Lorenzo Alvarez-Filip While a large percentage of coral reefs off Belize, Honduras and Puerto Rico are protected, we found that several reefs with the greatest potential for protecting coastlines were not within marine protected areas.

Why does this matter in a warming world? Ocean warming is driving more severe and frequent coral bleaching events. When water temperatures rise too high, corals expel zooxanthellae – the algae that live in their tissues, provide them with energy and give corals their color.

If heat stress is too intense or prolonged, many corals won’t recover. As corals die, the reef structures they built break down and lose complexity over time. The coastal defenses they provide disappear. At the same time, high-intensity hurricanes are becoming more frequent.

This creates a dangerous combination: stronger storms hitting coastlines that are less protected. Protecting coral reefs is essential, not only for the sake of marine biodiversity, but for safeguarding coastal communities, their economies and the millions of people who live there.

Sara M.

Melo Merino received a scholarship from Secretaría de Ciencia, Humanidades, Tecnología e Innovación (Secihti No.

246257).

Lorenzo Alvarez-Filip and Steven Canty do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) [2]

A healthy bat hangs in a cave, resting up to eat its weight in bugs at dusk. Liz Hamrick/TVA Most Americans tend to think about bats only around Halloween, but the U.S. economy benefits from these furry flying mammals every day.

Bats pollinate plants, including many important food crops, when they stop by flowers to drink nectar. Their guano is mined from caves for fertilizer. And they eat a lot of bugs – the kinds that bother people (think mosquitoes) and others that destroy crops that humans depend on for food.

Sadly, bat populations are declining rapidly in North America. A driving force is a fungal disease known as white-nose syndrome, which has spread among bats throughout the United States. When a bat population crashes, fewer bats are around to eat bothersome insects.

All those additional insects can do serious damage. So, when bats disappear, farms become less productive, and that has broad implications for the agricultural economy, human health, rural governments and even financial markets. Bats love to eat the bugs that bother people First, consider how many insects bats eat.

A reproductive female big brown bat can eat its body weight in insects every night in the summer, precisely when farmers are growing food. Mexican free-tailed bats head out of Bracken Bat Cave, near San Antonio, Texas, for an evening of feasting on insects.

In summer, the cave is home to the largest bat colony in the world. Ann Froschauer/U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service One of those insects is the cucumber beetle, which matures from rootworm – a scourge of U.S. cornfields.

Rootworm destroys more than 340 million bushels of corn across the U.S. Midwest and South each year, even as farmers spend US$1 billion annually on pesticides to control outbreaks. A colony of 150 big brown bats can consume 600,000 cucumber beetles in a single year.

If each female cucumber beetle – assuming half are female – had 110 rootworm larvae, the typical brown bat colony would prevent the production of 33 million rootworms. Farmers experience economic damage when rootworm concentrations exceed about 0.5 per corn plant.

Typical planting densities exceed 30,000 corn plants per acre in the Midwest. Therefore, the rootworms that would have hatched could damage more than 2,000 acres of corn – if bats weren’t around to eat the cucumber beetles first.

That is a significant amount of pest control provided by bats! The disaster known as white-nose syndrome In the winter of 2006, the fungus that causes white-nose syndrome, the aptly named Pseudogymnoascus destructans, was first detected in the U.S. near Albany, New York.

From there, it spread across the country, infecting 12 species of bats, three of which are listed as endangered under the Endangered Species Act. A 2010 study found white-nose syndrome had killed between 30% and 99% of the bats in infected colonies.

A little brown bat with the telltale signs of white-nose syndrome, a fungal infection that saps the bats’ energy. Ryan von Linden/New York Department of Environmental Conservation As of March 2026, the fungus causing white-nose syndrome had been detected in 47 states, reaching as far west as California, Washington and Oregon.

White-nose syndrome spreads primarily through bat-to-bat contact, though humans also contribute to the spread when cave explorers carry the fungus from one cave to another. Despite coordinated efforts by state and federal wildlife agencies to limit access to caves where bats live and slow the transmission, white-nose syndrome continues to spread rapidly.

When bats get infected, they wake up early from hibernation and use more energy over the winter. This depletes their fat reserves and causes them to die of starvation, leading to plummeting populations. Bats’ role in food production After white-nose syndrome arrives in an area, the loss of bats has significant consequences for farmers.

Yields fall as pests consume crops. To protect their crops, farmers purchase more chemical pesticides, so their costs rise as yields decline. The estimated agricultural losses from white-nose syndrome exceeded 0 million per year as of 2017.

A lesser long-nosed bat (Leptonycteris curasoae) feeding on an agave blossom in Arizona, spreading the flower’s pollen in the process. Rolf Nussbaumer/imageBROKER Greater pesticide use is also associated with human health problems that can be avoided if bat populations remain healthy.

Losing bats hurts local governments financially The story does not stop at the farm. Counties in all U.S. states tax agricultural land based on its “use value” – in other words, based on how profitable the land is in agriculture.

Without healthy bat populations, lower profits shrink the tax base, leaving county governments with less revenue. Those governments must respond by reducing services, raising taxes or increasing how much money they borrow – often at a greater cost of borrowing.

The effect is especially pronounced in rural counties, where agriculture makes up a large share of property tax revenue. Our recent research finds that rural county governments lost almost $150 per person in annual revenue after the arrival of white-nose syndrome.

For an average-size rural county, that is nearly $2.7 million in lost revenue each year. How losing bats can hit the bond markets The loss of county revenue makes municipal bond investors nervous. Buying a municipal bond is a bit like lending money to the county, and the interest rate is what the county pays you for taking on that risk.

When bats disappear, the risk goes up, and the county has to pay about 11.47 hundredths of a percentage point more in interest. That may sound small, but it is 27% larger than the typical risk premium investors already demand from county governments.

The higher interest rate raises borrowing costs for county governments. For example, the borrowing costs on a typical 15-year, $1 million bond would increase by more than $33,000. Bats snuggle up in a cave. Liz Hamrick/TVA Higher yields also mean lower bond prices for investors, including retirement funds.

For example, our research suggests that investors would discount a $1 million bond issued by a rural county by nearly $14,000 if that county’s bats have become infected by white-nose syndrome. Economic benefits of saving bats The good news is that the benefits from healthy bat populations create opportunities to make money from bat conservation.

Farmers can increase their incomes. Local governments can recover property tax revenue to fund public services, such as road maintenance, health infrastructure and public schools. Bond investors can earn financial returns from healthier bat populations.

No silver bullet exists for protecting or restoring bat populations affected by white-nose syndrome, but promising efforts are underway. A fungal vaccine is being tested by the U.S. Geological Survey and partners. Designing artificial roosts and adding cave protections can also help preserve healthy bat populations.

Researchers are also working to better understand bat resistance to the disease to explore whether improving resistance alone can stabilize bat populations. As these solutions develop, opportunities will emerge for farmers, local governments and investors to earn financial returns through bat conservation.

In other words, saving bats isn’t just good ecology – it’s good economics.

Eli Fenichel receives funding from the Knobloch Family Foundation.

He is a professor at Yale University in the School of the Environment.

Anya Nakhmurina and Dale Manning do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Source: The Conversation – France

Tropical-like cyclone Ianos crosses the Ionian Sea and approaches Greece on September 17, 2020. contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data (2020), processed by ESA, CC BY-SA In March 2026, a tropical-like cyclone named ‘Jolina’ produced significant damage across North Africa.

In 2020 and 2023, storms Ianos and Daniel both caused severe damage in Greece, and the latter triggered a humanitarian disaster in the city of Derna, Libya, where thousands were declared dead or missing. These tropical-like cyclones occur in a non-tropical region.

They are known as “medicanes” – a portmanteau of Mediterranean and hurricanes. As any major storm, medicanes know no borders.

Their impacts spread across multiple countries as they sweep across the Mediterranean coast, one of the world’s most densely populated and vulnerable regions (the total population of Mediterranean countries in 2020 was about 540 million people, around one-third of them living in coastal areas).

Rising sea temperatures due to climate change increase the reservoir of energy these storms can feed on.

More research on this phenomenon, which couples atmospheric and oceanic effects, is urgently needed in order to improve early warning systems and the preparedness of populations, in terms of civil protection and regarding how we would affront a catastrophic event that might exceed our ability to prepare for them.

Medicanes: rare and devastating hurricanes in the Mediterranean One of the earliest research papers on the subject, in 1983, opened with the sentence: “At times, Mother Nature does her best to deceive us”, accompanied by a satellite image of a cyclone displaying a well-organised spiral cloud structure and a cloudless eye at its centre, strikingly similar to those that habitually occur in the tropics.

The opening line implies what a surprise it would be to encounter such an impressive and counterintuitive occurence of a tropical-like storm structure in the Mediterranean. Since then, significant progress has been made in understanding medicanes through international scientific collaboration.

In 2025, a collective research effort produced a formal definition of this once counterintuitive phenomenon. Jolina medicane progresses towards Libya through the Mediterranean sea in March 2026. The eye of the storm is calculated in near-real time and shown as a red dot.

Source: Eumetsat/CNR-ISAC/ESA Medicanes Project In short, medicanes share important physical characteristics with tropical cyclones, but are not identical to them. Flooding from intense and widespread precipitation are their most dangerous hazard, often extending well beyond the cyclone’s centre and covering areas of country-wide extent.

But what is even more critical to retain is the very strong winds close to their centre, which make their track and landfall location highly relevant to impacts from windstorms and storm surges. Events that meet this formal definition occur on average less than three times per year.

This limited frequency means our statistical record is still too small to draw firm conclusions about preferred locations of occurrence. How does climate change affect hurricane risk in the Mediterranean The question of what climate change holds in store for medicanes does not have a reassuring answer.

Recent advances point to sea surface temperature as a key factor in storm intensification: a warmer sea drives greater evaporation and stronger heat fluxes into the atmosphere, providing the energy needed to develop and intensify a medicane.

According to the Copernicus Climate Change Service Atlas, the Mediterranean warmed by approximately 0.4°C per decade during the 1990–2020 period, a clear and accelerating trend. While such a figure may seem small in everyday terms, its physical implications are far from negligible.

Indeed, an increase of just 1–2°C can produce significantly higher wind speeds and precipitation rates. Moreover, the figure above represents a basin-wide average (i.e. for the whole Mediterranean Sea); locally, during individual medicane events, sea surface temperatures of 2°C or more above normal have already been recorded.

A recent study demonstrating links between the intensity of a Mediterranean medicane and climate change appeared in 2022 and focused on the storm “Apollo”, showed that warmer sea surface temperatures and a warmer atmosphere increased moisture availability and heavy rainfall over Sicily.

Later analyses of Daniel also found that extreme precipitation over the eastern Mediterranean and Libya was intensified by climate change. More broadly, recent research indicates that the most robust signal for Mediterranean cyclones concerns rainfall, with clearer increases in precipitation than in wind intensity.

Wind changes can also be detected in some events. Today, climameter.org, an international consortium which rapid attribution studies with a peer-reviewed protocol, monitors medicanes and Mediterranean cyclones through rapid attribution studies of emerging extremes.

New methods to monitor and better understand medicanes are urgently needed Collaborative research between the scientific community and civil protection agencies has been central to developing early warning systems and improving preparedness. One such effort is the MEDICANES project of the European Space Agency, some of the research is being applied as we write to the latest medicane Jolina.

Ultimately, however, efficient adaptation requires better climate prediction models and therefore more reliable and accurate estimation of extremes caused by cyclones. This can be only achieved through scientific research.

An end-to-end approach that translates research findings into actionable information for climate adaptation and civil protection is both timely and essential, including for example infrastructure resilience planning and early warning systems to reduce vulnerability and socioeconomic impacts.

The AXA science philanthropy is now part of the AXA Foundation for Human Progress, which brings together the commitments of AXA Group and Mutuelles d’Assurances in the fields of Science, Nature, Solidarity, and Culture.

Before 2025, the global science philanthropy was held by the AXA Research Fund, which has supported over 750 projects around the world since its inception back in 2007. To learn more, visit Axa Foundation for Human Progress. A weekly e-mail in English featuring expertise from scholars and researchers.

It provides an introduction to the diversity of research coming out of the continent and considers some of the key issues facing European countries. Get the newsletter!

Emmanouil Flaounas a reçu des financements de l’Agence Spatiale Européenne (MEDICANES project with Contract No.

4000144111/23/I-KE).

Davide Faranda a reçu des financements de ANR et ERC (Horizon)

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) [4]

El Niño can mean a rainy U.S. Southwest, warmer winters in the North and less Atlantic hurricane activity – but not always.

Bill Tompkins/Getty Images Talk of a “super El Niño” developing in 2026 is gaining momentum, with concerns rising that this climate pattern could bring extreme rainfall, heat, drought and destructive flooding around the world.

The signals appear to be in place: The tropical Pacific is warming along the equator, and computer models point toward extreme conditions by the end of the year. However, forecasting El Niño is not like predicting next week’s weather.

Forecasts for El Niño typically aren’t reliable before late spring – not because scientists don’t understand the system, but because we understand its limits. Sea surface temperature data on May 12, 2026, shows warming along the equator west of South America, often a sign that El Niño conditions are developing.

NOAA Coral Reef Watch As an ocean-atmospheric scientist who studies El Niño, I spend a lot of time thinking about what scientists can forecast confidently – and what remains uncertain. Here’s what we know about the current event, what we still don’t, and why many regions should begin preparing now, even if a strong, or “super,” El Niño never fully materializes.

Why is El Niño hard to forecast in spring The starting point for any El Niño forecast is the heat stored beneath the surface of the eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean. Computer models use data about those conditions to simulate how ocean temperatures will evolve over the coming months, and how they affect weather patterns around the world.

Right now, an exceptionally large reservoir of warm water sits beneath the surface there. In principle, this ocean heat should be a reliable signal of El Niño developing. In practice, what happens next depends heavily on what the atmosphere does.

The warm reservoir was shaped by a burst of wind activity in early 2026. Normally, the Pacific trade winds blow from east to west along the equator, pushing warm water toward Asia and leaving cooler water near South America.

But in April, a pair of cyclones straddling the equator caused the wind direction to reverse. This short-lived reversal triggered a downwelling Kelvin wave – a pulse of energy beneath the ocean surface moving eastward along the equator.

That subsurface pulse has now reached the eastern Pacific, helping fuel intense warming off South America. At the ocean surface, this can resemble the early stages of a strong El Niño. But there is a catch.

For El Niño to develop fully, the ocean and atmosphere need to lock into a feedback loop: Warmer surface waters weaken the trade winds, triggering more downwelling Kelvin waves that push warm water eastward and reinforce the warming.

But that loop doesn’t engage automatically. It requires repeated bursts of eastward winds to sustain the process. Until that feedback loop takes hold, the ocean-atmosphere system is in an unpredictable phase. It might tip into a super El Niño.

It might not. Spring is precisely when forecasts are most uncertain. Impressive early signals can fade if the winds don’t cooperate. El Niño forms when surface temperatures in the tropical Pacific Ocean are about 0.5 degrees Celsius (0.9 Fahrenheit) warmer than normal for three months.

A strong El Niño has temperatures over 1.5 C (2.5 F). The chart shows the Relative Oceanic Niño Index (RONI), a three-month running average that accounts for the background warming trend. Some forecasts still rely on the Oceanic Niño Index, based on absolute temperatures, which can overstate El Niño’s strength in a warming climate.

NOAA There’s a further complication: When models detect strong subsurface warming, they can simulate a stronger feedback loop than actually develops. The result is that models can look too confident – even alarming – despite the system not being locked in.

As of mid-May 2026, the wind patterns needed to amplify the warming have not clearly emerged. We’ve seen this scenario play out before. In both 2014 and 2017, forecast models were pointing toward strong El Niño conditions by midyear.

In both cases, the anticipated wind patterns never fully materialized and El Niño either stayed weak or returned to a neutral state. The early signals were real, but the expected follow-through didn’t happen.

So what do the forecasts suggest? The current forecasts for 2026-27 still span a wide range in mid-May – from expecting weak to strong El Niño conditions. How the winds behave in the coming weeks will determine what develops.

If trade winds weaken again at the right moment, it could tip the system into self-sustaining warming – the kind that’s hard to stop. As of mid-May, long-range weather forecasts weren’t showing strong eastward wind bursts on the horizon that could strengthen El Niño.

In fact, quite the opposite was expected for the second half of May: a burst of winds blowing in the opposite direction. A full month without major eastward wind activity would be a meaningful brake on ocean warming.

The Pacific has loaded the dice for El Niño, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s May outlook reflects elevated odds of El Niño developing and potentially strengthening later in the year.

By NOAA’s mid-June update, the picture should be substantially clearer. El Niño intensity matters for weather worldwide The difference between a weak El Niño and an extreme one is not subtle. It reshapes climate patterns across the globe – and with them, real-world risks.

If El Niño intensifies into a strong or “super” event, it can drive drought in the Amazon, fires in Indonesia, flooding in Peru and heavy rainfall in parts of California and southern South America.

These effects could materialize by the Northern Hemisphere winter, when El Niño typically peaks. How El Niño tends to affect the weather and climate around the world. El Niño’s affects vary based on many factors, so not every El Niño year will look exactly like this.

NOAA In some regions, the stakes are immediate. In India, the monsoon rains, which support agriculture and water supplies for hundreds of millions of people, have historically weakened during strong El Niño events. Even modest shifts in monsoon strength can bring food and water shortages, and harm economies.

At the same time, when El Niño is strong, hurricane activity in the Atlantic is typically suppressed – a rare upside – while the eastern Pacific often becomes more active with storms. NOAA scientists explain how El Niño affects weather across the U.S.

El Niño can even push global temperatures temporarily higher, as changes in cloud cover and the amount of heat the ocean releases alter the planet’s energy balance. In contrast, a weak El Niño produces far more muted effects.

This is why predicting intensity matters. Using uncertain forecasts in real-world decisions Because El Niño forecasts deal in probabilities, deciding how to prepare for the seasons ahead should be based on managing risk – not waiting for certainty.

El Niño’s impact does not occur everywhere at once. Some effects emerge quickly. Its impact on the Indian monsoon and Atlantic hurricane activity unfold over the summer and early fall. Other impacts arrive later, toward the end of the year when El Niño peaks, bringing extreme rainfall to parts of South America between November and January.

In Southeast Asia, scorching heatwaves often emerge even later, in April of the following year. In regions like India, decisions about how to respond to El Niño risks cannot wait for more certainty. Communities need to prepare their water infrastructure now in case El Niño means the monsoon season brings too little rain.

Even where forecasts suggest reduced risks – such as a quieter Atlantic hurricane season – it would be a mistake to assume safety. Destructive hurricanes still hit in otherwise quiet years.

Pedro DiNezio receives funding from NSF and NOAA.

He is affiliated with the ATLAS Institute at the University of Colorado.

Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives

Some time earlier this year, an employee at tech giant Meta built a system to track how much each staff member was using artificial intelligence (AI).

Named “Claudeonomics” after the Claude chatbot, the system created a leaderboard ranked by the number of tokens each user was exchanging with AI models, with leaders given titles such as “Token Legend”. (Tokens are tiny chunks of text, each around four characters long, that language models use for processing.) Meta is not alone in its fascination with “tokenmaxxing”: AI labs OpenAI and Anthropic, e-commerce company Shopify, and tech investment firm Sequoia capital are all reportedly monitoring AI usage and rewarding heavy users, some of whom burn billions of tokens in a week.

Reducing a person’s performance to a single metric can be appealing for management in large corporations. But the choice of what to measure isn’t a neutral one – and if we’re not careful, it can start to rewrite our vision of what we actually value.

The score keeps the score One of the more full-throated advocates of tokenmaxxing is Jensen Huang, chief executive of chipmaker Nvidia, who envisions a future in which tech employees negotiate high token budgets and consume tokens at rates commensurate with their salaries.

Around 80% of those tokens are currently processed via Nvidia’s chips, so Huang’s enthusiasm makes sense. But is token consumption a helpful metric for those of us who do not profit directly from AI processing volume?

In a recent book, The Score, philosopher C. Thi Nguyen analyses the rise of metrics throughout modern society and offers some helpful insights. As Nguyen emphasises, what we measure shapes our goals. We develop metrics as tools of convenience; they standardise our measurement of values so we can compare large numbers of otherwise disparate things.

This standardisation comes at the expense of variation and distinctiveness, Nguyen argues. In business, it can make workers seem interchangeable. Determining which employees in a large organisation are consuming the most tokens in a week is fairly straightforward.

But it tells us nothing about the quality or impact of their work. Bad metrics, bad results In the past, questionable metrics have contributed to dramatically bad outcomes. Prior to the 2008 global financial crisis, for example, many financial institutions had sophisticated systems of measures designed to incentivise selling as many loans as possible, as quickly as possible.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, many of those loans turned out to be far riskier than anyone realised. Nguyen emphasises that these types of metrics can tempt us into thinking they are unavoidable.

But one of the central lessons of moral philosophy is that we ought to pause at moments like these and ask a couple of basic questions: what is a good life, and what values are actually worth chasing?

Huang and others usually don’t present tokenmaxxing as an answer to these question. But that’s how it functions. What is worth devoting your professional and creative energy to? Simple: grinding through tokens. A new vision of the good life?

Silicon Valley has, of late, produced a striking number of manifestos and quasi-constitutions. Consider Anthropic’s Claude’s Constitution, published in January 2026, which sets out the company’s aspirations for its model’s values and speech.

Or look at venture capitalist Marc Andreessen’s Techno-Optimist Manifesto, which makes the case for ambitiously accelerating technological advancements in the service of promoting human flourishing. Some of the most influential texts in the history of moral and political philosophy take this form.

Thomas Jefferson wrote one – the US Declaration of Independence. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote another – The Communist Manifesto. One way to view these Silicon Valley proclamations, and trends like tokenmaxxing, is as repackaging familiar commonplaces of corporate life – recasting mission statements and key performance indicators in a loftier register.

But another is to see them as attempts to do something far more ambitious: sketch the outlines of a new and far-reaching vision of the good life. On that view, the metrics used to measure progress against the vision matter.

Tokenmaxxing, for example, is already creeping beyond the bounds of the tech industry – one report from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania suggests many organisations are prioritising staff AI usage and spending as metrics.

Metrics can be useful – if we’re careful Metrics do have their place in an ordered and complex society. There are many instances in which we might happily defer to the scores produced by simple metrics, trading nuance for convenience.

Aggregate ratings on product or restaurant review sites, for example, can simplify our decision-making, even if they aren’t tailored to our specific preferences. The problem is what Nguyen calls “value capture” – when we uncritically allow external metrics to determine our own goals and behaviour.

Resisting this process involves questioning what is being measured and reframing it. Instead of counting tokens, for example, we might use an equivalent metric such as energy consumption. Energymaxxing might sound more like conspicuous wastage, rather than improved performance.

Counting tokens is one measure of AI activity, which is itself intended as a measure of productivity, which in turn leaves aside the question of what is being produced.

Not only is tokenmaxxing a dubious metric in itself, but it may also distort our vision of what matters.

Victoria Lorrimar receives funding from the John Templeton Foundation.

Tim Smartt 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.

Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives

Yan Krukau/Pexels Menstruation is once again a hot topic on social media, thanks to a new health trend known as “cycle syncing”. It involves aligning your diet and exercise habits to each phase of your menstrual cycle.

For example, you may only do gentle exercises such as yoga or eat more fermented foods during the first phase of menstruation. Social media influencers are spruiking cycle syncing as a more natural way for women to manage negative symptoms, such as period pain, and be more in tune with their bodies.

So how does it work? And is it supported by research? The menstrual cycle During menstruation, the body sheds the uterus lining to prepare for pregnancy. This usually happens every 28–35 days. But bleeding is only one part of the menstrual cycle.

The menstrual cycle can be divided into three main phases: follicular phase, where the body releases a hormone called the follicle-stimulating hormone to help follicles grow in the uterus ovulation, where the ovary releases a mature egg that may or may not be fertilised luteal phase, where the body releases a hormone known as progesterone that thickens the lining of the uterus, in preparation for pregnancy.

But if the egg is not fertilised, the uterus will shed its lining and this cycle repeats. Throughout the menstrual cycle, fluctuating hormone levels can cause symptoms such as fatigue, cramps, bloating, mood swings and changes in appetite.

Read more: Planning a baby? A fertility app won’t necessarily tell you the best time to try Does ‘cycle syncing’ work? Advocates of cycle syncing say it helps women manage period symptoms and meet the the body’s changing energy needs during menstruation.

However, specific claims often conflict with each other. For example, some who promote cycle syncing suggest eating fermented foods and fresh vegetables during the follicular phase, while others recommend eating lean proteins and wholegrains. Certain cycle syncing advocates emphasise doing cardio workouts and other high-intensity exercise in the follicular phase.

Meanwhile, others say swimming or cycling are better options to manage period symptoms. However, there is little evidence to support these claims. Various systematic reviews – which summarise all the available research on a specific question – have found no evidence that doing exercise during certain phases of the menstrual cycle improves muscle development or performance.

This is the case with both resistance training which aims to build strength, and aerobic exercise, which increases your heart rate. It also does not appear to reduce your risk of muscle injuries. Research shows immune function may fluctuate throughout the menstrual cycle, but one systematic review found this variation is unlikely to impact exercise.

Read more: Can exercise reduce period pain? And what kind is best? However, research suggests female athletes may feel less motivated or confident playing sport in the late luteal phase. They were also more likely to think they performed worse at the start and end of their period.

This may be because symptoms such as cramping, back pain and tiredness make exercise seem much harder during menstruation. But research suggests certain types of exercise, including strength training and relaxation-based exercises, may help relieve period pain.

There’s even less evidence examining the link between nutrition and different phases of the menstrual cycle. One 2024 study suggested women may be hungrier or eat more during their luteal phase, compared to the follicular phase.

This may be because during the luteal phase, the body consumes more energy to prepare for a potential pregnancy. However, one systematic review found no conclusive evidence that changing your diet reduces symptoms such as cramps, bloating and fatigue.

What to do instead Existing studies looking at the relationship between diet, exercise and different menstrual phases have produced extremely varied results. And there are still many gaps in current research, including what the mechanism behind cycle syncing actually is and what its benefits may be.

So for those who want to manage period symptoms, the best approach is to be patient with yourself and listen to bodily cues. For example, if you slept badly because of night-time cramps, you don’t need to do a high-intensity workout the next morning.

Consider going for a walk instead. And if you feel extra hungry near the end of your period – in the luteal phase – it’s fine to eat a little more. The jury’s out as to whether cycle syncing actually works.

But making small lifestyle tweaks could help make your time of the month that bit more manageable.

Emmalee Ford is employed by Family Planning Australia, a non-government sexual and reproductive health organisation.

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) [4]

The Trump administration is trying to tie the hands of future administrations when it comes to regulating pollution, including greenhouse gas emissions.

Chris Sattlberger/Tetra Images via Getty Images As the Trump administration moves to weaken America’s air pollution rules, it is deploying new legal interpretations that are intended to tie the hands of future administrations for years to come.

In practice, the changes limit the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority under the Clean Air Act. The result allows EPA officials to ignore science, data and the adverse effects their decisions will have on public health and the environment.

But the new interpretations are also designed to apply not just to the rule in which they are first set forth but into the future. If affirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court in inevitable legal challenges, these interpretations could make it harder for future administrations to restore the public health protections that the Trump administration eliminates.

They could also make it difficult to update rules to respond to new information about health risks. Typically, moves to weaken pollution regulations through novel legal interpretations would have a good chance of being overturned in court.

But the EPA’s new interpretations are strategically designed to appeal to the current U.S. Supreme Court’s view of federal agencies’ authority, especially in light of the court’s 2024 ruling in Loper Bright v.

Raimondo. In that case, the court overturned what’s known as the Chevron doctrine. A 1984 Supreme Court ruling had established that courts should defer to executive agencies’ legal interpretations of their governing statutes when the text of the law was ambiguous or left gaps.

That deference no longer applies.

As a former EPA appointee who helped write and review dozens of regulations under the Clean Air Act during the Obama and Biden administrations, I find these efforts to prevent the EPA from doing its job of protecting public health and the environment to be alarming.

Here are two examples of how the new interpretations are playing out.

Blocking future climate regulations In February 2026, the EPA rescinded its 2009 endangerment finding, a determination under the Clean Air Act that carbon dioxide and five other greenhouse gases “may reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health or welfare” because they contribute to climate change.

The endangerment finding was the scientific and legal basis for EPA rules requiring automakers, power plants and oil and gas operations to cut their greenhouse gas emissions. Erasing it would make it easier for the Trump administration to eliminate greenhouse gas regulations.

Rather than try to challenge the science of climate change, which would be difficult given the growing mountain of evidence, the Trump EPA relied on legal arguments that were intended to dispense forever with the EPA’s ability to regulate greenhouse gas pollutants under the Clean Air Act.

President Donald Trump and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin arrive for a White House event to announce a rollback of the 2009 Endangerment Finding on Feb. 12, 2026.

Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images Among the administration’s numerous arguments, two stand out: First, the Trump EPA says the Clean Air Act should be read to limit the EPA’s authority to regulate air pollution only if its harm to the public is “through local or regional exposure.” That would mean contributions from U.S. sources to global air pollution, no matter how demonstrable or how much they endanger Americans, are not covered by the Clean Air Act.

Second, the Trump EPA says that reducing greenhouse gas emissions from motor vehicles and engines would be “futile.” It points to global climate modeling that suggest these reductions would not meaningfully reduce the harm to public health and welfare.

What that argument fails to mention is that actions by people around the world to reduce emissions across different sectors add up. Motor vehicle emissions are the No. 1 contributor of U.S. emissions. If this sector is too small to regulate, then nothing is big enough.

Each of these interpretations is contrary to positions that the EPA took in the original endangerment finding, which the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld in 2012. Allowing more toxic air pollutants A second example involves the EPA’s proposal on March 17, 2026, to weaken pollution restrictions on businesses that sterilize medical equipment using ethylene oxide, a known carcinogen.

In that proposal, the EPA is also changing a legal interpretation in a way that would constrain the agency’s ability to protect human health into the future, this time from emissions of toxic air pollutants.

The Clean Air Act, under Section 112, establishes a methodical program for the EPA to regulate industries that emit significant quantities of air pollutants that can cause cancer, birth defects, genetic mutations or neurological harm, or harm reproductive health.

The EPA reviews how facilities control their emissions and sets standards that require all facilities to meet what the best-controlled sources are doing.

But Section 112 has an important provision called “residual risk” review: Eight years after the EPA sets the first technology-based standards, it must determine whether the public health risk posed by emissions from the facilities after controls are added is acceptable.

In 2024, the EPA updated its hazardous air pollution rule for facilities that use ethylene oxide to sterilize medical equipment sensitive to steam heat, such as devices containing plastic, rubber or electronic components. Because recent research showed that ethylene oxide posed a much higher risk of cancer than previously thought, the EPA also updated its 2006 residual risk finding and required additional safeguards.

The Trump EPA is now arguing that the agency can assess residual risk only once, even if more recent information shows that the health risk is unacceptably high. By constraining its own authority, the EPA is withholding standards that would protect thousands of people from a higher risk of cancer.

It is also creating a legal precedent that will justify weakening other standards. Those include standards for chemical manufacturing facilities that the Biden EPA updated in 2024 through residual risk review.

That precedent would also prohibit the EPA in the future from taking into account new information about the health effects of any regulated hazardous air pollutant from any type of industry the EPA regulates under Section 112 of the Clean Air Act, including petroleum refineries, chemical manufacturing and paper mills.

Arguing the law These rules are just two examples of the administration’s “if you don’t have the facts, argue the law” approach.

If the administration’s strategy works, the American public may be living, and dying, with the consequences of these industry-friendly regulations for years to come.

Janet McCabe is a volunteer with the Environmental Protection Network and has held several appointed positions at the United States Environmental Protection Agency.

Consistent with the Indiana University Statement of Policy on Institutional Neutrality, the comments contained in this communication are solely my views and are not intended to be construed, and shall not be construed, as the views of Indiana University or comments made on behalf of or by Indiana University.