By Mireille Rebeiz, Chair of Middle East Studies, Dickinson College
Josiane Yazbeck, Lecturer, Université La Sagesse
Ongoing conflict, particularly in a three-month period in late 2024, caused widespread environmental destruction and the spread of toxic materials.
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By Murugan Anandarajan, Professor of Decision Sciences and Management Information Systems, Drexel University
Businesses are acting fast to adopt agentic AI – artificial intelligence systems that work without human guidance – but have been much slower to put governance in place to oversee them, a new survey shows. That mismatch is a major source of risk in AI adoption. In my view, it’s also a business opportunity.
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By Ahmed Elgammal, Professor of Computer Science and Director of the Art & AI Lab, Rutgers University
Generative AI was trained on centuries of art and writing produced by humans.
But scientists and critics have wondered what would happen once AI became widely adopted and started training on its outputs.
A new study points to some answers.
In January 2026, artificial intelligence researchers Arend Hintze, Frida Proschinger Åström and Jory Schossau published…
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By Micah Altman, Research Scientist, MIT Libraries, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
Philip N. Cohen, Professor of Sociology, University of Maryland
Expertise comes with training, experience and accreditation. And expert consensus is the best guide modern democracies have for making decisions about complicated challenges.
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By Qian Liu, Assistant Professor of Law and Society, University of Calgary
Parental support can unintentionally produce a strong sense of misguided obligation and guilt, sidelining the desires and preferences of young adults.
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By Christoph Randler, Professor, Department of Biology, University of Tübingen
There’s no question that being in nature is good for wellbeing. Research shows that experiencing nature and listening to natural sounds can relax us.
A key reason for these benefits may be because of the appeal of birds and their pleasant songs that we hear when in nature.
Studies show that people…
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By Neville Morley, Professor in Classics, Ancient History, Religion, and Theology, University of Exeter
In his speech to this year’s World Economic Forum at Davos, Canadian prime minister Mark Carney mourned the demise of international cooperation by evoking an authority from ancient Greece.
“It seems that every day we’re reminded that we live in an era of great power rivalry, that the rules-based order is fading, that the strong can do what they can, and the weak must suffer what they must. And this aphorism of Thucydides is presented as inevitable,…
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By Jeremy Allouche, Professor in Development Studies, University of Sussex
Despite billions being spent on impact assessments around the world, they often end up being just dusty reports on the shelf.
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By Johan Fourie, Professor, Department of Economics, Stellenbosch University
In 1825, a tax collector compiling a census in South Africa’s Cape Colony paused to write a poem in the margin of his work. In it, he complained about the idle chatter of townsmen in Stellenbosch and uncooperative taxpayers. It is a tiny window on the regular frustrations of a 19th-century taxman. But the poem survives only because the bureaucracy did.
Year after year, from the 1660s to the 1840s, local officials appointed by the Dutch East India Company and, after 1806, the British colonial government, recorded settler households, their harvests and their labour obligations in ledgers…
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By Long Li, Professor, Earth & Atmospheric Sciences, University of Alberta
Researchers have discovered that chemical reactions in underwater hydrothermal vents could have produced the necessary ingredients for life on Earth.
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