Politics influences so much of our daily lives, yet discussing it at the dinner table can turn even the most pleasant conversations with family into verbal jousting matches. At Live Science, we look towards scientific research to explain this polarizing topic, whether it's a study that shows facts don't convince people in political arguments to one that finds conservatives aren't more fearful than liberals.

Our expert writers and editors will also guide you through the history of politics and how it interacts with the sciences, helping you to be fully equipped for your next dinner-time disagreement.

In 1871, vandals with sledgehammers destroyed skeletons and models intended for display in New York's first dinosaur museum before the building was even completed. 

Contemporary news reports blamed the corrupt politician William "Boss" Tweed, but researchers have now revealed that the true culprit was likely Henry Hilton, who was seemingly obsessed with white paint and had "a remarkable ability to destroy everything he touched," according to researchers who have revisited the events.

Hilton was the vice-president and treasurer of Central Park, where the Paleozoic Museum was to be erected to provide education and entertainment for the public. But records show he favored a competing project to develop the American Museum of Natural History, which may have partly motivated the destruction of artifacts intended for the Paleozoic Museum, researchers wrote in a study published May 10 in the journal Proceedings of the Geologists' Association.

"Reading these reports, something didn't look right," co-author Vicky Coules, a researcher in the Department of History of Art at the University of Bristol in England, said in a statement. "So we went back to the original sources and found that it wasn't Tweed."

Commissioners developing Central Park were inspired by a display in England called the Crystal Palace Dinosaurs and enlisted the help of its creator, a natural history artist named Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins. Hawkins arrived in America in 1868 and began collecting dinosaur and other prehistoric fossils, which he stored in a workshop near the park.

There, Hawkins pioneered the "hidden" metal armature still used today to hold skeletons in a lifelike stance and built full-size mounts of the dinosaurs Hadrosaurus foulkii and Laelaps aequilunguis. Drawings of the workshop reveal that Hawkins kept skeletons of modern flightless birds, which he used as analogs for bipedal dinosaurs, according to the study.

Related: 'Truly gigantic' Jurassic sea monster remains discovered by chance in museum 

But in 1870, Tweed, who was at the height of his power, replaced the Central Park commissioners with his own team and abruptly canceled plans for the Paleozoic Museum, dismissing Hawkins. Two months later, a gang of workmen committed the greatest act of vandalism in the history of dinosaur study and museum development, when they trashed Hawkins' studio and destroyed all the artifacts they could find.

"Previous accounts of the incident had always reported that this was done under the personal instructions of 'Boss' Tweed himself, for various motives from raging that the display would be blasphemous, to vengeance for a perceived criticism of him in a New York Times report of the project's cancellation," co-author Mike Benton, a professor of vertebrate paleontology at the University of Bristol in England, said in the statement.

But when the researchers analyzed documents linked to the incident, the evidence didn't add up. Tweed would have had bigger fish to fry at the time the crime was committed, Coules said. "Tweed was fighting for his political life, already accused of corruption and financial wrongdoing, so why was he so involved in a museum project?" The timing of the vandalism operation also didn't align with that of the critical New York Times article.

A closer look at original sources revealed that Tweed had appointed Hilton as treasurer of Central Park and tasked him with establishing the American Museum of Natural History. In a meeting of the Central Park board which Tweed was absent from, Hilton clearly stated his intention to do away with Hawkins' workshop, according to the study. While it is still possible that Tweed was pulling the strings behind the scenes, the researchers did not find evidence to suggest that he was.

The researchers also found that Hilton was notorious for his questionable decision-making. "Hilton exhibited an eccentric and destructive approach to cultural artifacts and a remarkable ability to destroy everything he touched," they wrote. He insisted that a statue of Eve at the Fountain in Central Park and a whale skeleton donated to the museum be painted white, for example. Both were damaged and could not be restored afterwards.Hilton later cheated a widow out of her inheritance, squandered his fortune and destroyed others' businesses and livelihoods as he went through life, according to the statement.

Hawkins was never compensated for his dismissal, but identifying the likely culprit sheds new light on the curious case of Central Park's dinosaurs. "This might seem like a local act of thuggery but correcting the record is hugely important in our understanding of the history of paleontology," Benton said.

The Teutonic Knights were one of the great chivalric orders that emerged from the Crusades, alongside the Hospitallers and Templars, but while those other knights made their names in the Holy Land, the Teutonic Knights fought their greatest battles in Europe.

In the latest issue of All About History, on sale now, you can find out how the Teutonic order grew its powerbase in Europe and why it was called to put down 'pagan' elements in Northern and Eastern Europe. Learn how their crusader training make them unstoppable at first, and who ultimately stood against them. And, what would have happened if Joan of Arc had failed in her mission to free Orlean from the British?

Read all this and the full story of the last crusaders, the Teutonic Knights, in issue 126.

Also in issue 126 of All About History: uncover the mystery behind the death of Britain's greatest showman, learn why Henry Christophe was the first and last king of Haiti and explore the life of celebrated American politician and gay rights activist Harvey Milk.

Related: Read a free issues of All About History

In issue 126 you can also read about the great women of the Renaissance movement, learn about the origins of combat divers in WWII and explore the fascinating history of ballet dancing. It's all in All About History 126.

The last crusaders

The Order of the Teutonic Knights (known officially as The Order of the German House of St Mary in Jerusalem) is a charitable institution that remains active today. As indicated by its full name, it was primarily composed of German knights. The Order's origins are directly linked to the time of the Crusades to the Holy Land, when it was first established as a charitable order around 1190, during the time of the Third Crusade (1188–92). 

However, it should be made clear that its members were not 'crusaders', but rather the members of a monastic corporation. They took lifelong vows of poverty and chastity, as opposed to the temporary vow made by those who journeyed on crusade. 

In any case, the knights and their activities in the Middle Ages were strongly linked to the development of the crusade phenomenon. The Teutonic Knights entered a world already dominated by two (perhaps) more well-known brotherhoods: the Knights Templar and the Knights of St John, also known as the Hospitallers. The Templars' history has since crossed into a quasi-mythical realm, primarily due to their disbandment in the early 14th century. By contrast, the Hospitallers still remain active. The white cross of the St John's Ambulance Cadets seen throughout the United Kingdom today is a reminder of the Order's history. By 1198, its prestige had increased to such an extent that the Order was militarized by Pope Innocent III. It took a monastic rule that combined the martial duties of the Templars (defending the holy places and protect pilgrims visiting them) in addition to the Hospitaller obligations of the Order of St John.

Read more in All About History 126.

Last king of Haiti

In November 1815, Londoners were treated to one of the grandest exhibitions of craftsmanship the city had seen for some time. 23 state carriages were put on public display in Charles Street, Marylebone. No one who saw them failed to be awed by their magnificence, from the gilt moldings of the bodywork topped with crowned phoenixes and the finely painted coats of arms on the panels, to the luscious velvet interiors fringed with gold drapery. The carriages, along with harnesses, crimson saddles and silver-clawed tiger skin saddlecloths, had cost the coachmakers Crowther and Tapp an estimated £12,000 to make. 

"It is to be lamented that more time is not allowed the public," wrote "The Morning Chronicle", "to witness one of the grandest specimens of art and elegance ever combined in one piece of work of the kind that has been sent from this country." The same week the newspaper had cooed over a set of satin gowns "finished by one of our fashionable dress-makers" along with pieces from the Prince Regent's own jeweler, cut-glass chandeliers, damask cloths and marble busts. The purchaser was Henry Christophe, who had crowned himself King Henry I of Haiti only four years earlier, the ruler of a free Black kingdom in a Caribbean dominated by colonial slavery. 

Learn more about Henry Christophe in All About History 126.  

Life of Harvey Milk

San Francisco has long held a reputation as the 'Gay Capital of the World', with more of its citizens identifying as lesbian, gay, bisexual or trans than anywhere else in the United States. Every year the city hosts a huge pride celebration, with over 200 contingents taking part in the 2022 parade. A figure key in San Francisco's LGBTQ+ past is a man called Harvey Milk – one of the first elected officials to be open about their homosexuality in the history of the United States. Milk's career saw him fight passionately for LGBTQ+ rights, memorably campaigning against John Briggs' Proposition 6 and introducing legislation that protected the rights of queer persons within San Francisco. However, on 27 November 1978 Milk was assassinated in a brutal killing that shocked and horrified the city that he loved so much.

Milk was born in the suburbs of New York on the 22 May 1930 to Jewish parents William Milk and Minerva Karns. The youngster struggled with his parents' Judaism and would eventually drift away from the religion, though Milk's biographer Lillian Faderman maintains that its cultural values remained important to him throughout his life. From a young age Milk was aware that he was homosexual. A keen lover of opera, it was in the standing room only section of the balcony at the Manhattan Opera House that Milk experienced his first sexual liaisons, according to his biographer Randy Shilts. However, Milk was conscious of the need to hide his homosexuality and any interests that he felt might label him as such. Therefore at school he hid his love of opera under his prowess as a sportsman.

Read more about Harvey Milk in All About History 125.

To prevent the outbreak of World War III, which could involve the use of nuclear weapons, the world's superpowers have developed a system of diplomacy and deterrence. Despite this, since 1945 several crises have brought the U.S. and the Soviet Union (now the Russian Federation) close to a third devastating conflict. 

In the autumn of 1962 the Cuban Missile Crisis brought the governments of the United States and the Soviet Union close to the point of a nuclear conflict. Since then both the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., then Russia, have maintained direct, continual communication channels in order to avoid an accidental launch of nuclear weapons and triggering the global catastrophe of World War III, according to the Nuclear Threat Initiative.

The threat of World War III

World War II ended soon after nuclear bombs were dropped on Hiroshima brought about the first possibility of nuclear annihilation in human history. The proliferation of nuclear weapons then gave rise to the potential for an exchange of atomic bombs and later intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM), according to the U.S. National Park Service capable of wreaking destruction on a massive scale.  

The use of the atomic bombs against the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that ended World War II in the Pacific in 1945 demonstrated the awesome destructive capability of such weapons.

However, the development of nuclear weapons was not to remain exclusively with the United States. The Soviet Union conducted its first nuclear test on August 29, 1949, according to the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO), a non–profit set up by the U.N. to monitor and enforce the 1996 treaty banning nuclear testing. 

It wasn't long before the Soviets deployed their own arsenal of nuclear weapons, creating the possibility of a global conflict with the use of potentially devastating consequences for the world.  

Safeguards against World War III

The U.S. and Soviet Union came to the brink of nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis, in 1962, according to the Office of the Historian. One of the big challenges facing the leaders of both nations was the slow and unreliable channels of communication between the two leaders, President John F. Kennedy and Chairman Nikita Khrushchev, according to a paper in the Journal of Global Security Studies. 

The potentially devastating outcome of this crisis caused the two nations to create and maintain safeguards to prevent miscommunication and the unintentional or inadvertent outbreak of World War III.  

One of these safeguards is a communications hotline between the two nations' capitals, which was instituted in August 1963. This hotline was intended to provide "direct communication between the White House and the Kremlin," Roger Hermiston, author of "Two Minutes to Midnight: 1953 – The Year of Living Dangerously" (Biteback Publishing, 2021) told Live Science in an email. 

Over the years additional safeguards were put in place, including the 1971 Agreement on Measures to reduce the Risk of Outbreak of Nuclear War and the 1972 Agreement on the Prevention of Incidents at Sea. 

The Moscow–Washington hotline

As early as 1954, the Soviet government suggested the implementation of safeguards against an accidental nuclear exchange, and nearly a decade later, on June 20, 1963, the Soviet and U.S. governments signed the Memorandum of Understanding Between the United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics Regarding the Establishment of a Direct Communications Link, according to the U.S. Department of State.

The first hotline between Moscow and Washington D.C. utilized teletype equipment that was manufactured both in the U.S. and the Soviet Union and then exchanged. The circuitry routed from Washington, D.C., through London, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Helsinki, and on to Moscow, while a backup radio line linked the destination points through Tangier, in northwestern Morocco.

In the 1980s, the hotline was upgraded with fax equipment, and a secure computer email link was implemented in 2008.

According to Hermiston, the hotline is a complement to a number of "broad safeguards including reducing the amount of nuclear weapons in circulation, and developing treaties like the Intermediate–Range Nuclear Forces (I.N.F.) Treaty in 1987, the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (S.T.A.R.T.) in 1991 and the Strategic Offensive Reduction Treaty (S.O.R.T.) in 2002.  

"Interestingly, on Jan. 3, 2022, the five big nuclear powers — U.S., China, Russia, France and the U.K. — signed a joint statement committing themselves to Preventing Nuclear War and Avoiding Arms Races," Hermiston wrote.

1953: The pivotal year

According to Hermiston, a nuclear arms race between the world's superpowers began in 1953, and prompted safeguards to be put in place.  By the early 1950s, the development of nuclear weapons with far greater destructive capacity than the first bombs were in various stages of research and deployment, particularly the hydrogen bomb. 

"1953 was the year in which the world moved a dangerous step forward from the atomic bomb to the new terrifying super bomb — a thermonuclear explosive based on hydrogen fusion, up to a thousand times more destructive than the bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki," Hermiston wrote.  

"The Americans had produced their prototype H–Bomb — codenamed Ivy Mike — in November 1952. Next the Russians successfully tested their own, codenamed Joe–4, in August 1953.  As a result, the Doomsday Clock, that measurement of how close the world is to Armageddon, was moved to two minutes to midnight, the closest it had been in seven years of Cold War."

The augmentation of the U.S. and Soviet nuclear stockpiles magnified the importance of direct communication between the superpowers, according to Hermiston. "As the Soviets grew their stockpile under [Premier Leonid] Brezhnev. parity between the two great powers came in the mid–70s.  The phrase "Mutually Assured Destruction" (M.A.D.) was first coined and declared by U.S. Secretary of State Robert McNamara in the early 1960s."

Simply put, MAD asserted that a nuclear strike by one power would invoke a retaliatory strike by the other, leading to the devastation of both, and in turn, a global nuclear holocaust.

"By 1962, the year of the Cuban Missile Crisis, U.S. possessed 25,540 nukes, the Soviets had 3,356 and the U.K. had 211," Hermiston wrote.   

According to Hermiston, the nuclear weapons stockpiles among the world powers by the end of 1953 were as follows:

• U.S.A.: 1,169 
• Soviet Union: 120 
• U.K.: 1

Brushes with fate

Since its inception, the Moscow–Washington hotline has been utilized on several occasions, providing that vital link between the Kremlin, the White House and the Pentagon. 

The hotline, sometimes referred to as "MOLINK" according to the New York Times archive, was reportedly activated during the Six Day War of 1967, the Indo–Pakistani War of 1971, the Yom Kippur War of 1973, the Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, recent Russian military intervention in Syria, and perhaps on other occasions.

Recent reports indicate that the military establishments of the United States and Russia have opened a direct, tactical hotline to mitigate the possibility of an accidental military encounter during the current Russian operations in Ukraine, according to the U.S. Department of State.  A senior U.S. official told NBC News in early March 2022, "The Department of Defense recently established a de–confliction line with the Russian Ministry of Defense on March 1 for the purposes of preventing miscalculation, military incidents, and escalation."

Such a safeguard is warranted given the proximity of Russian forces operating in Ukraine to the frontiers of Poland, Romania, Hungary and other NATO countries.

Hermiston sees the currently unstable situation through the lens of history. "In 1953, the most worrying moments came after the death of [Soviet Premier Josef] Stalin, with the Korean War still raging," he assessed.  

"There was optimism that we might enter a new era of 'détente' with the Soviets, but the problem was no one really knew what his successors in the Kremlin were thinking.  Two weeks after Stalin's funeral, the shooting down of a British Lincoln bomber by a Soviet MiG fighter – killing all six crew – was a dangerous flashpoint.  

Today, MAD is entrenched and acknowledged, so Putin's disturbing rhetoric will remain just that — rhetoric. By attacking the West with nuclear weapons, he would invite the destruction of his own country."

Can World War III be prevented?  Reason and logic, perhaps, will prevail, while existing safeguards may be expected to serve their purpose.

Additional resources

To learn more about how close we are to World War III, listen to this discussion from Boston University. Additionally, to explore the history of nuclear weapons, visit the website of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons.

Bibliography

• "The Biden–Putin Summit: What is “Strategic Stability” and Why Is It Important to U.S.–Russia Relations?". The Nuclear Threat Initiative (2021). 
• "Series: Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles". The National Park Service.
• "29 August 1949 – First Soviet nuclear test". Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Organization
• "The Cuban Missile Crisis, October 1962". The Office of the Historian. 
• "Trusting Through the Moscow–Washington Hotline: A Role Theoretical Explanation of the Hotline's Contribution to Crisis Stability". Journal of Global Security Studies (2020).
•  "Two Minutes to Midnight: 1953 – The Year of Living Dangerously" (Biteback Publishing, 2021).
• "1971 Agreement on Measures to reduce the Risk of Outbreak of Nuclear War". U.S. Department of State.
• "1972 Agreement on the Prevention of Incidents at Sea". U.S. Department of State. 
• "Memorandum of Understanding Between The United States of America and The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics Regarding the Establishment of a Direct Communications Link". U.S. Department of State. 
• "One crisis alone justified the hot line". The New York Times (1973). 

Voting gives us a voice, enabling us to express our beliefs, act on our views and have a say in matters that will impact the way we live. However, the right to vote, known as suffrage, has not always been universal. In the U.S. women's suffrage has only existed for around a century. 

Today, citizens over the age of 18 can vote, and many take this for granted. Taking part in an election used to be an unlikely ambition for many women, and some dedicated their lives to turning this into a reality. When the 19th Amendment was ratified in 1920, all men's and women's suffrage was guaranteed, according to the publication "Insights on Law and Society". Before this, American women were treated as inferior to men and made to abide by laws that they could not vote for or against.

Women's position in society was so fixed that many had simply accepted their place, and some fought against their own rights, according to NPR History Department. But while there was so much women were forbidden from doing, there were some who believed they could bring about change. This is the story of those who fought relentlessly for equality at a time when the odds were not in their favour. These are the people who gave women after them the voice and rights without which they were forced to live.

July 19-20 1848: First convention

The Seneca Falls Convention was the first convention for women's rights in modern North America, according to the Journal of Women's History. This event, held in New York, saw the attendance of 300 people, who were mainly local, according to the journal The Wilson Quarterly. 

Among the issues of equality in jobs, religion, education and politics, they debated the issue of having to follow laws dictated by men. This convention gained press coverage and recognition across the U.S. and became a regular and more popular affair over the years.

Oct. 23-24 1850: National Woman's Rights Convention

The first of these annual meetings took place in Worcester, MA, according to the book "Lucy Stone: Pioneer of Woman's Rights". This was led by both men and women and drew in a crowd of over 1,000 people. Paulina Wright Davis addressed the crowd, saying: "It is one thing to issue a declaration of rights, but quite another thing to commend the subject to the world's acceptance." This gathering took place every year for the next decade — with the exception of 1857 — to try to apply this equality.

May 1866: American Equal Rights Association formed

This association aimed for equal rights for all U.S. citizens. While especially focused on votes for women at this time, it also tackled inequality based on race, according to American History USA. They made a pledge at the 11th National Woman's Rights Convention to achieve suffrage for women of all races.

Nov. 19 1868: Demonstrations begin

During the presidential election, women were expected to sit back and let the men decide who would run the country. However, in New Jersey 172 women voted anyway, according to the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), bringing their own ballot box with them. Although their votes still weren't counted, by voting in a separate box their votes served as a powerful demonstration.

1890: Society plan

Following the merging of the American Woman Suffrage Association and the National Woman Suffrage Association, the National American Woman Suffrage Association was formed. The group's new president put in place a structure to recruit more privileged members, according to the book "Women in the American Political System". The thought was that this would increase their status, but this led to racial inequality within the groups — a step backwards in the aim to grant women of all races equal voting rights.

May 21 1910: First large-scale parades

On the streets of New York City, hundreds of women took to the streets in a parade of protest, according to the National Women's History Museum. Later suffrage parades would soon rise to thousands of participants each year. This proved hugely successful in publicising the issue and recruiting more protesters. The parade was even given official city permission to become a recurring event. 

Dec. 2 1916: Petition dropping

With thousands of petition signers on board, how do you make sure the president pays attention to your efforts? Activists in 1916 discovered one way to do this was to literally drop petitions onto President Woodrow Wilson. The way they achieved this was by flying over his yacht armed with their well-earned signatures, according to The History Center. 

A month later the National Woman's Party protested in front of the White House for six days a week, standing their ground in the face of violence from the public, police arrests and bad weather.

Jan. 9 1918: Presidential support

Having succeeded in capturing the president's attention, he finally announced his support for women's suffrage, according to the journal Political Science Quarterly. The next day the House of Representatives voted, with two-thirds in favour of the amendment. 

When later addressing the Senate, it became clear that the president's opinion of women had changed significantly due to their vital roles in World War I. As part of his speech he said: "We have made partners of the women in this war... shall we admit them only to a partnership of suffering and sacrifice and toil, and not to a partnership of privilege and right?"

Aug. 26 1920: Women gain the vote

After states across the U.S. had introduced the new law one by one, it was on this day that the 19th Amendment was signed into law, according to the Iowa Department of Cultural Affairs. 

This amendment guaranteed every American woman in every state the right to vote. While some of the early activists never got to live to see the success of what they began, this victory meant that their strength and determination was not in vain, and that American women would no longer have to live by the laws dictated to them by men.

5 influential suffrage speakers

Sojourner Truth

As an African-American woman who was owned as a slave for around 28 years, Sojourner Truth had known a life of inequality, according to Columbia University. The speech she made at the 1851 Women's Rights Convention became her most famous, proving what women are capable of. She said: "Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted… and no man could head me. And ain't I a woman?"

Elizabeth Cady Stanton

While at an anti-slavery convention in 1840, Stanton met Lucretia Mott; together they planned to organise a women's rights convention. It was this pair who organized the Seneca Falls Convention eight years later, according to the Library of Congress. At this event, Stanton addressed the crowd: "Man cannot speak for us because he has been educated to believe that we differ from him so materially that he cannot judge of our thoughts, feelings and opinions by his own."

Susan B. Anthony

After she was arrested and fined $100 for voting in the 1872 presidential election, according to Smithsonian Magazine, Anthony made a speech explaining she had not committed a crime, but "exercised [her] citizen's rights". She continued to express that it was "a downright mockery to talk to women of their enjoyment of the blessings of liberty while they are denied the use of the only means of securing them... the ballot".

Emmeline Pankhurst

"I am here as a person who, according to the law courts of my country, it has been decided, is of no value to the community at all." These were the words spoken by Pankhurst, leader of the Women's Social and Political Union in the UK, according to the Iowa State University. She traveled to Connecticut to address an audience in November 1913.

Anna J. Cooper

In 1893 at the World's Congress of Representative Women, Cooper spoke of women's ability to put aside their differences to win rights they were all entitled to, according to the University of New Mexico. 

In her speech she said: "[Not till] the pursuit of happiness is conceded to be inalienable to all; not till then is a woman's lesson taught and a woman's cause won — not the white woman's, nor the black woman’s, not the red woman's, but the cause of every man and every woman who has writhed silently under a mighty wrong."

Additional resources

To learn about the suffragettes who won the right to vote for British women, you can watch this video by the BBC. You can view some letters and other primary sources from the women's suffrage movement at the National Archives website. 

Bibliography

• "From 19th Amendment to ERA: Constitutional Amendments for Women's Equality". Insights on Law and Society (2019-2020). https://heinonline.org/HOL/LandingPage
• "The Seneca Falls Women's Rights Convention: A Study of Social Networks". Journal of Women's History (1991). https://muse.jhu.edu/article/362977
• "Act One" The Wilson Quarterly (1986). https://www.jstor.org/stable/40257059
• "Lucy Stone: Pioneer of Woman's Rights". Blackwell, A.S. University of Virginia Press (2001). https://books.google.co.uk/books
• "Women in the American Political System: An Encyclopedia of Women as Voters, Candidates, and Office Holders" Bystrom D. G. (2018). https://books.google.co.uk/books
• "Woodrow Wilson, Alice Paul, and the Woman Suffrage Movement". Political Science Quarterly (1984).  https://www.jstor.org/stable/2149723

At the zenith of its control, the Roman Empire had a road network stretching from the sun-bathed Rock of Gibraltar to the marshlands of Mesopotamia. As the saying goes, "All roads lead to Rome" — but was that really the case?

The answer is not as easy as an unequivocal 'yes' or 'no.' It's a little more complicated than that. 

In 2015, three researchers at the Moovel Lab — a now-defunct German urban design team — dropped a uniform grid of almost 500,000 points across a map of Europe. These points didn't represent ancient or modern cities, but were simply random spots from which to start a journey to the imperial capital. The team then used an algorithm to calculate the best route to Rome using modern routes from each of those starting points. The more frequently a segment of a road was used across the different points, the bolder it was drawn on the map. Their results showed a mesmerizing web of roads that led to Rome, connecting other major cities along the way, such as London, Constantinople (present-day Istanbul) and Paris, which were also part of the ancient empire. 

Related: Why did Rome fall? 

News of the map went viral, but it didn't actually prove that all roads lead to Rome. If the researchers had conducted the same exercise, but instead looked at the quickest way from those same 500,000 points to Berlin or Moscow, the map would show a similarly vast array of roads leading to those cities. "Our project didn't really answer the question whether all roads lead to Rome," said Philipp Schmitt, one of the designers behind the artwork. "It was a 99% playful exploration of the question." 

Yet Schmitt's design still tells us something about the endurance of Roman roads: A lot of Europe's road infrastructure is still designed to link major cities to the Italian capital, potentially a legacy of the empire. Other researchers have also found this to be the case. 

"We've used computer modeling to look at the most likely or most logical routes that connect two points on the landscape, and then compared that with our knowledge of Roman roads to see if they're similar," said César Parcero-Oubiña, a landscape archaeologist at the Institute of Heritage Sciences in Madrid, Spain. "Modern routes are often the same in most cases if you're going to and coming from places that were both also Roman cities." 

In other words, many of Europe's multi-lane highways are the successors of Roman roads. This has changed in recent years, however, Parcero-Oubiña told Live Science. "Newly built motorways avoid populated places to save money in acquiring land, so that means some brand new motorways weren't always as logical as the old Roman routes."

And that brings us to the question at hand: What was the Roman logic for road building? Did all roads lead to Rome? "It depends on the importance of the road," Parcero-Oubiña said. "The logic of how an ancient empire works isn't so different to a modern country. The Romans weren't that different to us; they were just trying to minimize routes to save time."

The main roads were straight lines whenever geography allowed, and they connected important cities to other important cities, Parcero-Oubiña said. These direct routes were only possible once a country had been properly annexed by the Romans and any military opposition subdued, otherwise it wouldn't have been safe enough to travel in the open. In the early days following the acquisition of a province when barbarians, or non-Romans, were still resisting occupation, the Romans would stick to safer and less direct routes through dense woodlands or mountains in that province, Parcero-Oubiña said. Once a province was peaceful, however, these roads formed vital connections to speed up trade and keep the military on the frontline well supplied with troops and provisions.

Related: Is it safe to eat roadkill?

"The main roads were connecting important places, and so, in one way or another, they all ended or started in Rome, but it's not like you had to go via Rome when traveling from London to Paris, because the network allowed for that to happen," Parcero-Oubiña said. These principal roads were designed for the movement of wheels and animals — in other words, they were far more sophisticated than muddy trails. "They were built with different layers like earth and rock, and then finally big slabs of stone on top. They weren't flat, but kind of dome shaped to allow proper drainage," Parcero-Oubiña said.

"The main roads were connecting important places, and so, in one way or another, they all ended or started in Rome, but it's not like you had to go via Rome when traveling from London to Paris, because the network allowed for that to happen," Parcero-Oubiña said. These principal roads were designed for the movement of wheels and animals — in other words, they were far more sophisticated than muddy trails. "They were built with different layers like earth and rock, and then finally big slabs of stone on top. They weren't flat, but kind of dome shaped to allow proper drainage," Parcero-Oubiña said.

Then came other, secondary dirt roads that weren't paved. They connected smaller towns and cities, rather than offering any sort of a route to Rome. 

So, did all Roman roads lead to Rome? No, but an awful lot of the important ones eventually made their way there. The premise of the question might be flawed anyway, said Parcero-Oubiña, because most people going to Rome weren't taking the roads. 

"Connection via sea was much more useful because it was faster and cheaper," he said. "If you wanted to go from western Iberia to Rome, for example, then you probably took a boat and not a horse and cart."

Originally published on Live Science.

Karl Marx was a German philosopher, economist, historian and journalist who is best known for his work as a radical political theorist and socialist revolutionary. In collaboration with fellow theorist and benefactor Friedrich Engels, Marx published "The Communist Manifesto" in 1848, which became the basis for communism. His writings remain widely studied but also controversial, and they have influenced revolutionary movements and political regimes across the decades, particularly during the 20th century. 

Karl Marx's early life

The third of nine children, Marx was born on May 5, 1818 in what is now Trier, Germany but at that time was a city in the Kingdom of Prussia. Though ethnically Jewish, Marx's father Heinrich had converted to Christianity, and the young Karl was baptized as a Lutheran in 1824. However, his upbringing was largely non-religious.

Related: Why does Christianity have so many denominations?

In 1843 Marx married Jenny von Westphalen, and while their marriage was happy, there were rumors of infidelity. According to Gavin Kitching, emeritus professor of politics at the University of New South Wales, Marx had an affair with the family servant, Helena Demuth, which produced a child named Freddy. "Terrified that his wife would find out, he managed to get Friedrich Engels to claim Freddy's paternity... The truth only emerged on Engel's deathbed," Kitching told Live Science in an email.

In 1843, the Marx and Jenny moved to Paris, where he became influenced by a group of German intellectuals called the Young Hegelians, who studied the work of the philosopher Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831). Through reading Hegel, Marx adopted socialist ideas as well as a revolutionary view of the European political system. Although he was a humanist, meaning he centered his beliefs on all human interests equally, he came to believe that society could only function by the destruction of the privileged upper class, and the rise of the working class — Marx referred to these classes as the proletariat and bourgeoisie, respectively. 

While in Paris Marx co-edited the short-lived political journal Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher (meaning "German-French Yearbooks") with Arnold Ruge, a fellow member of the Young Helegians. The journal was aimed at French and German socialists, to "mark the commencement and continuance of the new era that we are entering," (according to Deutsche-Französische Jahrbücher) referring to Marx's predicted socialist revolutions in Europe. Many of Marx's articles in the journal discussed ideas that would later be expanded upon in "The Communist Manifesto."

What influenced Marxism?

Similar to Hegel, Marx was strongly influenced by economists such as David Ricardo (1772-1823) and Adam Smith (1723-1790), said Allen Wood, professor of philosophy at Indiana University Bloomington. "As a historian of the 19th century, he was also influenced by French historians of the 1789 revolution, including [François] Guizot," (1787-1874) Wood told Live Science in an email. 

Another influence on Marx was his friend and collaborator Friedrich Engels. "Engels was a fine historian (in my view, better than Marx), and because he lived in Manchester and actually ran a cotton factory, he knew far more about labour conditions and working-class life generally, than Marx himself," Kitching said. "I therefore think he influenced Marx… at least as much as Hegel and Ricardo."

Marx and Engels first met in Cologne in 1842, while the latter was traveling to England, Smithsonian Magazine reported. Marx visited England three years later, after reading Engels' report, "The Condition of the Working-Class in England." There, he met leaders of the Chartists, a socialist, working-class movement that campaigned for universal male suffrage. Marx spent much of his time studying in the libraries of London and Manchester, and he eventually moved to the British capital in 1849. He remained in London for the rest of his life with his family, financially supported by Engels who sent him "up to £50 a year — equivalent to around $7,500 now," Smithsonian Magazine reported.

Related: What is fascism?

Between 1852 and 1862, Marx wrote almost 500 articles for the New York Daily Tribune newspaper as one of its European correspondents. These included reports on political events in Europe, as well as pieces on civil rights, economics and the Crimean War. During this time, an important resource for his work was the British Museum's Reading Room, which was the precursor to the British Library. 

The Reading Room housed an enormous collection of books on history, politics and economics, newspapers from around the world, and government documents and official reports, according to historian Thomas C. Jones, writing for the Migration Museum in London. This vast archive provided information for Marx's newspaper articles and for his book "Das Kapital." The Reading Room's collection was so important to Marx's work, that "it is difficult to imagine Marx's thinking or oeuvre developing in any city other than London," Jones wrote. 

Marx's revolutionary writing was considered controversial and even dangerous by some contemporaries, because of its attack on the status quo of capitalism, said Justin Holt, professor of humanities at Wilbur Wright College. This is because Marx theorized that capitalist profit was a result of exploiting workers. "Marx showed that the profit income of capitalists is based on the non-payment of workers," Holt told Live Science in an email. "Thus, if all workers are paid for their contribution at the margin, then there is no exploitation. So, Marx's theory of exploitation called into question the legitimacy of capitalist production." 

After the Paris Commune of 1871, in which far-left socialist revolutionaries formed a short-lived government in the French capital, Marx published "The Civil War in France," which voiced support for the revolutionaries. The book brought Marx notoriety in London as "the red terror doctor" because of his support for the violent revolutions that threatened to spread across Europe. This reputation is likely what caused his application for British citizenship to be rejected, Jones wrote.

The Communist Manifesto

Marx is best known for authoring "The Communist Manifesto" and "Das Kapital." 

The former, originally called "The Manifesto of the Communist Party," was co-written with Engels and published as a pamphlet in 1848. One of the principal statements of European socialist and communist ideology, the manifesto described Marx's conception of history in terms of class struggle, from medieval feudalism to 19th-century capitalism. In the document, Marx predicted that communists would overthrow the bourgeoisie and accomplish the "abolition of private property," before raising "the proletariat to the position of ruling class."

The "Manifesto of the Communist Party" is now considered one of the most significant political works in history and contains famous lines such as: "A spectre is haunting Europe — the spectre of communism," and, "The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Working men of all countries, unite!" 

Between 1867 and 1883, Marx published "Das Kapital," a huge, three-volume analysis of the economic and social failings of capitalism. Focusing on economic arguments, "Das Kapital" argued that capitalism was ultimately doomed because it could not endlessly sustain profits. 

What impact has Marxism had on the world?

Marx died of bronchitis and pleurisy at his home in London on March 14, 1883. At the time of his death he was officially a stateless person and was buried in Highgate Cemetery, north London. 

Marx is buried with his wife Jenny, who died two years earlier, his daughter Eleanor, the family servant Helena Demuth, and his grandson Harry Longuet who tragically died just six days after Marx.

Marx's writings gained popularity in the late 19th century, after Marxism became the official ideology of the German Social Democrats, which is Germany's oldest political party, according to Deutsche Welle. 

Vladimir Lenin (1870-1924) was heavily influenced by Marx's work and became the leading figure of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. This led to the creation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), or Soviet Union, a huge multinational state that was governed by the Communist Party.

Communist revolutions influenced by Marx's writing spread elsewhere in the world during the 20th century, most notably in China, North Korea, Cuba and southeast Asia. This eventually led to the onset of the Cold War, a period of geopolitical tension for nuclear dominance between democratic, capitalist governments such as the U.S., and communist regimes such as the Soviet Union.

Related: North Korea: A hermit country from above (photos)

In 1980, approximately 1.5 billion people — more than a third of the Earth's population — were living under governments that claimed to be Marxist-Leninist, according to the American Enterprise Institute, a think-tank located in Washington, D.C. 

Marx's association with the enemies of the U.S. and its allies during the Cold War made his writing controversial, Holt said. "Much of our current political awareness was shaped by the conflict with communist countries," he said. "Accordingly, Marx’s writings are controversial since they are associated with the main political antagonist of non-communist countries in the 20th century." 

Historians continue to debate about the extent to which Marx can be blamed for the governments that claimed inspiration from his writings. "Marx is often identified with the regimes in eastern Europe and in Asia that did not come into existence until a generation or more after his death and whose policies, actions and propaganda bear very little resemblance to anything you could find in Marx's writings," Wood told Live Science in an email. 

Regimes associated with Marxism committed many atrocities over the century, although Marx himself never advocated such measures. "However, this does not mean that Marx bears no responsibility for the dictatorships that were created in his name," Kitching told Live Science in an email. "He does, but that responsibility derives from his silences, from what he does not say, rather than from anything in his work."

Is Marxism still relevant?

After the collapse of the Berlin Wall and Soviet Union at the end of the 20th century, Marxism was widely regarded as a failed ideology. In a 1985 speech, president Ronald Reagan, quoting novelist John dos Passos, said: "Not only has Marxism failed to promote human freedom, it has failed to produce food." 

Toward the end of the 20th century, many communist regimes either collapsed, such as the Soviet Union, or adapted. For example, the ruling Chinese Communist Party was heavily influenced by Marxism, but its huge economy is now market-orientated. Other countries whose ruling governments derive from communist and Marxist ideology include Vietnam, Cuba and North Korea. 

Marxism is widely considered to be politically and economically irrelevant in today's world but it is still "highly influential," philosopher Peter Singer of Princeton University wrote in an article for the World Economic Forum. 

Although most of Marx's theories on capitalism are now antiquated, the contradictions he exposed between the freedom of capitalist economies, and the severe inequalities they produce, remain relevant, Kitching said, "so long as human beings continue to live in the forms of society he called 'capitalist' or 'bourgeois'... so long as we have capitalism, so long will human beings have to live with, and cope with, the contradictions he identified." 

Additional resources

• Read more on Marx, Marxists, and Marxism at the Marxists Internet Archive.
• Take a 360-degree online tour of Marx's family home in Trier with Karl Marx Haus museum.
• Book recommendation: "Marx's Capital Illustrated" (Haymarket Books, 2014) by David Smith .

This May, China landed a rover on Mars, expanding the nation's growing presence in space. The feat showed the world the nation's space capabilities and fueled fires anew of competition in space, but is there truly cause for concern?

China became the second nation ever to successfully land on Mars when its Zhurong rover touched down May 14 on the Martian plain of Utopia Planitia . Zhurong's arrival  followed NASA's successful landing of its own Perseverance rover in Jezero Crater on Mars Feb. 18. This step is one of many being taken by China to expand its presence in space, including the development of a space station and continued exploration of the far side of the moon by its lunar rover Chang'e 4. 

However, while leaders in the U.S. space sector like new NASA Administrator Bill Nelson and the former astronaut Pam Melroy, the nominee for deputy administrator, congratulated China on this incredible accomplishment, they also shared words of caution, with Nelson describing China as "a very aggressive competitor."

Related: China's Tianwen-1 Mars mission in photos

Issuing a warning

In dramatic fashion, Nelson issued a warning to U.S. lawmakers during a May 19 congressional hearing, holding up a photo from Mars snapped by China's Zhurong rover. "I want you to see this photograph … it is a very aggressive competitor," he said about China. 

"They're going to be landing humans on the moon. That should tell us something about our need to get off our duff and get our Human Landing System program going vigorously," Nelson said, adding that China's recent progress in space adds "a new element as to whether or not we want to get serious and get a lot of activity going in landing humans back on the surface of the moon." 

Nelson seemed to imply that China's success in space puts more pressure on NASA to land humans back on the moon. With its Artemis program, NASA is currently working to return humans to the lunar surface and establish a sustainable human presence on the moon by the end of the decade. 

Nelson added that China is developing three "big landers" to land near the moon's south pole, the same region Artemis aims to land. He also asserted, pointing to unnamed reports, that China is planning a flyby and a lunar landing this decade. 

Political support

Nelson used his warnings on China's progress to make the case for increased funding for the U.S. space agency. "NASA can't do it alone," he said. "We want a vigorous competition, but we've got to have the money in order to be able to do that." 

"Nelson knows that NASA needs more money than it currently has to carry out the Artemis program to return humans to the moon," David Burbach, associate professor of national security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, told Space.com. Burbach's comments are his personal opinion and do not reflect the opinions of his employer.  

"I think it mostly was a very convenient way to remind the senators that there are competitors in space," Burbach added. "I don't think it's likely that China is going to beat the U.S. back to the moon. And we certainly have an aggressive program of Mars exploration. So I think it's a stretch to suggest that China is about to surpass the United States in those areas. But Nelson is correct that China is quickly catching up to become a very serious player in deep space exploration."

Nelson is not alone in his concern. Melroy was questioned about China's activity in space during a Senate hearing on May 20 and pointed to China's numerous recent achievements. "It's not just the landing on Mars, which is very impressive, but also a couple of landings on the moon, and of course the new construction starting of a low Earth orbit space station," Melroy said.

"China has made their goals very clear — to take away space superiority from the United States," she added.

Not everyone feels the same way. 

"I think China is a long way from taking away space superiority," Burbach said. Rather, he added, "I think China is moving into the number two slot if there's a global pecking order for space capabilities." Burbach also raised the issue of what "space superiority" means, for "if we are talking about who does the most exciting or most challenging [things in space], I think the U.S. still is in a pretty good position."

Not just about a rover landing

Melroy posits that her concern doesn't just arise from China's continued accomplishments. "We are right to be concerned, when you add the other concerns of intellectual property theft and aggressive behavior in space." 

There have been concerns over the years about illegal information sharing as, by public law NASA "may not engage in any bilateral activities with China or Chinese-owned companies," according to NASA. In fact, in January 2021, according to a report from Reuters, a NASA scientist pleaded guilty to lying about ties that he had to a Chinese government program that recruits researchers from abroad to develop relationships.  

"NASA will continue to follow the law," she continued. "It's there to ensure that the U.S. thinks very carefully about any kind of engagement with China. However, we have to operate together in the space domain. So there are times when it's in the best interest of the United States to talk to China."

In May, China sparked worldwide concern when the nation's Long March 5B rocket (CZ-5B), fell uncontrolled back to Earth. The rocket launched Tianhe, the first module for China's new space station. While predictions estimated that it was unlikely that the booster or pieces of the booster would land in a populated area, it remained a possibility. Luckily, the rocket's remains fell in the Indian Ocean, well away from populated areas, but the danger sparked quite a bit of worry both at NASA and around the world. 

"Spacefaring nations must minimize the risks to people and property on Earth of re-entries of space objects and maximize transparency regarding those operations," Nelson wrote in a statement before the rocket crashed back to Earth. 

"It is clear that China is failing to meet responsible standards regarding their space debris. It is critical that China and all spacefaring nations and commercial entities act responsibly and transparently in space to ensure the safety, stability, security, and long-term sustainability of outer space activities," he added.

"Landing a rover on Mars doesn't impact America's national security, but China is working on other types of space capabilities and technologies that impact America's national security," Brain Weeden, director of program planning at Secure World Foundation, told Space.com in an email. Weeden's comments are his personal opinion and do not reflect the opinions of his employer.  

China's accomplishments on Mars and the moon aside, the country has been steadily working on military uses of space including anti-satellite missile testing, and, according to a 2018 report, developing hypersonic weapons, activities which the U.S. department of defense has been watching. At the same time, China has been reaching out to other countries to expand international cooperation, most recently by agreeing to build a research station on the moon with Russia. 

Looking to the future

So what's next? China continues to develop its space station and explore Mars and the moon as the U.S. continues its many space ventures. With the law prohibiting bilateral activities between NASA and China, collaboration in general is extremely limited. 

However, despite political constraints on information sharing, researchers will go on to publish papers about Zhurong's findings on Mars. As it's not a direct transfer of information between the two nations, this is a small way in which, in the U.S. and abroad, scientists can benefit from exploration no matter which country's rover collected the data. 

"The Chinese lunar rover results have been published in scientific journals," Edwin Wright, a planetary geoscientist at the University of Chicago, told Space.com. "So the results are shared in that way with the community." Additionally, while NASA scientists are not able to work with China, "academic scientists are free to collaborate with Chinese scientists," he added. 

Currently, competition seems to outweigh collaboration as both nations continue to push the boundaries of science and technology in space. Still, as we have seen throughout NASA's history, especially with the political pressures of the 1960s "space race" with the former Soviet Union that drove NASA to land the first humans on the moon, competition can spark innovation.

"I hope that this competition spurs both the U.S. and China and others to advance space technologies and capabilities that result in more benefits for everyone on Earth," Weeden said. "But if there's too much emphasis on the 'us or them' rhetoric, the competition in space could worsen tensions here on earth that leads to conflict, which would be bad for everyone."

The possibility of increased political and also social tension is an added concern, especially as studies have shown that anti-Asian hate crimes increased in 2020 and continue to rise in 2021 (fueled in part, experts think, by the COVID-19 virus originating in China).

"For the last four plus years, many in the U.S. have been making China out as the enemy without always distinguishing between the Chinese people, the country of China, and the ruling Chinese Communist Party," Weeden said. "The hard part is calling out the irresponsible behaviors of the government, like the CZ-5B reentry, while not making it a racist indictment of an entire people or culture."

Email Chelsea Gohd at cgohd@space.com or follow her on Twitter @chelsea_gohd. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

Are conservatives more afraid of threats than liberals? Political psychologists have long found evidence that people on the right are more sensitive to scary stuff, on average, than people on the left, a basic psychological difference thought to drive some political disagreements between the two groups. 

But new research suggests that's overly simplistic. 

In a new international study, conservatives and liberals both responded to threats — but they responded more strongly to different kinds of threats. And to make matters more complex, those responses don't always map nicely onto the political divide, or stay consistent from nation to nation.

Related: Why did the Democratic and Republican parties switch platforms?

"This link between threat and conservative beliefs, or conservative ideology, is just not simple," said study leader Mark Brandt, a psychology professor at Tilburg University in the Netherlands. "It depends on a lot of different things. It depends on the type of threats that we study; it depends on how we measure political beliefs and what kind of political beliefs that we measure; and it depends on the precise country that we're looking at." 

Taking a global view

Let's rewind to 2012, well before the 2016 election and the dramatic political fallout that's happened since. That year, psychologists reported that conservatives responded more strongly to scary images than liberals did on a basic biological level: They literally started sweating more. This tracked with earlier research suggesting that conservatives were more prone to disgust, on average, than liberals. Multiple studies reached similar conclusions.

It made for a neat story. People physiologically prone to fear and disgust would pay more attention to threats and thus turn to a conservative political ideology that promises safety and the status quo. But there was a lingering problem. Seventy-five percent of the research cited on the topic in one influential 2003 meta-analysis was done in the United States, and only 4% was conducted outside of Western democracies. Another problem? The definition of "threat" in most studies on the topic was usually narrow, focused on threats of violence or terrorism. Political persuasion was often defined narrowly too, without accounting for differences between social ideology and economic ideology. 

"Many of the studies cited in support of this conclusion use threat measures or manipulations that exclusively tap threats emphasized by conservative elites," said Ariel Malka, a political psychologist at Yeshiva University who was not involved in the new study, referring to politicians and media figures. 

This is a problem because the link between threats and politics can run both ways. For example, a recent POLITICO poll found that 70% of Republicans thought the 2020 election was marred by fraud, compared with only 10% of Democrats. Before the election, only 35% of Republicans thought the election would be fraudulent, and 52% of Democrats did. The post-election shift makes it pretty clear that people's fears of fraud are driven by party affiliation and messaging from party elites, not the other way around. If studies on threats focus on fears usually emphasized by conservatives, they're likely to find a connection between threat and conservatism. 

Brandt and his colleagues wanted to broaden the scope. They turned to a dataset called the World Values Survey, which asked people from 56 different countries and territories about their perceptions of six different categories of threats, including war, violence, police violence, economics, poverty and government surveillance. Economic threats were broad-based worries about the job market and availability of education; poverty threats were more personal concerns about being able to put food on the table or pay for medical care. The survey also captured people's political beliefs in nuanced ways, ranging from whether they called themselves conservative or liberal to their individual opinions on immigration, government ownership of industry and abortion. Data on 60,378 participants was collected between 2010 and 2014.

Not so simple

The results were messy. 

Economic fears were slightly associated with some left-wing beliefs, but not all. For example, a fear of personal poverty was linked with more acceptance of government ownership of industry, but fears about the wider economy weren't. The fear of war or terrorism was sometimes associated with right-wing beliefs, but reporting worries about violence within one's neighborhood was associated with left-wing beliefs, as was fear of police violence. 

Related: How to actually stop police brutality, according to science

And there were many unexpected findings. The threat of war or terrorism was linked to left-wing beliefs on government ownership, for example, and economic worries were linked to left-wing beliefs on social issues. The threat of personal poverty was associated with right-wing views on social issues and on protectionist job policies that would reserve the highest-paid jobs for men and non-immigrants. What was clear was that threats and right-wing beliefs weren't married. There were six statistically significant associations between certain threats and conservative beliefs, nine associations between other threats and liberal beliefs, and 15 potential relationships between threat and belief that didn't turn out to correlate at all. 

Making matters more complicated, the relationships between ideology and threats weren't consistent from nation to nation. For example a fear of war or terrorism was associated with left-wing beliefs in Kazakhstan just as strongly as a fear of war or terrorism was associated with right-wing beliefs in the United States. Likewise, Brandt told Live Science, experiencing the threat of poverty leads to left-wing beliefs in the U.S., but in Pakistan and Egypt, the threat of poverty is linked to right-wing belief. 

If you look only at the United States, the researchers report, it's true that right-wing beliefs and a fear of war or terrorism go hand-in-hand. But expanding to other threats shows an inconsistent mix of associations. In other words, even in the U.S., conservatism and a physical sensitivity to threats aren't clearly linked. 

It's not clear from the study which comes first, the political belief or the focus on a threat. It's possible that experiencing a particular threat moves people to adopt a certain political belief, but it's also possible, as with voter fraud in the 2020 election, that people adopt a political identity first and focus on specific threats as a result. 

The new work is likely to be influential, said Bert Bakker, a political scientist at the University of Amsterdam who studies the relationship of personality and political ideology. Bakker was not involved in the current study, but his work has shown that the difference in disgust between conservatives and liberals may also be overstated.

"I am less certain about what we know about this now than I was a couple years ago," Bakker told Live Science. 

It's still possible that people gravitate toward political beliefs for deep-seated psychological reasons, Brandt said. 

"It's definitely plausible that people experience some threat or some event and then adopt this attitude," he said. "But what 'this attitude' is and the best one to address that threat might be different depending on the particular context." 

There may also be other psychological reasons to associate with a political group, Malka noted. People have a social need to fit in, and may adopt attitudes that help them do so. Future research should focus more on how pre-existing political affiliation leads people to focus on different threats, he told Live Science. 

Originally published on Live Science.

In his inaugural address last week, President Joe Biden called for unity. But how can Americans come together, given what seems to be growing political contention and deep divides? 

New research suggests the answer can be found in stories, not statistics. People respect those they disagree with more when their position comes from a place of personal experience, not facts and figures, finds a new series of experiments published Monday (Jan. 25) in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. This is especially true when the personal stories are rooted in experiences of harm or vulnerability. 

"In moral disagreements, experiences seem truer than facts," said Kurt Gray, a psychologist and director of the Center for the Science of Moral Understanding at the University of North Carolina. 

Related: 13 significant protests that changed the course of history

Respectful debate

Partisan gaps on issues ranging from race relations to the role of government in helping low-income people have grown in the past few decades. The Pew Research Center has found that across 10 issues tracked since 1994, the average gap in opinions between Democrats and Republicans has grown from 15 percentage points to 36 percentage points.

Many studies on political differences focus on persuasion and how people's opinions change, but opinion change is rare, Gray told Live Science.

"In today's political climate, we need to think of a more, basic foundational goal, which is just being willing to engage in respectful dialogue with a political opponent," Gray said. 

For the new research, Gray and his colleagues focused on how facts versus experiences affected people's perceptions of their opponent's rationality and their respect for that opponent. Over 15 separate experiments, they found that, although people think they respect opponents who present facts, they actually have more respect for opponents who share personal stories. 

Related: Why is blue for Democrats and red for Republicans?

The researchers tested this idea in multiple ways. First, they told 251 participants to imagine speaking to someone they disagreed with on a moral issue, such as abortion, and asked the participants to write about would make them respect their opponents' opinions. Just over 55% said opinions based on facts and statistics would increase respect, while a smaller percentage — 21% — said personal experiences would do the trick. In a second, nationally representative study, researchers asked 859 participants to imagine interacting with one opponent who based their opinions on facts and one opponent who based their opinions on experience. The participants rated the fact-based opponent as more rational and said they would respect that opponent more than the one who argued from experience. 

But follow-up studies revealed that most of the participants had it backward. In actual face-to-face interactions, online debates and debates between talking heads on television, experience-based arguments actually garnered more respect between opponents than arguments based on facts. 

In one study, the researchers had someone pose as a passerby who was engaging people in political discussions about gun rights and gun control. In the resulting 153 face-to-face conversations about guns, independent coders rated the responses to the topic as more respectful when the faux activist based their opinions on experience over facts. The same was true in the YouTube comments. In 300,978 YouTube comments on 194 videos about abortion, the conversation was more respectful when the videos focused on personal experiences instead of facts and statistics; commenters used a more positive tone, more positive emotional words, and more words associated with affiliation and togetherness. 

Similarly, people were more respectful of New York Times op-eds based on personal experiences rather than stats, and opponents on CNN and Fox News interviews between 2002 and 2017 were more respectful, and treated their opponents as more rational, when the conversations were based on experience. 

The power of experience

Further experiments found that stories were most associated with increased respect when the experiences were relevant, harm-based and personal. People respected opponents most when they'd been through something themselves, followed by when they shared the experience of a friend or family member, and they were least impressed when someone based an argument on a stranger's anecdote or story they'd read about. 

Related: 5 milestones in gun control history

Then, the researchers explored the idea that perhaps some people's experiences seemed more trustworthy than others. First, they asked 508 participants to read fact- or experience-based arguments from people who agreed and disagreed with them on guns. The results showed that people doubted political facts presented by their opponents far more than facts presented by someone they agreed with. There was not nearly as large of a gap in doubt, however, between experiences presented by opponents and experiences presented by someone on the participant's side.

Ultimately, people can always come up with a way to doubt or discount facts, Gray said, but personal experiences are harder to argue away. 

"It's just so hard to doubt when someone tells you, 'Look, this terrible thing happened to me,'" he said. 

The researchers also tested whether people would discount certain life experiences more than others. Given that the experiences of people of color and women are often downplayed, they investigated whether participants would be dismissive of the experiences of a Black woman who disagreed with them on gun control. Again, personal experiences beat out facts for increasing respect for the opponent. In another study, researchers compared how people responded to views on immigration from a scientist. In that study, personal experiences again garnered the most respect, followed by scientific research. Facts cited by a layperson were deemed least worthy of respect. 

Personal experiences have fueled recent movements, such as Black Lives Matter and the #MeToo movement, Gray said. Even if personal experience does not ultimately lead to persuasion, respectful discussion is an important underpinning of democracy, he said. 

"I don’t want this to sound like you shouldn't be able to condemn people's views," Gray said. "[But] you can still have respect for someone as a human being and appreciate the roots of their views, and you at least need to know what those views are."

Originally published on Live Science.

When armed supporters of President Donald Trump broke into and vandalized the United States Capitol on Jan. 6 in Washington, D.C., many were chanting "Stop the steal," referring to President-elect Joe Biden's victory in the recent election. Some wore sweatshirts reading "Civil War" with the date "January 6, 2021." Their fervent cries were fueled by encouraging words from the president and from Republican leaders, who for months have falsely claimed that Trump's loss to President-elect Biden — by more than 7 million votes — was invalid.

Trump's ongoing refusal to accept the election results, despite having no evidence that the process or results were fraudulent in any way, has led to speculation that he planned to remain in power not by lawful means but through a coup d'état, or coup — a French term describing the overthrow of a government. 

By urging invasion of the Capitol and refusing to activate the National Guard to repel the invaders, Trump appeared to embrace the notion of violence as a pathway to his continued power. This behavior is a hallmark of many leaders who have used violent coups to forcibly take control in nations around the world — even, once, in the U.S.

Related: 10 times the US Capital weathered political violence

During a coup, a government's executive authority is displaced or removed suddenly and by illegal means, according to the Coup D'état Project (CDP) at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign's Cline Center for Advanced Social Research.

Coups are not always violent, and they typically originate with small, elite groups already within the government. However, a coup can also be triggered by military actions, the involvement of operators representing foreign governments, or popular revolts "manifested by high levels of civil unrest," the CDP says.

The term "coup d'état," which translates as "stroke of the state," can be traced to the 17th century, but the first modern coup — in which coordinated efforts overthrow the government and install its replacement — is thought to be Napoleon Bonaparte's power grab in France in 1799, according to a study published in 1994 in the journal Terrorism and Political Violence.

Coups in modern history

By the 20th century, coups were "a key feature" in politics, with "170 successful and 141 unsuccessful coups in 79 countries between 1945 and 1986," the study author reported (13 of the coups were in Argentina alone). Cuba's coup d'état in 1952 saw the Cuban Army derail upcoming elections and install a military dictatorship; a military coup in Bolivia in 1979 toppled the country's first democratically elected government; and Mali's longstanding democracy was overthrown by a coup in 2012, to name just a few. 

There was even a successful coup in the U.S. on Nov. 10, 1898 in Wilmington, North Carolina by former Confederate colonel and U.S. congressman Alfred Moore Waddell, leading about 2,000 white supremacists. Enraged by "Negro domination" in local politics, the mob torched the offices of Wilmington's Black-owned newspaper "The Daily Record" and murdered dozens of Black people, according to the Zinn Education Project. 

Waddell then replaced recently-elected local officials with white supremacists, who elected him mayor. Wilmington's Black community was decimated, with many leaders imprisoned and hundreds of people "banished" from the city, according to A North Carolina History Online Resource (ANCHOR). The event "marked a turning point in North Carolina's history because more restrictions were placed on African American voters," according to ANCHOR.

Related: What is the 25th amendment?

More recently, on July 15, 2016, members of the Turkish military tried to unseat President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in an attempted coup that killed 241 people and injured more than 2,000. The coup was thwarted by thousands of citizens who mobilized in the streets, joining forces with police and loyalist soldiers to stop it, Al Jazeera reported in 2017.

However, even when coups are unsuccessful, they can still do lasting damage. A military coup in Spain in July 1936 sought to overthrow the Republic; while the rebellion went down in flames, it also sparked a civil war that lasted for three years, ending in another coup in March 1939, according to a paper published in 2019 by the Elcano Royal Institute in Madrid. 

And a failed coup in Russia in 1993 led to then-leader Boris Yeltsin consolidating power in the presidency, German news agency DW Akademie reported. In doing so, Yeltsin created a constitution and a presidential authority in which an "untouchable" president was capable of shaping public policy heedless of elections and votes — a position maintained by the nation's current leader, Vladimir Putin, DW Akademie says.

"We will never concede"

Was the Jan. 6 incident in Washington, D.C. part of an attempted coup? Prior to the storming of the Capitol, Trump spoke to thousands of his supporters at a rally outside the White House, saying "We will never give up; we will never concede," The Los Angeles Times reported. Trump then urged the mob to march on the Capitol and demonstrate to Republicans "the kind of pride and boldness that they need to take back our country." 

After the Capitol was breached and the violence escalated, Trump ignored urgent calls to mobilize the National Guard, according to The New York Times; the Guard finally moved in only after they were authorized to do so by Vice President Mike Pence. 

"It was unclear why Mr. Trump, who is still technically the commander in chief, did not give the order," The Times reported. 

As the mob of Trump supporters swarmed the Capitol, they assaulted police, smashed Capitol windows and furniture, and vandalized offices. Three people died after suffering medical emergencies during the siege, and one woman was fatally shot while inside the building; police later recovered two pipe bombs and a cooler containing explosives from the grounds, The Washington Post reported.

Trump released a recorded statement late in the afternoon saying "we had an election that was stolen from us" and telling the rioters "we love you, you're very special." But by the day's end, President-elect Joe Biden's victory was certified by U.S. lawmakers, according to the BBC. On Jan. 7 at 3:50 a.m. ET, Trump issued a statement on Twitter via White House chief of staff Dan Scavino (Twitter had locked Trump's account for 12 hours the day before) saying "there will be an orderly transition on January 20th." 

However, Trump reiterated "I totally disagree with the outcome of the election," adding in a second tweet: "While this represents the end of the greatest first term in presidential history, it's only the beginning of our fight to Make America Great Again!"

Originally published on Live Science.

As states continue to count their ballots in the 2020 election, it seems possible that Democrats and Republicans will end up in court over whether President Trump will win a second term in the White House.

President Trump has said he’s going to contest the election results – going so far as to say that he believes the election will ultimately be decided by the Supreme Court. Meanwhile, Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden has a team of lawyers lined up for a legal battle.

Unprecedented changes in voting procedures due to the coronavirus pandemic have created openings for candidates to cry foul. Republicans have argued that extending deadlines to receive and count ballots will lead to confusion and fraud, while Democrats believe Republicans are actively working to disenfranchise voters.

Should either candidate refuse to concede, it wouldn’t be the first time turmoil and claims of fraud dominated the days and weeks after the elections.

The elections of 1876, 1888, 1960 and 2000 were among the most contentious in American history. In each case, the losing candidate and party dealt with the disputed results differently.

1876: A compromise that came at a price

By 1876 – 11 years after the end of the Civil War – all the Confederate states had been readmitted to the Union, and Reconstruction was in full swing. The Republicans were strongest in the pro-Union areas of the North and African-American regions of the South, while Democratic support coalesced around southern whites and northern areas that had been less supportive of the Civil War. That year, Republicans nominated Ohio Gov. Rutherford B. Hayes, and Democrats chose New York Gov. Samuel Tilden.

But on Election Day, there was widespread voter intimidation against African-American Republican voters throughout the South. Three of those Southern states – Florida, Louisiana and South Carolina – had Republican-dominated election boards. In those three states, some initial results seemed to indicate Tilden victories. But due to widespread allegations of intimidation and fraud, the election boards invalidated enough votes to give the states – and their electoral votes – to Hayes. With the electoral votes from all three states, Hayes would win a 185-184 majority in the Electoral College.

Competing sets of election returns and electoral votes were sent to Congress to be counted in January 1877, so Congress voted to create a bipartisan commission of 15 members of Congress and Supreme Court justices to determine how to allocate the electors from the three disputed states. Seven commissioners were to be Republican, seven were to be Democrats, and there would be one independent, Justice David Davis of Illinois.

But in a political scheme that backfired, Davis was chosen by Democrats in the Illinois state legislature to serve in the U.S. Senate. (Senators weren’t chosen by voters until 1913.) They’d hoped to win his support on the electoral commission. Instead, Davis resigned from the commission and was replaced by Republican Justice Joseph Bradley, who proceeded to join an 8-7 Republican majority that awarded all the disputed electoral votes to Hayes.

Democrats decided not to argue with that final result due to the “Compromise of 1877,” in which Republicans, in return for getting Hayes in the White House, agreed to an end to Reconstruction and military occupation of the South.

Hayes had an ineffective, one-term presidency, while the compromise ended up destroying any semblance of African-American political clout in the South. For the next century, southern legislatures, free from northern supervision, would implement laws discriminating against blacks and restricting their ability to vote.

1888: Bribing blocks of five

In 1888, Democratic President Grover Cleveland of New York ran for reelection against former Indiana U.S. Sen. Benjamin Harrison.

Back then, election ballots in most states were printed, distributed by political parties and cast publicly. Certain voters, known as “floaters,” were known to sell their votes to willing buyers.

Harrison had appointed an Indiana lawyer, William Wade Dudley, as treasurer of the Republican National Committee. Shortly before the election, Dudley sent a letter to Republican local leaders in Indiana with promised funds and instructions for how to divide receptive voters into “blocks of five” to receive bribes in exchange for voting the Republican ticket. The instructions outlined how each Republican activist would be responsible for five of these “floaters.”

Democrats got a copy of the letter and publicized it widely in the days leading up to the election. Harrison ended up winning Indiana by only about 2,000 votes but still would have won in the Electoral College without the state.

Cleveland actually won the national popular vote by almost 100,000 votes. But he lost his home state, New York, by about 1 percent of the vote, putting Harrison over the top in the Electoral College. Cleveland’s loss in New York may have also been related to vote-buying schemes.

Cleveland did not contest the Electoral College outcome and won a rematch against Harrison four years later, becoming the only president to serve nonconsecutive terms of office. Meanwhile, the blocks-of-five scandal led to the nationwide adoption of secret ballots for voting.

1960: Did the Daley machine deliver?

The 1960 election pitted Republican Vice President Richard Nixon against Democratic U.S. Sen. John F. Kennedy.

The popular vote was the closest of the 20th century, with Kennedy defeating Nixon by only about 100,000 votes – a less than 0.2 percent difference.

Because of that national spread – and because Kennedy officially defeated Nixon by less than 1 percent in five states (Hawaii, Illinois, Missouri, New Jersey, New Mexico) and less than 2 percent in Texas – many Republicans cried foul. They fixated on two places in particular – southern Texas and Chicago, where a political machine led by Mayor Richard Daley allegedly churned out just enough votes to give Kennedy the state of Illinois. If Nixon had won Texas and Illinois, he would have had an Electoral College majority.

While Republican-leaning newspapers proceeded to investigate and conclude that voter fraud had occurred in both states, Nixon did not contest the results. Following the example of Cleveland in 1892, Nixon ran for president again in 1968 and won.

2000: The hanging chads

In 2000, many states were still using the punch card ballot, a voting system created in the 1960s. Even though these ballots had a long history of machine malfunctions and missed votes, no one seemed to know or care – until all Americans suddenly realized that the outdated technology had created a problem in Florida.

Then, on Election Day, the national media discovered that a “butterfly ballot,” a punch card ballot with a design that violated Florida state law, had confused thousands of voters in Palm Beach County.

Many who had thought they were voting for Gore unknowingly voted for another candidate or voted for two candidates. (For example, Reform Party candidate Pat Buchanan received about 3,000 votes from voters who had probably intended to vote for Gore.) Gore ended up losing the state to Bush by 537 votes – and, in losing Florida, lost the election.

But ultimately, the month-long process to determine the winner of the presidential election came down to an issue of “hanging chads.”

Over 60,000 ballots in Florida, most of them on punch cards, had registered no vote for president on the punch card readers. But on many of the punch cards, the little pieces of paper that get punched out when someone votes – known as chads – were still hanging by one, two or three corners and had gone uncounted. Gore went to court to have those ballots counted by hand to try to determine voter intent, as allowed by state law. Bush fought Gore’s request in court. While Gore won in the Florida State Supreme Court, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled at 10 p.m. on Dec. 12 that Congress had set a deadline of that date for states to choose electors, so there was no more time to count votes.

Gore conceded the next day.

The national drama and trauma that followed Election Day in 1876 and 2000 could be repeated this year. Of course, a lot will depend on the margins and how the candidates react.

Most eyes will be on Trump, who hasn't said whether or not he'll accept the result if he loses. On election night, he announced he had won before all the votes had been counted in a number of battleground states.  

This is an updated version of an article originally published on Nov. 1, 2016.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

In any 2020 electoral map, the color scheme is clear: Red is for Republicans, blue is for Democrats. But where did this universal agreement on color-coding come from? 

It's relatively new. Though red and blue have often been used to stand in for opposing sides in U.S. political history, it's only since the 2000 election that red and blue have been assigned to the political parties consistently. 

That year, The New York Times and USA Today published full-color electoral maps for the first time, and according to The Verge, they assigned the colors fairly arbitrarily. 

"[R]ed begins with r, Republican begins with r," senior graphics editor Archie Tse told The Verge. "It was a more natural association."

Related: Why did the Democratic and Republican parties switch platforms?

The political parties have now embraced their assigned colors, with Democrats urging citizens to "Vote Blue!" and supporters of Donald Trump donning red "Make America Great Again" hats. But it could have easily gone the other way. According to The History Channel, the first colorful electoral maps on television were broadcast in 1976, but there was no consistency between networks as to what colors were used for which party. Red often stood in for Democrats, and blue for Republicans. 

Going back further in time, red and blue were common options for differentiating political parties or two sides of an issue. For example, in the late 1800s and early 1900s, bosses of political parties in South Texas color-coded ballots red and blue for Republican and Democrat in order to "assist" illiterate or non-English-speaking voters at the polls (this assistance often involved outright election fraud, according to the Texas State Historical Association). Republicans were often red in this system, though the colors varied from county to county. According to Geography Realm, maps showing party affiliation by red and blue date back to at least 1883, though red often stood in for Democrats and blue for Republicans.

The long, arduous election between George W. Bush and Al Gore in 2000 cemented the red and blue designations for Republicans and Democrats. According to The History Channel, the major news networks "banded together" to keep the colors consistent, which made reporting contested electoral college numbers and the Florida recount a less confusing task. It took weeks to call the election, and by that time the color associations were set. 

Using blue for a left-leaning party and red for a right-leaning party makes the United States odd among other nations, which often associate red with political parties on the left and blue with conservative parties. For example, the Conservative party in the United Kingdom uses blue, while the Labour party is symbolized by a red flag. 

Originally published on Live Science.

When all the votes are cast and counted in this year’s momentous November 3 election, the results will have deep and potentially long-lasting impacts on numerous areas of society, including science. President Donald Trump and his challenger, former vice president Joe Biden, have presented vastly different visions for handling crucial issues—ranging from the deadly coronavirus pandemic to the damaging impacts of climate change and immigration policies.

The election’s outcome—not just who wins the White House but who controls Congress—will determine what laws get passed, how budgets are allocated and what direction key science-related agencies (such as NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) will take. The past four years have been marked by extensive deregulatory efforts that affect climate and public health. The Trump administration has also taken various steps that could undercut access to health care. And it has appointed industry officials to scientific advisory boards and made other moves that are likely to diminish the role and influence of scientific expertise. This approach has shown up acutely in what many public health experts see as the disastrous handling of the pandemic at the federal level—which has, in turn, undermined the reputation of storied agencies, including the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Here, Scientific American takes a look at how the election could shape a few key scientific issues, depending on who wins.

Will we bend the pandemic curve?

Undoubtedly the most immediate issue Biden or Trump will face as president is the COVID-19 pandemic, which has killed more than 227,000 people in the U.S. to date. Trump and his administration have consistently downplayed the threat to the public. They have failed to address severe testing shortages, flouted basic public health guidelines by holding large rallies and refusing to wear masks (while mocking those who do), and even proved unable to contain outbreaks in the White House itself. The administration has been accused of interfering with federal health agencies for political gain. It has refused funding to the hardest-hit states and communities and, in concert with Republicans in the Senate, opposed pandemic relief bills that included extending the extra unemployment benefits of $600, thus letting them lapse.* Although several potential vaccines are in the final testing stages, none are on track for approval before the election. The president himself has repeatedly spread misinformation about COVID-19, promoting ineffective and dangerous therapies and falsely calling the disease no worse than the flu. He has, again and again, claimed the U.S. is “turning the corner” on the public health crisis, despite record-high numbers of cases and hospitalizations. His own chief of staff recently admitted that “we are not going to control the pandemic.”

Biden, by contrast, has put forth a detailed COVID-19 plan to make testing more widely available and to guarantee that testing and treatment are free. The plan would also continue supporting vaccine development and ensure states have adequate protective equipment and staffing. Further, it would provide economic relief for workers and small businesses and paid emergency leave. Biden has pledged to put scientists and public health experts front and center in daily pandemic briefings. His plan additionally includes preparing the country for future pandemics by supporting research and developing robust disease-surveillance programs. He has promised that on his first day in office, the U.S. would rejoin the World Health Organization (which the Trump administration pulled out of earlier this year). He also aims to restore the White House’s National Security Council Directorate for Global Health Security and Biodefense, which was established by then president Barack Obama in 2014—and disbanded by the Trump administration in 2018. Biden has stopped short of calling for a national mask mandate but has said he would require masks in all federal buildings and interstate transportation.

“The biggest priority will be ending the pandemic and continuing to shepherd vaccines,” says Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at Columbia University. “That’s going to be very challenging because of the loss of trust in health agencies like the CDC.” Biden would need to reengage the public and rebuild that trust, and he should also invest heavily in research and pandemic preparedness and response, Rasmussen adds.

How clean will the air be?

Despite Trump’s pledges to ensure the U.S. has clean air and water, his administration has undertaken significant environmental deregulations. Some of the biggest changes have been to rules addressing greenhouse gases and other air pollutants. The administration has repealed the Obama-era Clean Power Plan (which set limits on carbon emissions from coal- and gas-fired power plants) and now allows states to set their own rules. It has also weakened the fuel-efficiency standards for cars, permitting more tailpipe emissions of greenhouse gases, and has loosened restrictions on toxic mercury emissions from oil- and coal-fired power plants.

A second Trump term would likely continue down the same path. It could, however, face some legal challenges: agencies have not always followed clearly set procedures for rulemaking, which leaves some Trump-era changes open to being overturned by the courts. “This administration’s track record in court is pretty bad,” notes Hillary Aidun, a fellow at Columbia’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law.

The Trump administration’s existing rollbacks would add the equivalent of an estimated 1.8 billion metric tons of excess carbon dioxide to the atmosphere by 2035, according to an analysis by the Rhodium Group, an independent research outlet. Analyses from both academic scientists and the Environmental Protection Agency have shown that less stringent air pollution regulations can lead to thousands of premature deaths and cause or exacerbate lung illnesses.

Biden has been vocal about reversing Trump’s actions and strengthening regulations—as well as addressing the disproportionate harm pollution causes in Black, brown and low-income communities. Some actions would be easier to undo than others. It would be relatively simple to revoke or alter executive orders and guidance, such as the Trump administration’s directive not to use Obama-era estimates for the social cost of carbon.

Biden can also issue his own executive orders, as he has pledged to do to set a target for reaching net-zero emissions by 2050. Rule changes completed within the past 60 legislative days could be overturned by the new Congress, though this is only likely to happen if Democrats win control of both chambers. Some older regulations, such as the revisions to fuel-efficiency standards, would have to be altered through the laborious federal rulemaking process, which can take years. (There is one exception to the fuel-standards rule: a Biden administration could rescind the withdrawal of California’s waiver to set its own more stringent regulations—which other states would then be free to adopt.)

Who will have reliable and affordable health care?

Trump and congressional Republicans have repeatedly tried to repeal the Affordable Care Act, or ACA. The law provides health insurance to more than 20 million Americans and protects up to 129 million people with preexisting conditions (which could include COVID-19). Repeal efforts have thus far failed, and the Trump administration has not revealed a plan for replacing the coverage. Instead Trump has issued a toothless executive order claiming he will protect insurance for those with preexisting conditions. He has signed several other executive orders that he contends will reduce drug prices, but the details are murky, and the orders are far from being implemented. Meanwhile, in a highly unusual and widely condemned move, his Republican party rammed through Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination to fill Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s Supreme Court seat—just a week before the election. In early November the court is scheduled to hear a case to decide whether the entire ACA is unconstitutional because of its individual mandate to purchase health insurance. The court’s six-to-three conservative majority could also threaten to overturn Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 ruling that guarantees the right to an abortion. The Trump administration has already chipped away at women’s reproductive rights through a series of rules that threaten insurance coverage for abortions and contraception. If reelected, he could roll these rights back even further.

Biden was part of the Obama administration, which created the ACA, and he has said that if he is elected, he will build on it rather than replace it. His health plan would add a public option to the ACA, increase tax credits in order to lower premiums and provide coverage for Americans who would have become eligible for Medicaid if their state had not refused to expand it. Biden’s plan aims to make health care more affordable by allowing the public option section to negotiate costs with providers and by repealing the exception that allows pharmaceutical companies to avoid negotiating with Medicare over drug prices. He would also work to shore up access to contraception and abortion by protecting Roe v. Wade, restoring funding to Planned Parenthood and rescinding the so-called Mexico City Policy that bars federal funding to global health organizations that perform or promote abortion as a method of family planning. Biden also says he wants to reduce the unacceptably high maternal mortality rate among women of color and to guard the ACA’s health care protections, regardless of gender, gender identify or sexual orientation. He supports paid leave for workers and has floated a plan to address gun violence.

But Biden’s ideas face some potential roadblocks. “One thing that’s really important to realize, [with a six-to-three conservative majority in the Supreme Court and 200 confirmed judges nominated by Trump], is: anything Biden does is going to be immediately challenged,” says Tim Jost, an emeritus professor at the Washington and Lee University School of Law. And of course, in order to pass any health care legislation, he would likely need a Democratic majority in the Senate.

Who will keep the U.S.—and the world—safe?

In the high-stakes arena of nuclear weapons, the differences between the two candidates could not be clearer. Biden has expressed support for existing arms-control agreements as a way to prevent nuclear proliferation—and annihilation. In contrast, Trump has consistently sought to weaken U.S. participation in such agreements, arguing that unilateral freedom of action is better than accepting safety-boosting norms set by international partnerships.

This “America First” approach has led to numerous setbacks in nuclear nonproliferation during Trump’s first term, most notably the U.S. withdrawal from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action in 2018. More commonly known as the “Iran deal,” this 2015 agreement between Tehran and the member nations of the United Nations Security Council was meant to halt Iran’s nuclear-weapons program in return for the lifting of crippling economic sanctions—many of which the Trump administration has now reinstated. Iran has responded in kind by continuing its pursuit of nuclear weapons. Biden has stated he would seek for the U.S. to rejoin the deal.

Similarly, Trump has denounced the only active nuclear arms agreement between the U.S. and Russia—the New START treaty enacted in 2010, which aims to prevent a ruinous cold war–style arms race by limiting the sizes of both nations’ nuclear arsenals. The treaty expires in February, 15 days after the next presidential inauguration, but it includes a provision that it can be renewed for up to five years. Trump had previously called for China to join the treaty (which would be unlikely) before the U.S. would renew, placing New START in limbo. Russia and the Trump administration now seem to be moving toward a short-term extension, but the treaty’s fate remains uncertain. Biden has said his administration would renew it.

Despite his high-profile courting of North Korea’s authoritarian leader Kim Jong-un, Trump has failed to contain the rogue nuclear state’s ongoing development of warhead-carrying missiles that threaten the U.S. and its allies. Biden, in contrast, has compared Kim to Hitler and vowed to take a tougher stance against his regime’s aggressive nuclear aspirations. But even so, according to Jeffrey Lewis, a nuclear-arms expert at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, in the aftermath of Trump’s actions, “it’s not clear that [a Biden administration] can put Humpty Dumpty back together again.” As for another four years of Trump? “It’s probably back to the arms race and proliferation,” Lewis says.

Who will be allowed to enter the country?

Trump has followed through on his campaign promise to restrict immigration, establishing a number of barriers to reduce the number of both authorized and unauthorized entrants to the U.S. Biden has pledged not only to tear down Trump’s restrictions but also to reform the U.S. immigration system to encourage entry. “Currently, we are not taking advantage of America’s ability to attract the best and brightest workers in the world,” reads a statement on his campaign Web site. Evidence suggests that immigrants boost the economy in general—and they play a particularly significant role in academia and technology.

The president’s anti-immigrant policies and rhetoric are already impacting U.S.’s ability to attract foreign-born talent. The number of new international students has fallen each year since 2016, depriving colleges and universities of their tuition—and the tech sector of their abilities. After graduation, many such people continue working here: for example, more than 80 percent of international students who earn doctorates in artificial intelligence at U.S. institutions remain in the country after graduation. In fact, more than half of the nation’s AI workers were born abroad, and as China strives to overtake it in this field, the U.S.’s ability to attract AI researchers will be vital. Artificial intelligence is only one example. Any highly technical research field, such as quantum computing, relies on skilled workers with specialized knowledge, many of whom come from beyond U.S. borders. This reliance is so important to both academia and technology companies that the Trump administration’s onerous new visa rules for skilled workers have drawn lawsuits from entities in both fields.

If Biden wins the election, his proposed immigrant-friendly policies could restore the U.S.’s reputation as an attractive destination for scientists from all over the world. If Trump remains in power, his administration will likely continue to restrict people born elsewhere from entering the country, driving many stars of artificial intelligence, quantum computing and other fields to take their valuable talents elsewhere.

Where will we go in space?

The next administration must decide whether to push on toward Trump’s goal of sending astronauts back to the moon by 2024 and then on to Mars in the 2030s under the Artemis program. Budget uncertainties and technical challenges make the deadline for a moon landing tight. The main hurdle in returning to Earth’s satellite is transportation, and NASA is developing its Space Launch System (SLS) heavy-lift rocket for the mission. It is also contracting with three commercial companies to develop vehicles to touch down on the moon’s surface and then launch astronauts back to lunar orbit for the return trip.

New presidential administrations have a history of changing space-exploration plans, with the inevitable result of delaying any eventual goal by forcing NASA to change gears. Former president George W. Bush had instructed the agency to head for the moon under the Constellation program, but his successor Obama cancelled Constellation and directed NASA to make a charge for an asteroid instead. When Trump took office, the U.S. set its sights back on the moon—resulting in neither goal being achieved so far. If Trump wins again, he will presumably continue on the current course. Biden has not explicitly stated his space goals, but he might at least push back the Artemis time line, as suggested by a U.S. House bill introduced in January 2020.

What will happen to our shared lands?

The fate of more than a quarter of the nation’s land—and with it, a sizable chunk of its greenhouse gas emissions—is in the hands of the next president. The federal government owns some 640 million acres of land in the U.S., managing its use for purposes ranging from conservation to energy development. Nearly 20 percent of the country’s emissions come from producing and using oil, gas and coal extracted from these public lands, which encompass ecologically important wilderness areas, as well as culturally and scientifically significant national monuments. Tensions over how to balance preservation of the land with natural-resource development have always existed. But against the backdrop of the unfolding climate crisis, the stakes are now higher than ever before.

Trump’s administration has made vast tracts of public land available for resource extraction. It has opened up parts of Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil and gas development—and now proposes to do the same with most of the nearby National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska. The latter is the country’s largest single piece of public land; it contains critical habitats for polar bears, caribou and other animals. In September the administration released its plan to open more than half of Alaska’s Tongass National Forest—an intact temperate rain forest that stores about 8 percent of the carbon held in all the forests in the lower 48 states combined—to logging, which would release greenhouse gases back into the atmosphere.

In Utah, Trump has drastically downsized the Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears national monuments, which contain hundreds of key fossil and archaeological sites. This change leaves nearly two million acres of previously protected land open to uranium mining, oil and gas drilling, and road construction. In New Mexico, his administration is looking to sell oil and gas leases in the area around Chaco Canyon, the sacred ancestral grounds of Navajo and Pueblo peoples. Since taking office, the Trump administration has offered millions of acres of public lands across the country for fossil-fuel-lease sales. And in July it rewrote the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA)—a foundational conservation law—to limit environmental review of, and public input on, proposed infrastructure projects, among other changes. In his pursuit of his “energy dominance” agenda, Trump will continue to push for deregulation, exploration and fossil-fuel extraction on public land if he is reelected.

If Biden is elected, he has pledged to take executive action on day one that would include “permanently protecting the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and other areas impacted by President Trump’s attack on federal lands and waters” and “banning new oil and gas leasing on public lands and waters.” Importantly, Biden would be able to nominate new people to lead the Department of the Interior and its subagencies, including the Bureau of Land management, which control most public land. And he could, with the support of a Democratic Congress, undo Trump’s changes to NEPA.

*Editor’s Note (10/30/20): This sentence was edited after posting to correct the figure for extra unemployment benefits.

When the Roman Empire was at its height, the emperor's reach stretched from the rain-sodden hills of northern England to the parched deserts of Saudi Arabia. But when did it start to go wrong? Why did Rome fall?

The answer, it turns out, is not straightforward. Some argue the sacking of Rome in A.D. 410 by the Visigoths is as good a marker as any for the end, while others say it wasn't until the Middle Ages that the empire's tenure was finally concluded. Largely speaking, it depends on which ancient Rome we're talking about. In A.D. 395 the Roman Empire was split in two, ever after separately administered as the Western Roman Empire with Rome as its capital and the Byzantine, Eastern Roman Empire with Constantinople (modern-day Istanbul) as its capital, according to HistoryHit, an online-only history channel.

"We tend to think of the Byzantines as this separate people and state from the Romans, but they called themselves "Romanoi" and saw themselves as citizens of a Roman government," said Kristina Sessa, associate professor of history at The Ohio State University. 

The fates of these two jurisdictions inevitably diverged. The Western Roman Empire fragmented as various provinces suffered economic and political disrepair within decades of the split. The Eastern Roman Empire was meanwhile comparatively prosperous for several centuries. "You need to distinguish these different regional trajectories," Sessa told Live Science.

Related: Deformed 'alien' skulls offer clues about life during the Roman Empire's collapse

The West crumbled because of a creeping and steady loss of centralized control, sometimes due to incursions by non-Roman tribes and occasionally instigated by traitors from within the Roman establishment. It's hard to mark the precise moment when Rome lost control over a given territory, because unlike the decolonization of imperial empires in the 20th century, it was rare to make or sign documents and declarations of independence. There were however, landmark battles — between A.D. 460 and A.D. 480, the Visigoths had managed to take substantial parts of what is now France. But still, the decline of Western Rome was a fairly gradual, nebulous process wherein colonies, one by one, were no longer realistically under the sway of an emperor in Rome. Instead, autonomous local leaders were increasingly in charge. 

"In some cases, these were Roman usurpers," who used coups to take power, said Sessa. In other cases, these autonomous regions were headed by so-called barbarian regimes. But the barbarians — such as the Franks, Saxons and Vandals — weren't simply raiders from foreign lands chipping away at a weaker Rome. That's selling those groups short. "That map with all the arrows of invaders coming into the empire from beyond and taking it over, which commonly appears in textbooks, is flat out wrong," said Sessa. Many of the barbarians were coalitions of soldiers that had been working with and for the Roman Empires for several generations.

"They had been living and working inside the Roman Empire, on behalf of the Roman Empire, for decades if not centuries," said Sessa. That gave the barbarians the opportunity to learn Roman tactics and expertise, which they then applied against the empire, resulting in a series of withering military defeats for the Romans. "The Roman frontier wasn't a border in the modern sense of the nation state. It was simply a region of diminishing Roman influence where people moved freely around," she said. 

In that context, it's easy to see how the frontier could shrink over time. "Without a central state, taxes were no longer regularly collected in most areas of the West, which obviously impacted the military," explained Sessa. Dwindling tax revenue made it increasingly tough for Rome to muster enough legions to reclaim lands the barbarians had taken.

While the Roman Empire in Western Europe was going to hell in a handbasket, the Eastern Romans carried on. "The East, by comparison, remained consolidated and focused around the city of Constantinople," said Sessa.

Its demise, however, was very much at the hands of an outside invading force.

"It was over the course of the seventh and eighth centuries that the Eastern Empire began to undergo a similar political fragmentation, though in this case we are talking about external armies and regimes; the Persians, the Slavs and the Arabs," she added. It wasn't until 1453, when the Ottomans sacked Constantinople, that we can truly say the Roman Empire ended.

Originally published on Live Science.

The Republican pollster Frank Luntz warned on Twitter and elsewhere the other day that if preelection polls in this year’s presidential race are embarrassingly wrong again, “then the polling industry is done.”

It was quite the forecast.

While it is possible the polls will misfire, it’s exceedingly unlikely that such failure would cause the opinion research industry to implode or wither away. One reason is that election polls represent a sliver of a well-established, multibillion-dollar industry that conducts innumerable surveys on policy issues, consumer product preferences and other nonelection topics.

If opinion research were so vulnerable to election polling failure, the field likely would have disintegrated long ago, after the successive embarrassments of 1948 and 1952. In 1948, pollsters confidently – but wrongly – predicted Thomas E. Dewey would easily unseat President Harry Truman. In 1952, pollsters turned cautious and anticipated a close race between Dwight Eisenhower and Adlai Stevenson. Eisenhower won in a landslide that no pollster foresaw.

“Predictive failure,” I note in my latest book, “Lost in a Gallup: Polling Failure in U.S. Presidential Elections,” clearly “has not killed off election polling.”

So what, then, accounts for its tenacity and resilience? Why are election polls still with us, despite periodic flubs, fiascoes and miscalls? Why, indeed, are many Americans so intrigued by election polling, especially during presidential campaigns?

Illusion of precision

The reasons are several, and not surprisingly tied to deep currents in American life. They embrace – but go well beyond – a simplistic explanation that people want to know what’s going to happen.

Patrick Caddell, the private pollster for President Jimmy Carter, spoke to that tendency years ago, saying, “Everyone follows polls because everything in American life is geared to the question of who’s going to win – whether it’s sports or politics or whatever. There’s a natural curiosity.”

More substantively, election polling projects the sense, or illusion, of precision, which holds considerable appeal in troubled times.

A hunger for certainty runs deep, especially in journalism, where reporters frequently encounter ambiguity and evasion. Since the mid-1970s, large news organizations such as The New York Times and CBS News have conducted or commissioned their own election polls. And reports of crude preelection polls have been found in American newspapers published as long ago as 1824.

These days, polls guide, drive and help fix news media narratives about presidential elections. They are critical to shaping conventional wisdom about the competitiveness of those races.

Public ignorant of polling flubs

But polls have an uneven record in modern presidential elections – which, paradoxically, has contributed to their resilience.

Americans are mostly oblivious to that record. They may be vaguely familiar with the “Dewey defeats Truman” debacle of 1948. And they may recall that election polls in 2016 veered off target in key Midwestern states, disrupting expectations that Hillary Clinton would win the presidency.

But other cases, such as the unforeseen landslide of 1952 or the close election that wasn’t in 1980, are not often recalled. So polling is at least somewhat shielded from reproach by unfamiliarity with its uneven performance record over time.

Of course, election polls are not always in error. They can redeem themselves, which is another value in American life.

Horse races to high wires

Analogies from the sporting world further help to explain polling’s tenacity.

Election polling, and its emphasis on who’s ahead and who’s sinking, long has been likened to a horse race – a metaphor not always agreeable to pollsters. Archibald Crossley, a pioneer of modern opinion research, revealed as much before the debacle of 1948, in a letter to his friend and rival pollster, George Gallup.

“I have a distinct impression,” Crossley wrote, “that polls are still thought of as horse-race predictions, and it seems to me that we might be able to do something jointly to prevent such a reputation.”

Crossley’s “distinct impression” endures. Polls, and the coverage of polls, still invite comparisons to the horse race.

A better analogy, perhaps, is that polling resembles a high-wire act. A presidential election plays out over many months, typically to growing attention and building anticipation. Whether pollsters will slip up and fail in their estimates inevitably becomes a bit of mild election drama itself.

When forecasts go awry, as they did in 2016, astonishment inevitably follows. For example, Nate Silver, the data journalist who founded the FiveThirtyEight.com polling-analysis and predictions site, said Donald Trump’s victory was, broadly speaking, “the most shocking political development of my lifetime.”

Many pollsters insist that election polls are snapshots, not prophesies. But they don’t much mind crowing when their final surveys come close to estimating the outcome.

An example of pollster braggadocio came a month after the 2016 presidential election, when Rasmussen Reports declared that it had said all along “it was a much closer race than most other pollsters predicted. We weren’t surprised Election Night … look who came in second out of 11 top pollsters who surveyed the four-way race.”

George Gallup did much the same in the early years of modern survey research, taking out self-congratultory advertisements in the Editor & Publisher trade journal to tout polling successes in presidential races in 1940 and 1944. “The Gallup Poll Sets a New Record for Election Accuracy!” one of those ads proclaimed.

[Get our most insightful politics and election stories. Sign up for The Conversation’s Politics Weekly.]

Which polls to follow?

The proliferation of surveys over the years – Nate Silver’s site provides ratings of dozens of pollsters – also allows a sort of team-sport approach to election polls: Savvy consumers can identify and follow preferred pollsters and mostly ignore the rest. Not that this is necessarily advisable, but it is an option allowed by the abundance of polls, many of which can be routinely tracked in the runup to elections at RealClearPolitics.com.

So, for example, supporters of Donald Trump may take heart from Rasmussen surveys, which have been far more favorable to the president during the 2020 campaign than, say, polls conducted for CNN.

Polling, fundamentally, is an imperfect attempt at providing insight and explanation. The desire for insight and explanation is, of course, never ending, so polls endure despite their flaws and failures. They surely will remain features of American life, no matter how next week’s election turns out.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Follow all of the Expert Voices issues and debates — and become part of the discussion — on Facebook and Twitter. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher. This version of the article was originally published on Live Science.

As the 2020 presidential election approaches, and the coronavirus continues to circulate throughout the United States, President Donald Trump has begun to decry mail-in voting, calling it a "scam" and predicting on Twitter that the election would be a "fraudulent mess."

Scientific literature on mail-in voting shows it has very low rates of fraud, however — and Trump might want to consider that there's no evidence he'll be at a disadvantage if a high proportion of people mail in their votes. Research on previous elections suggests that vote-by-mail doesn't lead to a major turnout bonus for either Democrats or Republicans. The politicization around mail-in voting is based upon mistaken assumptions, said Adam Berinsky, a political scientist and director of the Political Experiments Research Lab at MIT.

Related: Why did the Democratic and Republican parties switch platforms?

"Democrats and Republicans assume it's going to benefit Democrats," Berinsky told Live Science. "But political science research suggests this isn't the case."

Turning out the vote — by mail

Vote-by-mail has been an option for Americans since the Civil War, when soldiers were able to vote absentee in their home state elections. There is no firm differentiation between absentee voting and voting-by-mail, but Trump (who has called absentee voting "good") seems to make the distinction between states that allow voters to request an absentee ballot (all 50, though some require a specific reason why the voter can't come to the polls in-person) and states that run universal vote-by-mail elections (Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Washington and Utah). In universal vote-by-mail elections, all registered voters are mailed a ballot without having to request one. Typically, the polls in those states are also open for those who prefer to vote in-person.

In 2001, Berinsky spearheaded a study in Oregon, the pioneer of mail-in voting in the United States. Oregon held its first universal vote-by-mail primary election in 1995, and its first mail-in general election in 1996. Using data from phone surveys of voters and state records of their past voting histories, Berinsky and his colleagues showed that voting by mail increased turnout by about 6% over time. But it did so not by luring new voters into the electorate. Instead, it increased turnout over time mostly by encouraging previous voters to keep voting in later elections.

Related: The 6 strangest presidential elections in US history

Thus, the researchers reported in the journal Public Opinion Quarterly, there was no real difference in the demographics, or party preferences, of those who voted: Voting-by-mail tended to cement voting by older voters, the well-educated and those with a high interest in campaign activity, the same people who usually vote anyway.

More recent research suggests these findings still hold. Researchers from the Stanford University Institute for Economic Policy Research pulled data from 1996 to 2018 in California, Utah and Washington, all states that rolled out universal vote-by-mail elections county by county over time. Studying these slow rollouts allowed the researchers to compare in-person voting and universal mail-in voting in the exact same state races, helping control for things like competitiveness of the race and what offices people were voting for, they reported June 23 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"We can say in one year, two counties both did not have universal vote-by-mail and both of them had the same statewide competitions they were voting in," said Daniel Thompson, a doctoral candidate in politics and political methodology at Stanford and one of the authors of the paper. "Then we see the next year [that] one of those counties adopted universal vote-by-mail, and another didn't. They both now are still facing the same statewide ballot, so what was the change in turnout in the county that adopted universal vote-by-mail versus the other?"

This method showed an increase in turnout by 2% and no change in the share of voters by partisan affiliation. The findings are consistent with other research on universal mail-in voting, Thompson told Live Science, which typically shows a "modest" increase in turnout. For instance, a study of Washington's vote-by-mail elections published in Political Science Research and Methods in June 2013 found voter turnout increased by between 2% and 4%. In contrast to the earlier Oregon study, though, this turnout increase was due to lower-participating voters who began voting more often, instead of frequent voters getting an extra boost.

Thompson and his colleagues are working on preliminary research on vote-by-mail in Texas' July primary runoff election, perhaps one of the first looks at how vote-by-mail works in the time of a pandemic. In Texas, anyone over 65 can request an absentee ballot without an excuse, while those 64 or younger can only get one if they meet specific criteria. By comparing voting rates of 65-year-olds and 64-year-olds, who are at similar COVID-19 risk, Thompson and his team could look at the effect of a vote-by-mail option on turnout. They found no difference in turnout for 64- and 65-year-olds compared with normal years. The 65-year-olds shifted to vote-by-mail at much higher levels than usual, but the 64-year-olds headed to the polls in-person like usual, Thompson said. Thus, vote-by-mail seemed to be a good pandemic option that people want to take advantage of, Thompson said, but not one that fundamentally shifts election results.

"You can think of the effects of these policies in 2020 as giving people an opportunity to vote safely without dramatically changing the contours of the election," he said, while cautioning that people who vote in primary runoffs may not behave in exactly the same way as those who vote in general elections.

The question of fraud

Voting by mail might seem prone to fraud, given that there are no poll workers to check identification. But the evidence for voter fraud is slim.

Related: How hard is it to rig an election?

There have been a few high-profile cases of mail-in vote fraud. In 2019, an election result for a Congressional seat in North Carolina was overturned after officials learned that Republican operatives had organized a scheme to collect empty mail-in ballots and fill them in for the Republican candidate. According to the Heritage Foundation's voter fraud database, election officials became suspicious when 61% of mail-in ballots were marked for the Republican in a district in which 16% of voters were registered as Republicans.

There was also a case of fraud involving mail-in ballots in May in Paterson, New Jersey, involving a city council race. In that case, a councilman and two others have been charged with improperly collecting and delivering ballots. Hundreds of mail-in ballots were also left uncounted in that election, according to NJ.com.

However, the overall rate of mail-in voter fraud appears to be low. The Heritage Foundation records 1,290 convicted cases or confirmed findings of voter fraud stretching back to the early 1980s. Of these, only 208 involve improper use of an absentee ballot — the rest involve in-person voting. A Brookings Institution analysis of the Heritage database found that confirmed voter fraud was also limited in the states that offer universal vote-by-mail. The analysis looked at duplicate voting and improper use of an absentee ballot, both of which would be easier under vote-by-mail. Colorado had eight of these types of fraud via the mail-in system between 2005 and 2018 (vote-by-mail was enacted in 2013 in the state). Oregon had nine cases, and Washington seven. Hawaii and Utah had none. In total, all five states reported only 29 attempted fraudulent votes of any kind by mail.

Of course, these numbers included only fraud that was caught and confirmed. Fortunately, there is little evidence that widespread fraud is slipping under the radar, either, whether by mail or in-person, Thompson said. In one study published in May 2020 in American Political Science Review, researchers looked at double-voting, or cases where a person votes twice, and found that it was theoretically possible that at most, one in 4,000 of votes in the 2012 presidential election were double votes. However, a "significant portion, if not all" of these double-votes were actually probably clerical errors, the authors wrote. True double votes are not numerous enough to threaten election integrity, they wrote.

"When they actually go and investigate this directly by gathering data on social security numbers on these individuals, they find that almost all of these people that are accused of double voting are actually two different people with the same name and birthdate," Thompson said.

There have also been systematic attempts by both the George W. Bush and Trump administrations to ferret out voter fraud, Berinsky said. Neither found any major incidents.

It's not just that there is an absence of evidence for voter fraud; there is evidence of absence of voter fraud," he said.

That doesn't mean that holding an election during a pandemic will be smooth or simple. Compared with previous elections, this one might see a difference in who wants to vote by mail or vote in-person due to the coronavirus. An Economist/YouGov poll released Aug. 7 found that Biden voters are more likely than Trump voters to want to vote by mail, with 59% of Biden supporters saying they expect to vote by mail and 61% of Trump supporters saying they want to vote in person. And a study undergoing final revisions before publication in a peer-reviewed journal finds that women are more likely than men to support easily-accessible absentee voting.

"Our article suggests women are much more concerned about the spread of COVID, so that leads to differences," said Gabriel Sanchez, a political scientist at the University of New Mexico, and one of the authors of that research.

Related: Why COVID-19 kills some people and spares others

Given the lack of a funding boost for the U.S. Post Office and the rapid switch to more mail-in voting for many states, the logistics of the 2020 election could be challenging, Sanchez said. One major issue he and his team are studying is the accessibility of ballot drop-off boxes, particularly in rural areas and on or near tribal lands. Ballot-drop boxes are concentrated in urban areas in New Mexico and Nevada, Sanchez told Live Science, meaning many rural residents have to drive long distances to turn in their ballots. That's difficult for those who don't have cars and for tribal members who live on reservations, many of which have instituted checkpoints and curfews to slow the spread of coronavirus.

States also need to scramble to put procedures in place for allowing voters to track their ballot and ensure that it is received. They'll also need ways to "cure" ballots, or chase down voters whose mail-in ballots otherwise wouldn't be counted due to a mismatched signature or stray markings. Sanchez and his team have found that New Mexico law appears to allow the U.S. Secretary of State leeway to implement a curing system without going through the legal system, Sanchez said, and they alerted the state government to that opportunity.

"We're strongly in favor of more transparency, the curing process, providing voters with an opportunity to know that their vote was actually counted and challenging it if the state says it was not," Sanchez said. "Good policy would be to give voters an opportunity to rectify this."

Originally published on Live Science.

Political protests have a rich past, with varied degrees of success in accomplishing what they originally set out to do.

The following historically significant political protests include a decisive event in the Civil Rights movement, two history-changing moments that occurred within one year and the medieval defiance of one man. We added to the list some recent protests that could change history, including the George Floyd protests against police brutality and systemic racism, and the Women's March on Washington. 

The George Floyd protests

The George Floyd protests began in Minneapolis on May 26, 2020, after the killing of George Floyd — an African American man who asphyxiated when now-former Minneapolis Police officer Derek Chauvin pinned him down with a knee on his neck for more than 8 minutes. The protests quickly spread across the nation, with hundreds of thousands of people in all 50 states taking to the streets in opposition to Floyd's death, police brutality and institutional racism at large. As of June 3, the protests have continued nightly, resulting in 12 deaths, widespread incidents of police brutality as well as looting, and the deployment of nearly 20,000 National Guard troops in 24 states.

The March for Science

On Earth Day (April 22) 2017, roughly 100,000 people marched on Washington, D.C., in a non-partisan rally to celebrate science and promote making policy decisions using scientific evidence — particularly on issues like climate change and public health. Like the Women's March, the March for Science was inspired by the election of President Trump. Trump had previously called climate change a hoax and promised to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris Agreement on global climate mitigation, abolish anti-pollution regulations put in place by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and cut federal funding for numerous science and research agencies, including the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Marches for Science were held in more than 600 cities around the world on Earth Day 2017, drawing a global attendance of more than 1 million people, according to the organizers.

The Women's March on Washington

On Jan. 21, 2017 — the day after Donald Trump was inaugurated as 45th president of the United States — more than 470,000 people marched on Washington, D.C., in support of women's rights, and in opposition to misogynistic statements and behavior from Trump. (As of May 2020, Trump had been accused of sexual misconduct by at least 25 women.) The protest garnered enormous international support, with more than 600 marches planned in the U.S. and 81 other countries on the same day. Experts estimate that somewhere between 3.2 million and 5.2 million people participated in the marches in the U.S. alone, easily making the Women's March the largest single-day protest in U.S. history.

The Protestant Reformation

The Protestant Reformation began with the quietest and most orderly single protest in this list — the nailing to the door of a German church a treatise on the abuses of Catholicism by Martin Luther, in 1517. However, the movement that followed would ultimately spill blood and tear empires apart.

The Storming of the Bastille

This one act of July 14, 1789, has come to symbolize the entire French Revolution and indeed was a major catalyst to the 10-year-long rebellion against the crown. On that day, a throng of Parisians descended on the Bastille (long a symbol of royal authority and excess), beheaded its governor and overtook the prison.

Gandhi's Salt March

Another protest against British taxation sent Mahatma Gandhi on a 23-day, 240-mile journey to the coast of India to collect his own salt, which was illegal under crown laws. More than 60,000 people, including Gandhi himself, were incarcerated for participating in the salt march, but it ultimately turned the tide of world sympathy towards Indian, rather than British, interests.

The Boston Tea Party

Despite its quaint-sounding name, the 1773 "tea party" was in fact a bitter reaction to harsh new British taxation acts. Over the course of three hours on Dec. 16, more than 100 colonists secretly boarded three British ships arriving in harbor and dumped 45 tons of tea into the water. The unorthodox protest was a key precursor to the American Revolution.

South Africa's National Day of Protest

Nelson Mandela's ANC party organized this anti-apartheid work stoppage in 1950, in retaliation for a new bill effectively allowing the government to investigate any political party or organization. On June 26, hundreds of thousands of South Africans participated in the "Stay at Home," a tactic that was used several times in the next decade. June 26 was celebrated as National Freedom Day in South Africa until 1994.

March on Washington

Martin Luther King's historic "I Have a Dream" speech was delivered during this August 1963 rally to promote racial equality in the United States. More than 200,000 demonstrators gathered peacefully at the Lincoln Memorial in D.C., and the event is credited with pressuring President John F. Kennedy to draw up firm civil rights legislation.

Tiananmen Square

A mass of at least 1 million people, mostly students seeking democratic reform, had peacefully occupied Beijing's Tiananmen Square for seven weeks when the Chinese military unexpectedly rolled in tanks to clear them out. Numbers are imprecise, but it is estimated that at least several hundred protesters were killed in the city, drawing harsh criticism from the international community.

Berlin Wall Protests

The concrete division that had separated East and West Berlin for 28 years came down just two months after public protests occurred throughout Germany. Pressure to take down the wall had been growing in 1989 and the demonstrations were the final straw for the East German government, which finally opened the gates on Nov. 9.

Iraq War Protests

Millions of people in cities around the world gathered for anti-war protests in the months leading up to the invasion of Iraq, which went ahead despite their efforts in March of 2003. The biggest crowds occurred in London in conjunction with global marches organized for Feb. 15, when at least 1 million people assembled in what is believed to be the largest ever political demonstration in UK history.

The Orange Revolution

In late 2004, hundreds of thousands of people flooded Kiev's main square to protest the results of the Ukrainian presidential election. Demonstrations continued for 12 days through sleet and snow until a revote was called, reversing the results and putting the opposition candidate (whose party colors are orange) in office instead.

Editor's Note: This article was first published in 2011 and updated in 2020 to reflect new protests and movements. 

Originally published on Live Science.  

To understand politics, it helps to think like a scientist.

Campaign coverage of the upcoming presidential election is everywhere, with various polls showing this or that candidate on top. There are national approval ratings, local approval ratings, polls about primary candidates, polls about issues, polls about electability. All of these numbers add up to a cacophony of information that can be difficult to make heads or tails of. In that way, scientists say, they're a lot like the data a researcher might collect: The individual polls mostly aren't too useful on their own, without context. But taken together and approached thoughtfully, the polls can add up to the sort of information a scientist would find useful.

"There are plenty of methodologically sound political polls that closely resemble methods used in scientific contexts, but there are also some quite poorly designed — and/or purposefully biased — political surveys out there," said Sara Burke, a research psychologist and expert in intergroup biases at Syracuse University. "The best of the best in political polling do a good job with the tools available and maintain — and attempt to communicate — a clear understanding of the limitations that still exist in their methods."

Related: 10 Things You Didn’t Know About You

In other words, whether a poll is valuable or interesting depends a lot on how it was conducted and how it's presented.

Often, these polls are presented as "Here are some percentages," according to Jillian Scudder, an astrophysicist studying galaxies at Oberlin College in Ohio. "So you might do a political poll, you might say, 'We did a poll in this state, and we got these numbers,' and you might put that in the news. When I do statistics and I come up with a percent, that percent comes with a lot of other numbers," Scudder told Live Science.

Scudder's work involves statistical tests that look a lot like polling, she said. She might collect millions of data points on the behavior of galaxies to try to figure out how they're behaving. But it would be a waste of time to go through each one individually. So she'll take smaller samples of her data and study them, using statistical methods similar to the ones pollsters use to draw conclusions about the whole population of galaxies.

But for that research to work, and for it to have any meaning to other scientists, the numbers must come with data that gives them context, she said.

"Was this a sample of 100 [data points]? Was this a sample of 1,000? Was this a sample of 1 million? How much do changes in sample size change the result? If I go from 1,000 to 10,000, do the percentages change, or are they pretty robust? Things like that," Scudder said.

Polls, similarly, are much more useful when you know how many people were sampled, how consistent the results are with other polls, and how exactly the polls were done, said Chris Schatschneider, an educational psychologist and expert in statistics and research design at Florida State University.

In Schatschneider's own research, he said, he uses statistics to separate "signal" from "noise" — to determine whether the result of an experiment likely tells you something meaningful about how the world works or might be the result of random chance. He also thinks carefully about precisely what questions a particular set of data can answer, and what questions it can't.

Those statistical methods are different from the ones pollsters use, he said. But it's important to ask similar questions when hearing polling data in the news: How big was the sample size? Who exactly was sampled? What questions did the pollsters ask exactly? All of that context can tell you whether a poll is meaningful in the way a few floating numbers next to, say, a candidate's name can't.

It's also important to understand the methods a pollster used, he said.

Related: What is a scientific hypothesis?

For example, many polls involve "stratified sampling." That means that if a particular group — college students, for example — is underrepresented in a poll sample compared with the general population, pollsters will tweak the numbers so that the college students who were surveyed become more important. This can be a legitimate technique in principle, Schatschneider said. But it can skew results as well when a tiny group of surveyed people end up standing in for thousands. He gave an example: The New York Times reported in 2016 that a single 19-year-old black man who supported Donald Trump in that year's election was wildly skewing poll results due to this kind of data-massaging, leading to news stories suggesting that Trump was much more popular with black voters than was the case.

The reality, Schatschneider said, is that unless it's your full-time job you probably don't have time to evaluate polls individually in this way to determine which ones are scientific and which are less so. Most people are better off not paying too much attention to news about individual polls, which can be misleading, and should instead look at averages of recent polls like the ones RealClearPolitics publishes, he said.

Scientists do something similar with research data, when they average together data from multiple papers in bigger papers called "meta-analyses," Schatschneider said. If anything, he said, an average of polls is more trustworthy, because polls tend to get released whether or not they're interesting. But scientific papers tend to be biased toward more interesting results because they're still easier to get published, according to Schatschneider.

Election forecasts based on huge groups of polls can also be interesting and useful, Scudder said, but unlike with scientific research where methods and raw numbers are published, pollsters don't show their work — keeping it all in a proprietary black box.

Generally, Scudder said, she would deem a group of polls trustworthy and interesting if they all point in the same direction, and less meaningful if they're all over the place — suggesting problems in the data collection.

Just because the findings fit a trend doesn’t make them accurate. With any dataset available, Scudder said, you also have to know how to interpret the results.

"You do have to be careful that the statistical test you're using is answering the question that you want to answer," she said.

In science, that might mean figuring out whether a dataset rules an idea out entirely — say, that all stars are made of cheese — or just doesn't prove it — say, all stars might still be made of cheese, but we haven't seen the cheese yet.

When it comes to political polls, the questions are different. But understanding what they mean is just as important. An approval rating isn't a measure of how people plan to vote. Asking people who they like during a primary doesn't necessarily tell you how they'll feel during a general election. Asking who they plan to vote for in February doesn't predict how they'll vote in November, Schatschneider said.

In that way, Schatschneider said, polling is a lot like taking a patient's temperature. It's a perfectly scientific enterprise, he said. But it's important for people following polls to be clear on what exactly they mean.

• 5 Influential Leaders Who Transformed the World
• 7 Great Dramas in Congressional History
• 6 politicians who get the science wrong

Originally published on Live Science.

President Donald Trump wants to nuke hurricanes into submission before they reach the Atlantic coastline, according to a bizarre article published yesterday (Aug. 25) on Axios. "Why can't we do that?" he reportedly asked. This raises an important question: Has Trump been reading old Live Science articles? And if not, should he be?

Live Science answered this very question in a 2012 article.

"The theory goes that the energy released by a nuclear bomb detonated just above and ahead of the eye of a storm would heat the cooler air there, disrupting the storm's convection current," Rachel Kaufman wrote at the time. "Unfortunately, this idea, which has been around in some form since the 1960s, wouldn't work."

The problem is the energy involved, Kaufman reported, citing writing by Chris Landsea, a former National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration research meteorologist. 

Related: Hurricane Season 2019: How Long It Lasts and What to Expect

A hurricane is essentially a powerful, super-efficient country-size engine for pulling heat out of the ocean and releasing it into the atmosphere. As a hurricane's low-pressure system moves over warm water, that water evaporates and then condenses as droplets in the atmosphere. As the water condenses, it releases the heat it's carrying into the surrounding air. About 1% of that heat energy gets converted into wind; the rest sticks around as ambient warmth, according to the article.

A hurricane can release 50 terawatts of heat energy at any given moment — a significantly greater output than the entire power system, and comparable to a 10-megaton nuclear bomb detonating every 20 minutes. Trying to stop a hurricane with a nuke would be "about as effective as trying to stop a speeding Buick with a feather," Kaufman wrote, and might even add energy to the storm.

Stopping a smaller tropical depression with a nuke might be more realistic, but there are just too many of them and no good way to tell which will develop into powerful, landfalling hurricanes.

"Finally, whether the bomb would have a minor positive effect, a negative effect, or none at all on the storm's convection cycle, one thing is for sure: It would create a radioactive hurricane, which would be even worse than a normal one. The fallout would ride Trade Winds to land — arguably a worse outcome than a landfalling hurricane," Kaufman wrote.

The best way to avoid the destruction of a hurricane, remains a boring one: prepare. In case that's the route you want to go, how to prepare for a hurricane.

• Hurricanes from Above: Images of Nature's Biggest Storms
• Photos: Hurricane Michael Toppled Over Trees and Uprooted 19th Century Artifacts
• Inside Irma's Eye: Hurricane Hunters Capture Jaw-Dropping Photos

Originally published on Live Science.

Are ugly accusations and verbal abuse in politics "business as usual"? In recent years, verbal jabs traded between political opponents seem less like discourse between adults, and more like acid-tinged dialogue cut from "Mean Girls" because it was too nasty.

But while such behavior is distasteful and unpleasant, it isn't new — the tradition of politicians indulging in scathing personal insults was widespread across the ancient Roman Republic, and was exquisitely brutal, according to new research.

In fact, Roman leaders frequently traded verbal attacks and flung deeply personal put-downs and scandalous accusations at their opponents. They even endured barrages of insults from the people that they governed, according to Martin Jehne, a professor of ancient history at Technische Universität Dresden in Germany. [Oh Snap: 10 Memorable Political One-Liners]

Jehne will present his findings about insults in ancient Roman politics at the 52nd Meeting of German Historians, taking place at the University of Münster in Germany from Sept. 25 to Sept. 28. The meeting's theme, "Divided Societies," addresses abusive speech and the challenges posed by divisions between social groups from ancient times to the present, according to a conference statement.

According to Jehne, Roman senators used blistering putdowns of an opponent to strengthen their standing among their supporters — a strategy that echoes in today's political arena. Insults then — as now — were used for entertainment value, garnering attention and generating indignation, "similar to insults, threats and hate speech on the Internet today," Jehne said in the statement.

But such a strategy could backfire, if the audience sided with the person on the receiving end of the insults, Jehne told Live Science in an email.

"Insulting in a public context always means to fight for the approval of the audience," he said. "And you never can be sure how people will react."

Scathing slander

When it comes to modern-day insults in politics, President Donald Trump is particularly notable, lending belittling nicknames to political figures in the U.S. and on the world stage. He called North Korean leader Kim Jong Un "Little Rocket Man," labeled Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau "dishonest & weak" and mocked Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren by calling her "goofy" and "Pocahontas" (a racist nod to her Native American heritage).

In fact, his roster of monikers — for both Democrats and Republicans — reads like a roll call of rejected names for Disney's seven dwarfs: "Cheatin'," "Lyin'," "Sneaky," "Crazy"  and "Crooked" are just the tip of his insult iceberg.

And Roman politicians could be just as savage. Marcus Tullius Cicero, a famed speaker and political figure who lived during the first century B.C., once accused a rival named Clodius of incest with his sisters and his brothers, according to Jehne. Clodius' response — claiming that Cicero was acting like a king — may not sound too terrible by today's standards, but it was a searing slight in the Roman Republic, which shunned pretensions of royalty, Jehne said in the statement.

But as much as Roman senators despised royal airs, they typically came from privileged households, and apprenticeships to older, experienced senators likely taught them how to navigate the political minefield of verbal insults from their peers, Jehne told Live Science.

"They learned how to do the job by observation and imitation. So if they witnessed a harsh argument with insulting parts in it between senators, they also learned how to do that — and how to endure that," he said.

Jeers from the peanut gallery

The politicians of ancient Rome weren't the only ones spewing insults at their fellows. Roman citizens also expressed their displeasure with unpopular figures through public mockery, which was sometimes hurled from the stage, Jehne said.

For example, in 59 B.C., the politician and general Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus (also known as Pompey), attended a play at a festival for the god Apollo, and the audience and performers used the theater to demonstrate their disapproval of the unpopular leader. When an actor delivered the line, "By our misery, are you great!" the audience turned to look at Pompey and roared with laughter, and insisted that the actor repeat the line, according to Jehne. 

The historian Cicero wrote that the actor repeated the line 1,000 times, "which is exaggerated, of course," Jehne said. "But Pompey had to sit there and suffer while the people laughed at him. The whole event was extremely insulting for Pompey and he could not do anything against it."

Different circumstances between the present and the distant past — especially when it comes to politics — make direct comparisons of human behavior across millennia somewhat tricky, Jehne said. However, the persistent use of insults in the political realm does suggest something unpleasant about human nature, he said. 

"In our research group in Dresden we rely on the basic assumption that invectivity — our artificial term for the whole complex of insulting, abusing, defaming, discriminating and so on — is a universal feature in human societies," Jehne said.

But even if that's true, people can still decide — as individuals and as communities — when enough is enough. We may not be able to entirely do away with the impulse to be insulting, but humans are still capable of creating boundaries and setting limits, confronting and calling out unacceptable behavior — no matter how high their station, Jehne added.

Original article on Live Science.

If you want to know the meaning of life, science probably can't help you much better than Kermit the Frog can. (For the record, Kermit says, "Always be yourself. Never take yourself too seriously. And beware of advice from experts, pigs and members of parliament.")

Meaning is personal to each of us. However, a new study published June 15 in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science suggests that some people might be better at finding that meaning than others — and the difference may come down to politics.

According to the study, which compiled survey results from more than 50,000 participants in 16 countries, people who identified as political conservatives were more likely to find meaning and satisfaction in their lives than liberals were. 

"Political conservatives tend to be happier than liberals, a finding that has been labeled the 'happiness gap' in media reporting," a team of psychologists from the University of Southern California (USC) wrote in the new paper. "One conservative commentator even described it as 'niftily self-reinforcing; it depresses liberals.'" [7 Things That Will Make You Happy]

Vote red or feel blue?

In the new study, researchers split the idea of happiness into two facets: day-to-day satisfaction and an overall sense of meaning in life.

To see how strongly these concepts contributed to the happiness gap between liberals and conservatives, the USC researchers compiled the results of five different psychological surveys administered between 1981 and 2017. Each survey asked participants to state their opinions on various political issues and to answer some version of the questions "Do you feel your life has meaning?" and "How satisfied are you with your life?"

The difference the researchers saw wasn't huge, but it was consistent. Across all five surveys, people who identified as having conservative political beliefs were more likely to report stronger feelings of meaning and satisfaction in life than liberals were. The pattern held true whether participants were asked to assess their satisfaction with the previous 24 hours or to look at their lives as a whole.

Why might this be? Surprisingly, God wasn't the answer. Even when the researchers adjusted their statistical model to take religious attendance out of the equation, conservatives still proved more satisfied and purposeful than liberals.

One clue came from identifying whether a respondent's views were more socially or economically conservative. "Social conservatism (in form of opposition to abortion and gay marriage) was a better predictor of meaning in life than economic conservatism, whereas the reverse was true for life satisfaction," the authors wrote.

The researchers said this split neatly reflects the two main components of conservative ideology: a rationalization of inequality and the resistance to change.

If it ain't broke, don't fix anything

The link between life satisfaction and economic beliefs is easy enough to grasp. Financial well-being makes life less stressful, and previous studies have found that conservatives are less moved by the inequality experienced by others than liberals are. One 2008 study found that as income inequality increased in the United States from the 1970s to the early 2000s, the happiness gap between conservatives and liberals also increased. Experts think that people who identify as economic conservatives are more likely to believe that some people deserve to be rich, others deserve to be poor and the system that made society that way is fair, the study suggested.

And what about the link between a meaningful life and resistance to change? It may be as simple as a matter of order, said David Newman, author of the new study and a doctoral candidate at the USC Dornsife's Mind and Society Center.

"Finding meaning in life is related to the sense or feeling that things are the way they should be and that there is a sense of order," Newman said in a statement. "If life feels chaotic, then that would likely dampen your sense that life is meaningful."

Of course, this interpretation is all conjectural, Newman wrote in the study, and the link could ultimately be a matter of circumstance. For example, some common factor in the study participants' childhoods could have led them to independently develop conservative viewpoints as well as feelings of satisfaction and purpose later on.

Still, across more than 50,000 survey responses, a clear meaning-of-life gap showed up, and that's worth investigating more, Newman and his colleagues wrote.

To paraphrase the great Kermit once again, it's not easy being green… but apparently, it's a little easier (or at least more satisfying) being red.

Originally published on Live Science.

There's a paradox in every command. Tell some people to do something, and they'll be less likely to do it. Restrict their choices, and suddenly all they want is the one option they can't have. This aversion to being controlled is one of the ingrained traits of humans (and cats, obviously) and touches diverse areas of life. It affects whether an employee fulfills the boss's request and whether parents follow health authorities' advice to vaccinate their children, whether diplomatic talks succeed or nations remain in bitter standoff.

But what fuels this impulse? In a new study published today (May 14) in the Journal of Neuroscience, researchers found several factors: People balk at being controlled if they take it as a sign of being distrusted or if they have little understanding about the behavior of the other person who is restricting their freedom.

And looking at the brain itself revealed a surprising factor that may help explain why some people are more control-averse than others, the researchers said. The investigators found that an individual's tendency for control-aversion is reflected in how synced up the activity is in two brain regions. [10 Things You Didn't Know About You]

Control-aversion at its core is not necessarily bad. People value their freedom of choice and benefit from protecting it. But this primal instinct sometimes kicks in for the wrong reasons, and a better understanding of the mechanisms behind it could help people avoid causing a backlash effect, the researchers said. This backlash contributes to noncompliance to medical treatments, disobedience of the law, and even deadlocked political and business negotiations, the researchers said.

"There are many cases in which the society would be better off if we could prevent or reduce control-averse behavior," study investigators Daria Knoch and Sarah Rudorf, of the University of Bern in Switzerland, told Live Science. Take, for example, anti-drug or anti-smoking campaigns, which sometimes inadvertently increase the behavior they are trying to reduce, the scientists said.

There have been studies on how to devise more-effective communication that doesn't turn people away. "But without opening the black box and understanding what goes on in a control-averse person's mind, these studies rely on trial and error," the researchers in the new study said.

The teenager in all of us

In the new study, 51 university students had their brains scanned while they played a trading game in which they divided money between themselves and a peer. In some rounds, the peer could specify a minimum requested amount and therefore control just how freely the participants were to divvy up their assets.

At the end of the game, the participants rated a few items on a questionnaire that was designed to measure how much the participants' decisions were influenced by factors highlighted in previous research. These factors included negative feelings such as anger and motivation to restore one's freedom. Other factors were trust and understanding, which were measured by items including, "When Player A requests a minimum of generosity, he distrusts me and I dislike that," and, "I understand when Player A requests a minimum of generosity." Most people turned out to be quite generous in giving away some of their assigned money. But if their peers requested a minimum, all but 10 participants tended to give less than they normally did, though to varying degrees.

Responses to questionnaires revealed that in the controlled conditions, the more someone perceived distrust or the less understanding they had, the more they reduced the money they gave away. These factors seemed to influence participants' decisions more than how angry they felt or how badly they wanted to restore their freedom.

A third finding from the brain scans complemented this picture further. The participants who were more control-averse showed higher simultaneous activity in the brain areas called the inferior parietal lobule and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex.

"It seems that this connectivity captures something that is not accessible through self-reports. In that sense, our study revealed a missing piece of the puzzle," the researchers said.

The puzzle, however, is still incomplete. The two brain regions have both been implicated in diverse functions. For the inferior parietal lobule, that ranges from mathematical operations to reorienting attention and processing distances to self. And the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is involved with cognitive control, moral decision-making and resolving conflicts in decisions.

So it is unclear exactly why activity in these two brain regions shows up during control-averse behavior. One interpretation, the researchers said, is that control-averse people perceive a conflict between their general motivation to be generous and their urge to act against restrictions, and that conflict is reflected in these brain regions.

But what makes one person use this network more than another person? It's possible that individuals' variability in brain wiring is at play, the researchers said, but that's something future research needs to find out.

Original article on Live Science.

About 2,000 years ago, a Roman politician celebrated his victory by commissioning a sundial and putting it on display for all to see, according to archaeologists who just discovered the ancient timekeeping device in Italy.

It's incredible the sundial and the inscriptions on it survived intact for two millennia, especially because the town was scavenged for building materials during the medieval period, the researchers said.

However, even though the sundial was found facing down in an amphitheater, archaeologists suspect the Romans had originally placed it in a more prominent spot in town — likely on top of a pillar in the nearby forum, they said. [Photos: Ancient Sundial-Moondial Discovered]

"Less than a hundred examples of this specific type of sundial have survived and of those, only a handful bear any kind of inscription at all, so this really is a special find," Alessandro Launaro, a lecturer at the Faculty of Classics at Cambridge University and a fellow at Gonville and Caius College, in the United Kingdom, said in a statement.

Students from the University of Cambridge found the sundial during the excavation of an amphitheater in the Roman town of Interamna Lirenas, located about 90 miles (144 kilometers) southeast of Rome.

The limestone sundial measures about 21 inches by 13 inches by 10 inches (54 by 35 by 25 centimeters), and has a bowl-like face engraved with 11 hour lines, which mark the 12 hours of daylight. Three curved lines intersect perpendicularly with these hour lines, marking when the winter solstice, equinox and summer solstice should happen, the researchers said.

The sundial's iron needle that casts shadows — known as a gnomon— is missing, but its lead base is still there, the researchers noted. They added that this type of bowl-like sundial is known as a hemicyclium, and was common during the Roman period.

Telling inscription

An examination of the sundial might have ended there if it weren't for an inscription on the sundial's base and bowl. On the base, researchers saw the name of "M(arcus) NOVIUS M(arci) F(ilius) TUBULA" — or Marcus Novius Tubula, son of Marcus.

Another engraving on the rim of the bowl says that Tubula (literally, "small trumpet") held the office of "TR(ibunus) PL(ebis)" — that is, plebeian tribune, and paid for the sundial "D(e) S(ua) PEC(unia)," or "with his own money."

"Not only have we been able to identify the individual who commissioned the sundial, we have also been able to determine the specific public office he held in relation to the likely date of the inscription," Launaro said.

The style of the letters allowed researchers to date the sundial to the mid-first century B.C. or onward, after the people of Interamna Lirenas had already received full Roman citizenship.

"That being the case, Marcus Novius Tubula, hailing from Interamna Lirenas, would be a hitherto unknown Plebeian Tribune of Rome," Launaro said. "The sundial would have represented his way of celebrating his election in his own hometown."

Original article on Live Science.

After three years of improvement, the well-being of Americans ticked downward in 2017, according to a new poll, though some demographics were spared.

The overall well-being of U.S. adults dropped to a score of 61.5 on a scale of 100, down 0.6 points from 62.1 in 2016, according to the latest Gallup-Sharecare survey, which was published yesterday (Nov. 8).

The score, called the Gallup-Sharecare Well-Being Index, ranges from zero to 100, with zero representing the lowest possible well-being and 100 representing the highest.

To calculate the Well-Being Index, the researchers looked at five metrics: whether a person felt a sense of purpose in daily life, whether they enjoyed supportive relationships, their level of financial security, whether they felt safe and happy in their community and whether they were in good physical health, according to Gallup. [Find Out Where Your Country Ranks on the Happiness Index (Infographic)]

Though the overall findings show a decrease in well-being, the effects weren't felt across all demographics. For example, the survey found that both men and Republicans fared just as well in 2017 as they did in 2016. But women's well-being dropped by 1.1 points from 2016 to 2017, and Democrats' well-being decreased by 0.9 points in the same time period. Black and Hispanic people had larger declines in well-being than other groups, at 1.3 and 1.0 points, respectively.

Only one group surveyed reported having a better Well-Being Index score in 2017, the researchers found: people making over $120,000 per year. For individuals in this group, the score increased by 0.3, but the researchers noted that the increase may fall within the margin of error for the survey, meaning the difference between 2016 and 2017 was too small to definitively say that there was a real change. Similarly, the very small drop in well-being for white people in the United States also may have fallen within the margin of error.

Compared with 2016, Americans said they worry more on a daily basis, according to the results. Of all the people who responded, the number of people who said that, at least some days each week, they have little interest or pleasure in doing things went up by 7.4 percentage points, from 33.7 percent in 2016 to 41.1 percent in 2017. Overall, the survey revealed that a smaller percentage of people felt that their community leaders fostered a feeling of enthusiasm about the future, and a smaller percentage of people in 2017 said they enjoyed their daily lives, compared with the percentage in 2016.

The survey results are based on telephone interviews with more than 135,000 U.S. adults from all 50 states and Washington, D.C., conducted from Jan. 2 to Sept. 30 of this year.  

Originally published on Live Science.

Move over Pi Day: Mayors across the U.S. are celebrating the day of the mole — which began at 6:02 a.m. today (10/23) in honor of the vast number of atoms or molecules in a mole of matter (6.02 X 10^23) — by advocating unfettered scientific research.

So far, 20 mayors, whose cities, including Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Denver and Nashville, have a population of almost 6 million people, have signed the pledge, which states that government scientists and those who conduct federally or state-funded research should be able to share their results "without political interference." 

A handful of the mayors will share their reasons for signing the pledge on Facebook Live at 4 p.m. EDT today, including Nancy McFarlane, the mayor of Raleigh, North Carolina, since 2011, and a former pharmacist and businesswoman. [Best Supporting Role: 8 Celebs Who Promote Science]

McFarlane said she plans to talk about how cities will combat climate change, despite President Donald Trump's decision to pull out of the Paris Agreement.

"Cities are often the leaders in the introduction of new technology," McFarlane told Live Science in an email. "Despite the president's actions, many mayors not only remain committed to, but feel compelled to increase their commitment to sustainability, environmental protection and reducing their impact on carbon emissions in the air."

The Mole Day pledge is being organized by 314 Action, a nonprofit committed to electing scientists to public office, much like Emily's List helps qualified women run for election. The group 314 Action was founded in July 2016 by Shaughnessy Naughton, a chemist and businesswoman who ran twice, but lost, for U.S. Congress in Pennsylvania's 8th district.  

About 7,000 scientists across the country have reached out to 314 Action over the past year, and several thousand have watched the group's online and in-person training sessions on how to set up a campaign, hire staff and consultants, and put together and broadcast a platform. These scientists aren't just interested in federal office, but are also running for state legislatures, city councils, school boards and even county coroner positions, Naughton told Live Science.

But don't expect all 7,000 to run in 2018, Naughton said. "Scientists like to do their homework, so some of them are thinking of runs in 2020 and beyond," she said. "It's not just for this election cycle."

As for Mole Day, Naughton said she couldn't resist taking the nerdy day that celebrates Avogadro's number to the mainstream. (Amedeo Avogadro was an Italian chemist who lived from 1776 to 1856.)

"We thought it would be a good time to highlight our STEM [science, technology, engineering and math] principles" in light of the "proposals and things enacted by the Trump administration that are just a denial of science," Naughton said.

For instance, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is keeping three of its scientists from attending an event in Rhode Island today that deals, in part, with climate change, according to the Associated Press. In August, emails obtained by The Guardian show that U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) employees were told to stop using the term "climate change." And a 2015 report by the Florida Center for Investigative Reporting found that in Florida, state employees had been discouraged from using the terms "climate change" and "global warming," according to The Washington Post.  

It's crucial that government officials learn about and act on climate change, McFarlane said.

"As an elected official with a STEM background, I have a better understanding of the environmental impact of our decisions," McFarlane said. "I am less swayed by political banter and more interested in empirically proven data." (314 Action has endorsed McFarlane for political office; she is seeking re-election for mayor on Nov. 7.)

People can ask their mayors to sign 314 Action's STEM pledge by filling out this form.

Original article on Live Science.

"Make America think again!" "We need data!" "Nerd power!" "Fund science, not the wall!" These were just some of the chants heard during the March for Science today (April 22) in Washington, D.C., and across the globe.

Scientists and science enthusiasts (along with their curious kids) turned out in droves to make their voices heard. Though their signs were diverse — from "I'm with Her [mother Earth]" to "Grab 'em by the hypothesis" — the central message seemed to be the idea that science is important to everyone and must inform decision-making at the highest levels of government.

"I spoke with scientists that do research on astronomy, biology, chemistry, health, physics, all with one voice for the importance of science for society," said Cristian Samper, President and CEO of the Wildlife Conservation Society who marched in Washington, D.C. [In Photos: The Best Signs from the 2017 March for Science]

The March for Science, which grew out of a Reddit thread back in January and took inspiration from the historic Women's March, spanned cities across the globe. In Washington, pre-march rallies saw the likes of musician Questlove and YouTube star Derek Mueller (of Veritasium) take to the stage in front of the Washington Monument, along with celeb science communicator Bill Nye and more than 50 other speakers. An appearance by Thomas Dolby performing his appropriately named "She Blinded Me with Science" had science marchers jumping around and dancing.

In New York City, the march took place in Manhattan, beginning near Columbus Circle at 71st Street and ending in Times Square, with plenty of signage and chants in support of science. Seventh-grader Talia Levine, 12, who lives just outside New York City, said she was marching "because I really believe in what we're saying here, and I hope Trump can hear us." Levine, who was there with her dad, added, "If I could say one thing to Trump, I would say, 'Think what you're doing, because it's going to affect you eventually.'"

Preliminary estimates indicate some 40,000 people marched in New York City. (As more estimates come in, Live Science will update this article.)

Here are some of the voices from the marches:

"What an inspiring experience," Collette Adkins, a senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity, who marched in D.C., told Live Science. "I loved seeing my children's excitement about the crowds of scientists and their creative signs. Science should be the basis for important policy decisions, and I'm glad to see that so many took the streets with that message."

Excitement is part of what science is about, said one marcher in D.C. "I want to remind people that science is fun," said George Goldberg, a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Denver, Colorado, who was at a March for Science rally in D.C. "People tend to forget the fun part."

Marni Majorelle of Brooklyn, New York, came out to march in Manhattan because she believes in "the power of facts," Majorelle, a landscape designer and owner of Alive Structures, told Live Science. "Because I care about what scientists have to say and what they have to share with the rest of the world. I think the scientists should be well funded. It's an important part of our society. It's an important part of our exploration of outer space. It's an important part of our exploration of the ocean, of medicine, of geology and for our future."

Majorelle added, "It's part of who we are. It's one of the best things that humans have created — it's science."

"I was so impressed by how people stuck with it in spite of the weather," Eric Davidson, president of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) told Live Science. "These scientists are truly dedicated to the pursuit of science for the benefit of humanity. One of the cutest chants I heard was 'we're here, we're wet, and we're upset.' Scientists are finding their voice," said Davidson, who marched in D.C. [6 Politicians Who Got the Science Wrong]

Samper of the WCS agreed. "It was great to see so many people with diverse interests and backgrounds coming together for science," Samper told Live Science. It was a cold and rainy afternoon in D.C., but this did not dampen the enthusiasm of thousands of people that came together."

Some thought the tone was a little more serious than the Women's March.

"In comparison to the Women's March, this one was more serious and somewhat incredulous that this was even an issue," said John Robinson, Chief Conservation Officer for the Wildlife Conservation Society who marched in New York City. "Contrary to some of the news chatter that all scientists worry about is their research money, the dominant sentiment was that science is serious, and that policy should be evidence based not opinion based."

Live Science reporters Laura Geggel and Denise Chow contributed to this report.

Original article on Live Science.

Are you ready to march for science?

On April 22, scientists and science advocates will gather in Washington, D.C., and in hundreds of other cities around the world to take part in the March for Science, a historic event that may well be the biggest march in history in support of science.

First proposed Jan. 22 in a conversation on Reddit, the March for Science quickly gathered more than 1 million followers on social media. Momentum was spurred by recent federal policy proposals to cut funding for scientific research and restrict the availability of data to the public. The march will also protest against the eradication of environmental protections and elimination of initiatives to mitigate climate change. [10 Historically Significant Political Protests]

Though the march takes place on Earth Day, environmental science won't be the only science getting its due. Anyone who practices or cares about any aspect of science is encouraged to march in its defense and support the cause, the organizers wrote in a statement.

Why are scientists speaking up?

President Donald Trump's administration has proposed unprecedented cuts to the sciences in its proposed 2018 budget. The largest proposed cut — a 31 percent reduction in the Environmental Protection Agency's budget — would cut programs including Energy Star (which helps consumers find energy-efficient products and buildings) and Targeted Air Shed Grants (which help limit pollution at the local level).

In 2009, Trump signed an open letter to President Barack Obama and Congress calling for aggressive action against climate change and greenhouse gas emissions, but he has since changed his stance. In a 2012 tweet, he called "The concept of global warming" a Chinese hoax, and on the campaign trail he threatened to pull the United States out of the Paris Agreement, a pact adopted by almost 200 countries to reduce carbon dioxide emissions.

Trump has also approved executive orders that roll back the Clean Power Plan, which would reduce carbon dioxide emissions from power plants, and approved construction for the Keystone XL pipeline, which the previous administration rejected because of concerns that it would contribute to climate change. [6 Politicians Who Got the Science Wrong]

Trump has also said that vaccines cause autism, which has been scientifically disproven countless times. 

Who's behind it?

Three co-chairs joined the March for Science team on Jan. 24: Valorie V. Aquino, a researcher who explores the relationship between human communities and the environment; Caroline Weinberg, a health educator who has investigated genetic disease diagnosis and obesity prevention programs in public schools; and Jonathan Berman, a science educator and activist who researches the molecular origins of hypertension.

Currently, 170 organizations have joined as partners for the event, representing a broad range of scientific disciplines, according to the organization's website. They include the Entomological Society of America, the Society for Neuroscience, the Genetics Society of America, the Society for Research in Child Development, and the Center for Biological Diversity, to name just a few.

On March 30, the organizers announced the addition of three honorary co-chairs who will serve as ambassadors for the march and will speak at the event in Washington, D.C.

Serving in that capacity are Mona Hanna-Attisha, a pediatrician and public health advocate who exposed alarming instances of lead poisoning in children living in Flint, Michigan; biologist Lydia Villa-Komaroff, one of the first Mexican-American women awarded a doctorate in the natural sciences in the United States, and a contributor to research to derive insulin from bacteria; Bill Nye, a science educator and CEO of The Planetary Society, creator and host of the award-winning TV show "Bill Nye the Science Guy," and star of a new science-friendly series on Netflix, "Bill Nye Saves the World." 

When and where?

The March for Science in Washington, D.C., kicks off with a rally at 10 a.m. local time on the grounds surrounding the Washington Monument — between 15th Street and 17th Street, bounded to the north and south by Constitution Avenue and Independence Avenue. The march is scheduled to start at around 2 p.m. local time, with the route still to be announced, organizers said on the March for Science website.

During the rally, free audio descriptions for visually impaired attendees will be provided by Metropolitan Washington Ear, and sign language interpreters will translate all speeches delivered from the main stage. An accessible seating area will also be provided near the stage, the organizers explained in an accessibility plan provided online. A more detailed plan describing access points along the march route for people with disabilities will be available once the route is finalized, the march organizers added. 

Hundreds of marches

As of April 6, a total of 480 satellite marches are scheduled worldwide on every continent except Antarctica. There are 358 marches in the United States alone, spanning all 50 states, as well as the territories of Puerto Rico and Guam. Marches will take place as far north as Tromsø, Norway, and as far south as Dunedin, New Zealand, according to the March for Science interactive map.

People living in participating cities can connect with local organizers and fellow marchers through links provided in the map, and a registration form is available for those who do not yet have a march in their area and would like to organize one.

Tickets are not required to attend any of the marches, though participants are encouraged to register online, indicating where they will be marching to help organizers track attendance numbers.  

Those who wish to participate but are unable to attend in person can still show their support by signing up for a virtual march, which will follow the march in Washington, D.C., as it is streamed live from the event's website.

On April 22, writers and editors from Live Science and our sister site Space.com will be covering the March for Science in Washington, D.C.; New York; Los Angeles; Honolulu; and San Francisco. Be sure to follow us on Facebook and Twitter for the latest updates!

Nonpartisan, but still political

In recent weeks, people have expressed concerns on social media about the march's commitment to diversity, inclusion and accessibility, organizers acknowledged in a statement. However, despite missteps in the past, those areas are now firmly integrated with the march's mission, they said.

"We cannot ignore issues of racism, sexism, homophobia, ableism, xenophobia, or any other form of discrimination in the discussion and implementation of science. Nor can we ignore the ways in which science has been misused to harm marginalized communities," the organizers said in the statement.

"The March for Science is an opportunity to advance important dialogues, both within the scientific community and with the public, on how we engage with policy and politics," they added. [The Year in Climate Change: 2016's Most Depressing Stories]

They also clarified that although the march is nonpartisan, it is certainly political.

"Politics and science are intertwined, whether we face a travel ban that restricts the free flow of scientific ideas, changes in education policy that diminish students' exposure to science, or budget cuts that restrict the availability of science for making policy decisions," the organizers said in the statement. 

"We will work to become stronger partners with the communities we serve, and to ensure that policymakers understand and appreciate the vital services science provides."

Original article on Live Science.

This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Live Science's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

When news breaks about wrongdoings of our favorite politician, the other side inevitably argues that we have a scandal on our hands. We like to think that our superior grasp of logic is what enables us to reason through and reject the other side's concerns.

But, a series of three studies I recently published suggest such decisions are not just the result of reasoning. Rather, feeling moral aversion toward political opponents compels us toward positions that help our team "win." This is true even if it means adopting positions with which we'd otherwise disagree.

Here's the effect in a nutshell: Imagine that you walked into an ice cream shop on Election Day. You discover that the shop is filled with supporters of the presidential candidate you oppose, and you find supporters of that candidate morally abhorrent. When you get to the front of the line, the worker tells you all of the other customers just ordered red velvet – normally your favorite flavor.

My studies demonstrated that when asked to order, you are likely to feel an urge to stray from your favorite flavor toward one you like less, politically polarizing an otherwise innocuous decision.

Whatever they think, think the opposite

To understand what's meant by "urge" here, it helps to understand the Stroop effect. In this classic experiment, people see a single word and are asked to name the color in which the word is printed. When the color and the word match – for example, "red" printed in red – the task is easy. When the color and the word are incongruent – for example, "red" printed in blue – the task is harder. People feel an impulse, or "urge," to accidentally read the word. This urge interferes with the task of naming the color, and what should be a simple task becomes oddly difficult.

A theory of morality put forth by Jonathan Haidt suggests that morals "blind" people to alternative viewpoints such that even considering the other side's opinions is taboo. With that theory in mind, I thought that moral aversion might be a social cause of unproductive urges similar to urges experienced in the Stroop task. That is, just as people in the Stroop task feel the impulse to incorrectly read the word, I thought that strong moral beliefs might cause people to feel impulses to make decisions that maximize their distance from people they believe have different morals.

How the test worked

Here's how I tested it:

I first had people do several Stroop trials to make them aware of what that urge to make an error feels like.

Next, I asked people six fairly trivial consumer choice questions, such as preference for car color (forest green vs. silver) or vacuum brand (Hoover vs. Dirt Devil).

Here's the twist: After answering each question, participants were told how a majority of other participants answered the same question. The identity of this majority group was random. It could be either a group that everyone belonged to (for example, Americans) or a more politically charged group (for example, Trump supporters, Clinton supporters or white supremacists).

Finally, I showed participants the set of questions a second time, and asked them to simply state their previous answer a second time. I also asked participants to rate their urge to change their answer – similar to the urge to make an error in the Stroop test.

This should have been straightforward.

Participants were not asked to evaluate the majority answer or reconsider their opinion in any way. Still, just like the interference felt in the Stroop task, knowing the majority response caused people to feel an urge to give the wrong answer.

When participants belonged to the majority group, they reported heightened urges to make an error when they had previously disagreed with the majority. Despite just being asked to repeat what they said a moment ago on a fairly trivial opinion question, they felt a conformist urge.

Similarly, when participants had strong moral distaste for the majority group, they reported heightened urges to make an error when they agreed with the group. In other words, participants' initial responses were now morally "tainted," and, even for these rather inconsequential questions, they felt an urge to abandon that response and distance themselves from their opponents. This urge made the trivial task of stating their opinion again slightly more difficult.

'Hive mind' and passive effects

As America is more ideologically divided now than any other point in history, these results illuminate two things about the psychology behind political polarization.

First, people might think they are able to use their reasoning to decide whether, say, a minimum wage increase will have positive or negative consequences. However, moral impulses have likely already nudged people toward disagreeing with their opponents before any deliberative thinking on the issue has begun.

Second, the effects observed here are likely a passive process. Participants did not want to feel urges to make an error in the Stroop task, and they likely did not want to feel urges to contradict their own opinions in my studies. The urges just happen as a result of a morality-driven psychology.

These results suggest that efforts to bring those on the fringe closer to the middle will likely fall on deaf ears. A more optimistic interpretation is that polarization might have its roots in unintentional partisan urges. While there is no shortage of moral issues that lead to polarization, polarization does not necessarily result from the malice of those involved.

Randy Stein, Assistant Professor of Marketing, California State Polytechnic University, Pomona

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

In high-stakes politics and business, there are only two colors of ties: red and blue. Oh, sure, you might spot purple or yellow now and then, but those are clear statements of aloofness, be they calculated or careless.

Few world leaders or CEOs want to be seen as aloof.

But does it matter whether one wears red or blue? Yes, suggest several studies, including one published in the journal Science on Feb. 6, 2009. More on that in a moment.

First, some color:

Tonight (Feb. 28), during his first address to a joint session of Congress, President Donald Trump wore a blue and white striped tie. Seated behind Trump, Vice President Mike Pence and Paul Ryan, Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, both wore blue ties.

For his inauguration on Jan. 20, President Donald Trump wore a red tie with his dark suit, while outgoing President Barack Obama donned a blue tie. Their wives wore the reverse, with Michelle Obama in a red dress and Melania Trump wearing a powder blue ensemble. [The 15 Weirdest Presidential Inaugurations in US History]

In the first presidential debate of 2016, then-nominee Donald Trump donned a blue tie, while the Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, wore a red suit. (Here's more science on why everyone should wear red.) The Democrats may have decided on "red" during the election, as Clinton's running mate, Sen. Tim Kaine donned a red tie during the first vice presidential debates on Oct. 4, while Trump's running mate, then-Indiana governor Mike Pence sported a blue necktie.  

Related:

• Election Day 2016: A Guide to When, What, Why and How
• Democratic Party Platform 2016: We Fact-Checked the Science
• Republican Party Platform 2016: We Fact-Checked the Science

In President Obama's first 11 days on the job, he wore only red and blue ties, observed Daily News reporter Joe Dziemianowicz. "Obama represents something different in politics, but he dresses the same as everyone else," said Esquire senior fashion editor Wendell Brown. "Washington, D.C., is a strange place when it comes to style. All the emphasis is on fitting in."

At the inauguration in January 2009, Obama and Joe Biden seemed to coordinate efforts: "For the inaugural festivities, both executives chose predictable dark gray suits, white dress shirts, enlivened by either baby blue or red necktie," wrote Lisa Irazarry of The Star-Ledger in New Jersey. "As Obama wore a blue necktie on Monday and Biden wore his blue Tuesday, maybe they prearranged not to duplicate each other alternating necktie colors."

(Former President George H.W. Bush and former first lady Barbara Bush both had on plum overcoats and purple scarves at the inauguration. They can be aloof now. Plus, purple is associated with royalty and we do tend to treat our former presidents as such.)

Where's all this come from?

The ties to red and blue go way back. Neckties are said to be descended from the cravat and used throughout most of history, at least the portion during which humans have been fully clothed. Blue was once associated with the blue blood of British nobility, while red represented the red blood of the Guards.

Red has long been associated with love. And there's some science to that, too. A study last year found red clothes on women makes men feel more amorous towards them. In sports, athletes wearing red are known to outperform their opponents, in part because referees cut the red-clad competitors some slack, researchers discovered.

Politicians, of course, love to gain advantages. Neckties are one way they try to do that.

As Washington Post columnist Tom Shales wrote of a televised Bush-Kerry presidential debate in 2004: "Bush wore his traditional blue necktie, though a darker shade than the usual robin's-egg hue, and Kerry wore the classic TV-red necktie; red ties supposedly lend color to the face of whoever wears them, and if there's anything the Massachusetts senator needs, it's color."

But wait, there's more.

Red and blue are also thought by psychologists to improve brain performance and receptivity to advertising. The 2009 study in Science supports this idea. It also suggests nuances that world leaders and presidential candidates might want to know about, assuming one buys into the notion that presidential messages and speeches are essentially a form of advertising.

The study found that red is the most effective at enhancing our attention to detail, while blue is best at boosting our ability to think creatively.

"Previous research linked blue and red to enhanced cognitive performance, but disagreed on which provides the greatest boost," said study leader Juliet Zhu of the University of British Columbia. "It really depends on the nature of the task."

Zhu and colleagues tracked the performance of more than 600 people on cognitive tasks that required either creativity or attention to detail. Most experiments were conducted on computers with a screen that was red, blue or white.

Red boosted performance on detail-oriented tasks such as memory retrieval and proofreading up to 31 percent more than blue. For brainstorming and other creative tasks, blue cues prompted participants to produce twice as many creative outputs compared with red cues.

Why? Look around.

"Thanks to stop signs, emergency vehicles and teachers' red pens, we associate red with danger, mistakes and caution," Zhu said. "The avoidance motivation, or heightened state, that red activates makes us vigilant and thus helps us perform tasks where careful attention is required to produce a right or wrong answer."

And the value of blue?

"Through associations with the sky, the ocean and water, most people associate blue with openness, peace and tranquility," says Zhu, who conducted the research with UBC doctoral candidate Ravi Mehta. "The benign cues make people feel safe about being creative and exploratory. Not surprisingly it is people's favorite color."

Perhaps presidential candidate's choice of red vs. blue neckties should be made more thoughtfully than they realize.

Editor's Note: This article was originally published in 2009 and updated in 2017. 

This story was updated Feb. 2 at 11:01 a.m. EST.

What began as a political conversation on Reddit is turning into a national movement: Scientists are planning to march on Washington to express their support for rigorous scientific research. 

The idea for this activism began after President Donald Trump's administration reportedly started to restrict scientific communication and freeze grants at certain governmental agencies.

"Slashing funding and restricting scientists from communicating their findings (from tax-funded research!) with the public is absurd and cannot be allowed to stand as policy," Scientists March on Washington, the group organizing the march, wrote on their website. "This is a non-partisan issue that reaches far beyond people in the STEM fields and should concern anyone who values empirical research and science," they wrote, referring to the science, technology, engineering and math fields of study. [10 Historically Significant Political Protests]

The march will be held in April, according to a tweet that says, "The March for Science will take place on April 22, 2017. We hope to see you in D.C. and around the world! #ScienceMarch"

The scientists' march was inspired by the Women's March on Washington, which drew at least 3.3 million people around the country on Saturday (Jan. 21), the day after Trump's inauguration.

A day later (Jan. 22), a Reddit conversation discussing the future of science in the United States came to the conclusion that another march, this time for scientists, could help convey the country's support and respect for research, The Washington Post reported.

"There needs to be a Scientists' March on Washington," one commenter said. Other Reddit commenters jumped on board, with both scientists and science supporters saying they would "go in a heartbeat." 

Just four days later after the Twitter account was launched, @ScienceMarchDC had about 26,600 followers and more than 204,000 members on Facebook. As of Feb. 2, the Twitter page had reached 307,000 followers, while 814,516 members had joined their Facebook page. 

The group tweeted that all people, regardless of whether they are scientists, are welcome. They also encouraged supporters to set up sister marches in other cities.

That's because, as they tweeted, "Public pressure can be an effective tool against censorship!" — largely in response to a news story that the U.S. Department of Agriculture had rescinded a gag order barring researchers from talking with the public after a large public outcry against it.

The Department of Agriculture wasn't the only governmental agency that reportedly received a communication ban. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Department of Health and Human Services, Department of Transportation and National Park Service were also told to stop communicating with the public, BuzzFeed reported. (Some National Park Service Twitter accounts tweeted about climate change after the ban, including @GoldenGateNPS and @BadlandsNPS, but some of those tweets were later deleted.)

In addition, the Trump administration scrubbed the White House's climate change web page on Friday (Jan. 20), and froze EPA grants for research, news sources report.

"Demands to shut down informational websites and prevent the release of scientific findings are straight out of Orwell," Ken Kimmell, president of the Union of Concerned Scientists, a science advocacy group, said in a statement. "We don't live in a world of 'alternative facts' — you can’t delete climate change and you can't overrule the laws of physics by preventing scientists from talking about them." [The Reality of Climate Change: 10 Myths Busted]

Running for office

Meanwhile, another group, called 314 Action, is encouraging scientists to run for public office, according to The Atlantic. The group, named for the Pi ratio, is similar to Emily's List, which backs pro-choice female candidates, and VoteVets, which supports candidates who are U.S. veterans, The Atlantic said.

"A lot of scientists traditionally feel that science is above politics, but we're seeing that politics is not above getting involved in science," founder Shaughnessy Naughton told The Atlantic. "We're losing, and the only way to stop that is to get more people with scientific backgrounds at the table."

As of Jan. 25, there was at least one scientist running for public office: Michael Eisen, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator and professor of genetics, genomics and development at the University of California, Berkeley, according to his Twitter account.

Eisen plans to run in 2018 for Sen. Dianne Feinstein's seat (it's unclear whether she's seeking reelection), he told Live Science.

"It's time for scientists and people who care about science — and about the environment and human rights — to step forward," Eisen told Live Science in an email. "And so I am."

Editor's Note: This story was updated to include the date of the march.

Original article on Live Science.

Last year was the hottest year on record, but it wasn't just high temperatures that people will remember — Americans had to handle a fiery, contentious election, and people around the world experienced violent, political strife. It seems fitting, then, that "dumpster fire" has been selected as the word of the year for 2016.

In a vote held in Austin, Texas, on Jan. 6, the American Dialect Society chose "dumpster fire" — defined as "an exceedingly disastrous or chaotic situation" — as the word (or, rather, words) of the year.

"As 2016 unfolded, many people latched on to 'dumpster fire' as a colorful, evocative expression to verbalize their feelings that the year was shaping up to be a catastrophic one," Ben Zimmer, chair of the New Words Committee of the American Dialect Society, said in a statement. "In pessimistic times, 'dumpster fire' served as a darkly humorous summation of how many [people] viewed the year's events." [The 6 Strangest Presidential Elections in US History]

The phrase "dumpster fire" wasn't invented just last year, and although it's actually two words, the American Dialect Society said "Word of the Year" can be interpreted in its broader sense, as a "vocabulary item" — in other words, not just words but phrases.

The society also added that the chosen words or phrases do not have to be brand-new, but they should represent things that were newly prominent or notable in the past year.

"Very few [words of the year] are brand-new," said Allan Metcalf, an English professor at MacMurray College in Jacksonville, Illinois, who founded the society's Word of the Year vote in 1990.

"It's not a scientific process," Metcalf told Live Science, noting the unpredictability of the hand vote, which can be swayed by a particularly impassioned nomination speech.

Voters picked "dumpster fire" from a field of other category winners, including "normalize," "post-truth," "#noDAPL" (a hashtag used by protesters against the Dakota Access Pipeline) and the fire emoji. The eventual word of the year won in a runoff vote against "woke," which means "socially aware or enlightened."

This selection is the 27th annual word of the year, joining a list of previous words of the year that reflect changing sociopolitical environments. The 2015 winner was the singular "they" (in place of "he" or "she"), and in 2014, "#blacklivesmatter" took the title.

The American Name Society also announced its selection of "Aleppo," the city in Syria, as 2016's name of the year.

Original article on Live Science.

The U.S. has a science problem. Around half of the country's citizens reject the facts of evolution; fewer than a third agree there is a scientific consensus on human-caused climate change, and the number who accept the importance of vaccines is ticking downward.

Those numbers, all gleaned from recent Pew and Gallup research polls, might suggest that Americans are an anti-science bunch. But yet, Americans love science. Even as many in the U.S. reject certain scientific conclusions, National Science Foundation surveys have found that public support of science is high, with more than 75 percent of Americans saying they are in favor of taxpayer-funded basic research. 

"The whole discussion around scientific denial has become very, very simplified," said Troy Campbell, a psychologist at the University of Oregon. [6 Politicians Who Got the Science Wrong]

Campbell and other psychologists are presenting findings from polls and other research that they say reveal Americans' complex relationship with science. The presentations are occurring today (Jan. 21) at the annual meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP) in San Antonio.

Science denial — whether it comes in the form of dismissing fact-based evidence as being untrue or in accepting notions that are not factual as being true — is not typically rooted in blanket anti-science attitudes, the research showed. But the facts aren't always paramount, either. Often, people's denial of scientific evidence is based on motivations other than finding truth, such as protecting their social identity, the research said.

Why deny?

One key thing to understand about people who engage in science denial is that very few people deny science as a whole, according to research by Yale University psychologist Dan Kahan, also presenting at SPSP on Saturday. For example, the more liberal a person is, the more likely he or she is to agree that humans are causing global warming; a conservative is far more likely to blame natural climate variation or say scientists are making the whole thing up. [Wishful Thinking: 6 'Magic Bullet' Cures That Don't Exist]

But that same conservative may be just fine with the evidence for the efficacy of vaccines, and there is virtually no partisan split on issues like the safety of nanotechnology, the use of artificial sweeteners in drinks or the health impacts of living near high-voltage power lines, Kahan wrote in a book chapter soon to be published in the "Oxford Handbook on the Science of Science Communication." 

Kahan's research has also shown that the more science-literate people are, the more strongly they hold to their beliefs — even if those beliefs are totally wrong.  

In other words, it's not about hating science or misunderstanding the facts. It's about motivation.

"Beliefs are difficult to budge, because people don't act like scientists, weighing up evidence in an even-handed way," Matthew Hornsey, a psychologist at the University of Queensland, wrote in an email to Live Science. "When someone wants to believe something, then they act more like lawyers trying to prosecute what they already want to be true. And they cherry-pick the evidence to be able to do that."

The real question, Hornsey said, is why people want to believe something that flies in the face of scientific evidence. In some cases, the reason can be political: Solving the problems created by climate change would mean standing in the way of the free market, something conservatives tend to oppose.

In other cases, people might have some other vested interest in their beliefs, Hornsey said. A smoker may not want to believe her or his habit is really going to cause lung cancer, because that would mean the person would have to quit. Social identity can also be an important driver of beliefs, Hornsey said. Studies of teens in Midwestern towns have found that these individuals typically go along with the crowd, he said, believing in evolution if the majority of their friends do and believing in creationism if that's what the people around them believe.

"For someone living in a 'creationist community,' to express belief in evolution might be seen as a distancing act, as a signal that one was defiantly assuming an outsider status," Hornsey said.

Changing minds

When someone's self-image or social acceptance is at stake, badgering them with facts isn't likely to change their minds, research has shown.

In fact, a 2010 studyfound that when people were shown incorrect information alongside a correction, the update failed to reverse their initial belief in the misinformation. Even worse, partisans who were motivated to believe the original incorrect information became even more firm in their belief in that information after reading a correction, the researchers found. For example, conservatives who were told that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction before the Iraq war believed that claim more firmly after reading a correction.

So researchers are suggesting more-subtle ways to change people's attitudes toward accepting scientific facts. Hornsey said he and his colleagues call this "psychological jiujitsu," in reference to the martial art that teaches people to use their opponent's own weight against them. [Best Supporting Role: 8 Celebs Who Promote Science]

In this approach, people who accept scientific facts might try to get at the root of the disbeliefs held by those who don't, and then address that basis, rather than addressing the surface denial. Campbell and his colleagues have found, for example, that if free-market solutions to climate change are presented as an option, self-identified Republicans become less likely to deny climate science.

Using this jiujitsu approach is challenging, Hornsey and his colleagues wrote in an article soon to be published in the journal American Psychologist, because people's underlying motivations are not always clear. Sometimes, the people themselves may not know why they think the way they do. And no single message will fit all possible reasons for disbelief, the researchers warned. [Evolution vs. Creationism: 6 Big Battles]

"A two-tiered strategy would be optimal: messages about evidence and scientific consensus that should be sufficient for the majority, and a jiujitsu approach for the unconvinced minority," the authors wrote.

There's another trap to watch out for, though, Campbell warned: smugness. If a message from a science-accepting person comes across to a denier as being holier-than-thou, or as judgmental of a person's whole character, it's likely to backfire, he said.

"I like to say, 'Tell people they already are the people you want them to be,'" Campbell said. For example, "don't go to somebody and say, 'You don't care about the environment enough.' Point out all the ways they do care about the environment."

From there, Campbell said, there is common ground to work from. Successful persuasion, he said, finds common values without triggering people's self-protective instincts.

"The general thing I think is important to say is 'I like and care about you,'" Campbell said. Once respect is established, he said, "any criticism is very much tapered, and is not a holistic admonishment of who you are."

Original article on Live Science. 

Should you buy organic? Or avoid foods made with genetically modified ingredients? Americans are divided in their thinking on whether such choices are beneficial for their health, a new survey finds.

Just over half of all Americans, or 55 percent, consider organic produce to be healthier than conventionally grown produce, and 39 percent of Americans think that foods with GM ingredients are less healthy than those without such ingredients, according to the survey.

On the other hand, 41 percent of Americans think that organic produce is neither better nor worse for one's health than conventionally grown produce, and 48 percent of Americans think the same about GM foods, according to the nationally representative survey, published today (Dec. 1) by the Pew Research Center. [10 New Ways to Eat Well]

"The data suggest that people's divisions are linked to their interest in food issues and how they think food consumption ties to their well-being," Cary Funk, the associate director of research at Pew Research Center and the lead author of the report on the survey, said in a statement.

Based on the survey respondents' answers to other questions, the researchers also concluded that people's views on food "are not driven by their political attitudes, their level of education, their household income or where they live," Funk said.

For example, roughly equal shares of Republicans and Democrats think that GM foods are worse for a person's health than foods that don't have GM ingredients, according to the survey. And 50 percent of Republicans and 60 percent of Democrats think that organic foods have health benefits beyond those of conventionally grown foods.

Age, however, did appear to play a role in people's views: Adults under 50 were more likely than older adults to say that organic produce is healthier than conventionally grown produce, the researchers found. And 48 percent of adults ages 18 to 29 thought that GM foods are worse for health than non-GM foods, compared with 29 percent of adults over 65 who think this, according to the survey.

Is there anything Americans agree on?

Americans aren't completely divided, the researchers found. Indeed, 72 percent of Americans said that healthy eating habits are very important for a long and healthy life, and 71 percent said that getting enough exercise is very important for a long and healthy life, according to the survey.

But the majority of Americans feel like they aren't meeting their healthy-eating goals: 58 percent said that on most days, they feel like they should eat healthier, the researchers found. [6 Easy Ways to Eat More Fruits and Vegetables]

In addition, depending on a person's level of science knowledge, it may be difficult to know how to eat healthy, the researchers found. For example, among those with low science knowledge, half said "the core ideas of eating healthy are pretty well understood," while 47 percent said that conflicting information from news reports made it difficult to know how to eat healthy.

Among those with high science knowledge, however, 92 percent said that the core ideas of healthy eating were well understood, the researchers found.

Can food scientists help?

The researchers also looked into how Americans view food scientists.

They found "that Americans have limited trust in scientists connected with GM food," Funk said. Only 19 percent of Americans think that scientists understand the health effects of GM foods "very well," the survey found. Another 44 percent said they think that scientists understand these health effects "fairly well," and 35 percent think that scientists either do not understand these effects at all or "not too well."  

However, although only 35 percent of Americans said that they trust scientists to give the public complete and accurate information about the health effects of GM foods, 60 percent say they think scientists should play a major role in food-policy issues, the survey found.

The findings were based on surveys completed by 1,480 adults in all 50 states and the District of Columbia between May 10 and June 6, 2016. Surveys were either mailed or emailed to the participants.

Originally published on Live Science.

So, it's Thanksgiving, and you're back at home, passing the mashed potatoes to your Aunt Jenny, whom you haven't seen in person in nearly a year. But you are friends with her on Facebook, so you know quite a lot about her thoughts on the election. Like ... every thought. Way too many thoughts.

How do you reconcile the smiling woman across the table with the conservative warrior or liberal firebrand you've been seeing on social media? Is Aunt Jenny's frothing Facebook persona her real self, or just a piece of her personality? And how do you talk to her if her views happen to fundamentally clash with yours?

The problem of political reconciliation around the Thanksgiving table is not a new one, but a particularly contentious and personal election, plus the ubiquity of social media, have made family harmony increasingly fraught.

"I think people may have caused some damage in relationships just because of the way that they interacted on social media," said Jaclyn Cravens, a marriage and family therapist and assistant professor at Texas Tech University. "Now, the holidays are coming up, and we may potentially have to sit down face-to-face with these individuals. We don't have the option of unblocking, unfollowing, defriending." [The 6 Strangest Presidential Elections in US History]

Online versus in person

For more than a decade, psychologists have been documenting a phenomenon called the online disinhibition effect. As described in a 2004 paper, people "loosen up" online; they're less restrained and more willing to express themselves openly. Sometimes, this is beneficial: People can show great kindness and generosity or open up about emotions and experiences that they otherwise might have kept hidden. That's benign disinhibition. Other times, online disinhibition is terrible: People threaten each other, throw out insults and hurl abuse. That's toxic disinhibition.

Disinhibition isn't the only way offline and online discussions can differ. A 2012 paper in the journal New Media & Society — one of the few studies to directly compare internet and real-world discussions of political issues — found that online participants of political dialogues were more likely to be male, younger and employed full time than those who attended public forums on politics in person. They were also less knowledgeable, less trusting, less tolerant and less interested in politics overall. Online discussion also appeared less likely to build consensus: Whereas 53 percent of offline-discussion participants said their last meeting ended in a decision to take an action, only 17 percent of online-only participants said the same.

Of course, that study compared online discussions to formal political meetings, not around-the-table chats between citizens. In this regard, research shows that your Facebook feed is probably more likely to be flooded with political debate than your real-world conversations. In a 2012 study, researchers analyzed the 2008 election and found that people talked about politics pretty frequently: At least in the run-up to a national election, it was the most-discussed topic among family members and the second-most-discussed topic among nonfamily members. Nevertheless, the researchers found that people assiduously avoid political disagreements: Only 29 percent of pairs of people who disagreed with one another said they talk about politics frequently, compared with 71 percent of people who agreed with one another.

Surviving in a social media world

OK, so you know you and Aunt Jenny will never see eye to eye on politics; that's why you've always spent your Thanksgiving dinners talking about football and your cousins' latest straight-A report cards. But thanks to the online disinhibition effect, you've been exposed to her beliefs — and she's probably been reading about your opinions, too. Maybe you've even gotten into online arguments.

"I think, a lot of times, people are shocked," Cravens told Live Science. "Like, 'Oh, I did not realize the extent of this belief or the extent of intolerance."

The first thing to tackle, Cravens said, is how people use social media. It's an oversimplification to say that someone's social media postings reveal their true selves, she said. [7 Weird But Nonpolitical Things to Talk About This Thanksgiving]

"People use social media to vent, to get frustrations out, to connect with other people that have shared ideas — and that's not the totality of who they are as a person," she said. Sometimes, people use social media as a catharsis and are less partisan or angry in person.

"We know, with internet communication, that there is this disinhibition side of being able to freely post anything and everything that comes to mind without as much awareness of repercussions of what we share," Cravens said. "I think we do a better job of managing some of those when we're having face-to-face interactions with someone else because we instantaneously see someone's reaction and can tell immediately if we've hurt someone's feelings."

In that sense, face-to-face discussions around the Thanksgiving table have the potential to bridge divides.

"Online or offline, there are just some universals," Cravens said. "Are we attempting to be empathetic with people that have different opinions than we do? Are we really trying to understand why we have those beliefs, or are we stuck with an assumption that fits our views, about why they voted a specific way?"

Going into a discussion to change someone's mind or to prove one's own righteousness is likely to end badly, Cravens said, but initiating a conversation to engage and understand can be more productive. [How to Argue Politics Without Losing Friends]

To engage or not to engage?

People in families of mixed political views need to think carefully about their goals before the holiday season starts, said Josh Klapow, a psychologist at the University of Alabama, Birmingham. Holidays are a minefield already, Klapow said: You put a bunch of people, who may see each other rarely, in a house for days at a time, force them to spend all their time together and often ply them with alcohol. Family dynamics and old resentments tend to rear their ugly heads when debates start, he said.

"That is not a good setting for conflict resolution," Klapow told Live Science.

Thus, even if you want to speak with a family member about his or her political posts, Thanksgiving may not be the time to do it, Klapow said. That doesn't mean you have to let go of everything for the sake of family unity, he said, but you may want to think about what duking it out in that environment is likely to accomplish, especially if the offending relatives are ones you see only a few days each year.

"It's not only an issue of 'pick your battles,' but 'pick your battlefield,'" he said.

If disagreement and rancor are likely, Klapow said, families may even want to set explicit ground rules before the holiday starts, going as far as banning political talk altogether. If politics aren't off the table, focus on protecting yourself, Klapow suggested.

"Your strategy needs to be, 'Am I going to get into this, yes or no? And when am I going to get out, and how am I going to get out?" he said.

Clear verbal boundaries — "I'm not talking about this anymore" — and leaving the room to take a walk are time-tested strategies of the holiday season, Klapow said.

There are times when you can do everything right, exhibiting empathy and tolerance and setting firm boundaries, and some family member or another is going to fixate on ignoring those boundaries and trying to escalate, Cravens said. In those situations, it may be time to rethink the closeness of that relationship.

"There is a certain extent," she said, "where it's helpful to step back and examine the value of that relationship and the impact it's having on your life."

Original article on Live Science.

The election of Donald Trump as the nation's next president spurred celebration in some quarters and dismay in others, including among those concerned about the steady warming of the planet.

The unrestrained emissions of heat-trapping greenhouse gases have altered the Earth's climate, raising sea levels, impacting ecosystems, and increasingly the likelihood of extreme weather. In terms of numbers, the world’s temperature has risen by more than 1 degree Fahrenheit since 1900 and 2016 is expected to be the hottest year on record.

Though climate change was not a major topic in much election coverage — there were no questions on it during the three presidential debates — many climate scientists and policy advocates supported Clinton. They expected that she would continue policies enacted by the Obama administration, such as the Clean Power Plan and the signing of international agreements to limit warming.

Trumps comments on climate change have included calling it a hoax and warning that Environmental Protection Agency policies are costing the country jobs, though he has talked about the importance of maintaining clean air and water. He has suggested he will pull out of the landmark Paris agreement and scuttle the Clean Power Plan, as well as boost the domestic coal and oil industries.

While the U.S. is only one country, it is a linchpin to the viability of international agreements and to moving the needle on limiting warming.

In response to Tuesday's landmark election, Climate Central reached out to climate, energy and policy researchers to see how they think a Trump presidency will impact climate research and efforts to limit future warming and mitigate what has already happened. We also asked what they think climate scientists should be doing in the coming weeks, months and years, including what they may personally be doing. Their answers have been lightly edited for clarity and brevity:

Jennifer Francis, sea ice researcher at Rutgers University: If President Trump acts on statements he made during the campaign, we are likely to see any federal efforts to curtail fossil fuel burning go up in smoke. I fear that funding for any scientific research related to the environment will be further cut by an unrestrained science-phobic Congress​, even as we become ever more confident of the myriad ways that climate change is costing the U.S. economy billions of dollars, contributing to food and international insecurity, and disrupting daily life. As an optimist, I hope that a President Trump will become more open-minded than the candidate Trump and allow facts to guide his presidential decisions. I also hope that as president he will take his grandchildren to visit our great national parks and see the beauty that will be destroyed if he ignores those facts.

Mother Nature did her share to influence this election by dishing up a smorgasbord of record-breaking heat, flooding, drought, and storms — yet, climate change was a non-issue. We know it's adversely affecting wildlife, agriculture, fisheries, outdoor sports, transportation, you name it — so clearly scientists of all stripes need to tell this story better. I will be redoubling my efforts to help people recognize impacts of climate change on their own lives, and also see the solutions that must happen to reduce the mess we leave for our children.

Jacquelyn Gill, paleoecologist at the University of Maine: We have just elected the only climate denying president in the free world, with a Young Earth Creationist vice president. It's hard to predict exactly how this will play out in terms of impacts to combat and mitigate against climate change, but one of the most immediate threats will be to the funding and agencies that support climate change research. Trump has gone on the record stating he'd cut funding for climate science, which will directly jeopardize ongoing efforts to understand how the climate system works, how to predict the impacts of climate change, and what the effective strategies for mitigation should be.

U.S. Senate Could Block Landmark HFC Climate Treaty 3 Ways Trump Could Abandon the Paris Climate Pact Trump's Presidency Poses Serious Risks to the Climate

I worry that Trump's election will only rejuvenate the ongoing assault on climate scientists, both in terms of internet harassment and in Congress. In my opinion, scientists should be taking steps to protect the security of their online communications, their data, and their personal information. We should be supporting efforts like the Climate Legal Defense Fund. We should be careful about bringing new students into our labs while the future of science funding is so uncertain. We should be putting communication networks in place, reaching out to grant program officers, university administrators, and legislators, and doing what we can to advocate for the importance of our research and academic freedom at every level.

And even though it's scary, we need to be reaching out to the public, now more than ever. We need to find our own outreach communities and connect with those people, and to undertake efforts to humanize climate science. And we need to work with the folks who aren't scientists who are on the ground, on the front lines of climate change and climate justice, to make sure that we amplify their voices and pitch in where we can. This is going to be especially crucial for those of us who are in the most protected groups — white men especially.

Katharine Hayhoe, climate modeler at Texas Tech University: I work with cities, states, and provinces — helping them prepare for a changing climate, building resilience to the impacts we can't avoid, cutting carbon to reduce the impacts we can avoid. Cities like Washington, D.C., Chicago, and even tiny Georgetown, Texas, are at the forefront of this global movement. A president hostile to climate policy may be able to affect federal and even international action: but they can't stop cities and that's where the momentum is. That's what gives me hope.

Andrew Hoffman, sustainable development expert at the University of Michigan: Trump's election throws the future of environmental policy, both in the U.S. and globally, into confusion. His stated and tweeted positions on climate change, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Paris climate accord, the Clean Power Plan and many other related issues suggest that the future of much of the programs and policies of the past administration, indeed many from administrations going back to President Nixon's formation of the EPA, are in question. That said, Trump's positions have been uneven (for example, while deriding some environmental policies, he has endorsed programs by the National Wildlife Federation to protect the Great Lakes; announcing "let's make the Great Lakes great again") and some seem to have been hastily announced (such as his tweet that climate change is a Chinese plot). Let's wait and see how his positions solidify in the coming days of his administration. One aspect of Trump's campaign has been his unpredictability.

I would also add that I wrote this essay to warn that he may be following a similar path that Reagan started down and had to stop. Reagan tried to stop the actions of the EPA and faced a latent interest among the general public on the environment that was aroused by his disregard for environmental policies.

Mark Jacobson, clean energy researcher at Stanford: I'm most concerned with how a Trump presidency will affect solutions to climate change, air pollution, and energy security. Fortunately, the cost of wind and solar are very low now and dropping still, and clean-energy technologies and startups are widespread, so we have momentum. At the state level, many states are moving to clean, renewable energy. It is still in the economic interest of Republicans and Democrats to expand clean, renewable energy. In fact, the five states with the highest fraction of electricity from wind are all "red" states that voted for Trump. Those countries that move faster toward clean, renewable energy will create more jobs, develop their economies faster, become more energy independent, reduce catastrophic risk, including terrorism, associated with centralized plants, and live healthier and longer, so this should be an incentive to keep moving in the right direction. Since most efforts to solve the problems have been at the state level over the past four years in any case (e.g., California, New York, and even inadvertently in Iowa and South Dakota with their expansion of wind), I am confident state and local steps can continue.

I will continue to do what I do, namely try to understand and solve the problems. There is nothing that an unsupportive president can do to stop my efforts.

Ralph Keeling, director of the CO2 program at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography: It's not easy to formulate responses at this point. It's clearly too early to tell what Trump will do to change the landscape on climate mitigation. For now we will be waiting to see how much his policies will be guided by the sometimes extreme views that guided his campaign — such as being in denial of the climate problem. It's certainly easier to be in denial from the sidelines than from being in the driver's seat, so there's hope that a more reasoned approach will follow.

The main step for the climate scientists is to keep working on the science. If we end up on a slower track on mitigating climate change, this just means we need a faster track on adaptation and preparedness. There's a lot on the plate of the scientists regardless.

Michael Mann, paleoclimate researcher at Penn State: A Trump presidency might be game over for the climate. In other words, it might make it impossible to stabilize planetary warming below dangerous (i.e. greater than 2°C) levels. If Trump makes good on his campaign promises and pulls out of the Paris Treaty, it is difficult to see a path forward to keeping warming below dangerous levels.

It is time for introspection and contemplation. I’m still in the process of letting this sink in.

Laura Tam, sustainable development policy director at SPUR: As a policy analyst and advocate for local climate action, I can tell you that the urgency of sub-nationals and cities to take action to go fossil-free is even more important, and we should set up our systems to do this without the federal government, and perhaps in spite of it. The demonstration of the viability of 100 percent renewables for all energy needs can happen here in California and when we demonstrate the economic and environmental superiority of this model, the nation will not be long to follow. It will become inevitable. A Trump presidency will make local and state action even more urgent.

David Titley, climate and weather risk researcher at Penn State: Many black swans have taken flight this year. One thing science teaches you is that systems frequently revert to the mean. So, as dark as everything looks at this moment for fixing our climate, we need to have hope that we won't realize the worst case. If there is a silver lining it's that Trump does not seem bound by whatever he has said previously. So perhaps he will see the wisdom or at least self-interest, in investing in non-carbon, U.S.-produced, energy.

The climate community has a huge challenge ahead, to frame this issue in a way that will resonate with the likely president-elect. It may not be possible but it would be negligent to not even try.

You May Also Like: Trump's Presidency Poses Serious Risks to the Climate Toasty October Keeps U.S. on Track for 2nd-Hottest Year 'Critical Moment' as UN Climate Talks Resume The World Isn't Doing Enough to Slow Climate Change

Originally published on Climate Central.

Call it a presidential game of 20 questions: The 2016 U.S. presidential candidates recently answered a slew of questions about science-related issues, offering a glimpse of their stances on everything from vaccinations to climate change to the country's growing opioid problem.

ScienceDebate, a coalition of 56 leading U.S. nonpartisan organizations representing more than 10 million scientists and engineers, called on the candidates to give their stance on top science, engineering, technology, health and environmental questions facing the country.

In their responses, Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton and Republican candidate Donald Trump touched on specific government programs and spending priorities, but the candidates diverged wildly on approaches to science policy. [Democratic Party Platform: We Fact-Checked the Science]

Climate change, in particular, was a hot-button issue.

A warming planet

Clinton said the science of climate change is "crystal clear" and the issue is "an urgent threat and a defining challenge of our time." The Democratic candidate outlined her plan to address the issue, which focused on making America "the clean-energy superpower of the 21st century."

A growing body of scientific evidence confirms that human activities are contributing to rapid climate change, and scientists have warned that if the gradual heating of the Earth does not slow, the repercussions could be devastating. Recent data from NASA suggest that 2016 is on track to be the hottest year on record. In fact, 16 of the hottest years on record fall within the past two decades, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Melting ice sheets, rising global sea levels, collapsing ecosystems and an increased risk of extreme weather are some of the consequences of global warming, scientists have said.

For Trump, the issue of climate change was referred to in quotation marks. He said, "There is still much that needs to be investigated in the field." While the candidate noted the need for new energy sources to alleviate America's dependence on fossil fuels, he did not directly respond to how he would tackle the issue of climate change if elected. Instead, Trump offered alternative uses for the country's limited financial resources, such as increasing food production or fighting malaria. [We Fact-Checked the Science Behind the Republican Party Platform]

A growing problem

On the topic of opioids, ScienceDebate asked candidates how they would enlist researchers, medical doctors and pharmaceutical companies in addressing this issue. Powerful prescription painkillers — like hydrocodone (marketed as Vicodin), oxycodone (OxyContin, Percocet), morphine (Kadian, Avinza) and codeine — are highly addictive and dangerous with misuse.

Trump's solution to the growing prescription drug problem was to "stop the inflow of opioids into the United States," something he said his administration can and will do.

In Clinton's response, she noted that 52 million Americans over age 12 have misused prescription drugs. Clinton said the government must work with medical professionals to treat the issue on the ground, from how patients access the medications to how they are supported in recovery. Beyond opioids, Clinton discussed the need to combat all drug and alcohol addiction. She described a proposed $10 billion initiative that would support prevention, treatment, recovery and other areas of reform.

Presidential platforms

Beyond the science issues, the candidates also varied in the format of their responses. In general, Trump questioned the need for the federal government's involvement in a number of scientific issues, such as agriculture and ocean health. His answers were also short and took a broader approach in addressing the questions.

For instance, in response to the last question on scientific integrity — in which ScienceDebate asked candidates how they will ensure scientific evidence is transparent and free from political biases and pressure — Trump said:

"Science is science and facts are facts. My administration will ensure that there will be total transparency and accountability without political bias. The American people deserve this and I will make sure this is the culture of my administration." [6 Politicians Who Got the Science Wrong]

In contrast, Clinton was very detailed in her responses and outlined not only the role of the government but also specific plans for her presidency. To the same scientific integrity question, Clinton explained how her efforts would "ensure a culture of scientific integrity," which included the facilitation of open communication and public engagement. Clinton also discussed her concern over the interference of partisan political efforts in scientific endeavors and called for "the free exchange of ideas and data" and federal policies to reinforce public trust in the integrity of science.

One issue the candidates all agreed on was the need to expand the space program, including the importance of exploration and its inspirational aspects. Trump noted that a strong space program inspires students to pursue the so-called STEM fields (science, technology, engineering and mathematics), while Clinton shared her personal awe of space and commended NASA's efforts thus far. Green Party candidate Jill Stein called for demilitarized and internationally collaborative space exploration.

Libertarian Party nominee Gary Johnson had not yet responded at the time of publication.

The candidates' full answers to all 20 questions can be found on the ScienceDebate website.

Original article on Live Science.

Party Stance

The 2016 Republican Party platform, released Monday (July 18), details the party's stated principles and policies. Both of the nation's major political parties create platforms in advance of national elections so that voters have a clear view of the agenda the party will pursue if its members are elected to office.

To find out what Donald Trump, the Republican nominee for president, and other Republican elected officials might decide to do on health and environmental issues, Live Science examined the party platform. Then, our reporters and editors dug into the scientific research related to the party's stances on issues from abortion to electromagnetic pulses to climate change.

[Read our analysis of the Democratic National Committee platform and Election Day 2016: A Guide to When, What, Why and How]

Here's a guide highlighting the Republican National Committee (RNC) platform's beliefs and the science that may support or run contrary to these party stances.

Fetal pain

The RNC platform: "Over a dozen states have passed Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Acts prohibiting abortion after twenty weeks, the point at which current medical research shows that unborn babies can feel excruciating pain, and we call on Congress to enact the federal version."

The science: The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) considers the case to be closed as to whether a fetus can feel pain at this stage [20 weeks] in development. The best evidence on fetal development suggests that a fetus is not capable of feeling pain until the third trimester of pregnancy, which begins at about 27 weeks.

In order for a fetus to be able to feel pain, a number of neural pathways must be developed, to carry pain signals through the body to the brain. A 2005 review article in the journal JAMA sums up scientists’ understanding of how these pathways develop, and concludes that it is unlikely that a fetus would be capable of feeling pain before the third trimester. Since the article's publication, "no research has contradicted its findings," according to a statement from ACOG.

Related: Do Fetuses Feel Pain? What the Science Says

Recent Supreme Court abortion ruling (Whole Woman's Health v. Hellerstedt)

RNC platform: "We condemn the Supreme Court's activist decision in Whole Woman's Health v. Hellerstedt striking down commonsense Texas laws providing for basic health and safety standards in abortion clinics."

The science: The Supreme Court recently overturned a Texas law called House Bill 2, which required doctors who perform abortions to have admitting privileges at a nearby hospital (less than 30 miles, or 48 kilometers, away from the abortion clinic), meaning they could admit patients to the hospital if necessary. The law also required abortion clinics to meet standards that are required for hospital surgery centers.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled, on June 27, that these requirements did not offer medical benefits to the patients that were "sufficient to justify the burdens upon access [to abortion] that each [requirement] imposes," Justice Stephen G. Breyer wrote in the court's majority opinion. In other words, the law did not provide basic health and safety standards, as the RNC platform holds.

According to the ACOG, "abortion is one of the safest medical procedures performed in the United States." Studies show that less than 1 percent of U.S. women who have an abortion will experience a major complication that requires admission to a hospital.

Related: Supreme Court Abortion Ruling Explained

Fetal tissue research

RNC platform: "We urge all states and Congress to make it a crime to acquire, transfer, or sell fetal tissues from elective abortions for research, and we call on Congress to enact a ban on any sale of fetal body parts."

The science: Scientists say that because fetal tissue cells can divide and grow more quickly than other types of cells, they are highly valuable for research, including studies investigating human development, treatment of spinal cord injuries and diseases that affect the brain.

Fetal tissue is also uniquely suited to help scientists understand factors that affect a fetus' development during pregnancy, or that cause miscarriages.

Were fetal tissue not recovered for research, it would otherwise be discarded.

Embryonic stem cell research

RNC platform: "We oppose embryonic stem cell research. We oppose the federal funding of embryonic stem cell research. We support adult stem cell research and urge the restoration of the national placental stem cell bank… We oppose federal funding for harvesting embryos…"

The science: Embryonic stem cells come from human embryos. (An "embryo" develops immediately after fertilization, and is considered as such up until the eighth week of gestation, when it is referred to as a "fetus.") These cells have the ability to morph into any type in the body, such as a red blood cell or a nerve cell. Because of this flexibility, researchers can use embryonic stem cells to investigate potential treatments and cures for a number of human diseases, especially those where a certain type of cell becomes damaged or no longer functions as it should. Some diseases that could be helped by embryonic stem cell research include diabetes, cancer and Parkinson’s disease. [What Are Stem Cells?]

Although adults have stem cells, these cells are much more limited in their ability to morph into different cell types: For example, an adult neural stem cell can only morph into a nerve cell. In other words, embryonic stem cells have much greater potential for research.

In 2009, President Barack Obama reversed a ban on federal funding for research into embryonic stem cells. However, researchers whose projects are funded by the government still must use existing lines of embryonic cells, they are not allowed to create new cell lines because the rules forbid destroying embryos, from which the stem cells are extracted. Therefore, the initial extraction of stem cells from the embryos still would depend on private funding.

According to the National Institutes of Health, as long as stem cells are obtained from embryos that were produced by in-vitro fertilization but are no longer needed, and the donors give permission for the embryos to be used for research purposes, federal funds can be used for research on the resulting stem cell lines.

Human cloning

RNC platform: "[We] call for a ban on human cloning."

The science: Although there is no federal ban on human cloning in the United States, most experts agree that human cloning would be unethical, and say that scientists are nowhere near able to actually clone a person.

In a 2013 interview, John Gearhart, the director of the Institute for Regenerative Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, told Live Science that concerns about human cloning are "overwrought," because scientists are not interested in doing it, since it crosses an ethical line.

Dr. Robert Lanza, chief scientific officer at the biotech company Advanced Cell Technology, agreed, saying that human cloning is unethical, because cloning comes with an extremely high risk of death or developmental abnormalities in the fetus. Trying to clone a human is "like sending your baby up in a rocket knowing there's a 50-50 chance it's going to blow up. It's grossly unethical," Lanza told Live Science in a 2013 interview.

Researchers would also need to get approval from the Food and Drug Administration before pursuing this type of work, which is not likely to happen, Paul Knoepfler, a stem-cell researcher at the University of California, Davis School of Medicine, told Live Science. Fifteen states also currently have laws that ban human reproductive cloning.

Keystone XL Pipeline

RNC platform: "After years of delay, the President killed [the Keystone XL Pipeline] to satisfy environmental extremists. We intend to finish that pipeline and others as part of our commitment to North American energy security."

The science: In November 2015, President Barack Obama vetoed a bill that would authorize construction of the pipeline, a project designed to carry tar sands oil (a mixture of clay, sand, water and black, thick oil) 1,179 miles (1,897 kilometers) from Alberta to Nebraska. However, the entire Keystone Pipeline System would have eventually extended 2,639 miles (4,247 km), branching off into several Midwest markets, as well as the Gulf Coast, according to TransCanada, the Calgary-based company proposing the project.

A 2015 report presented by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), found that if run at full capacity, the pipeline project could release greenhouse gases every year that would equal the annual output of 5.7 million cars on the road or almost eight coal-fired power plants, according to the Los Angeles Times.

Over a 50-year period, the tar-sands-oil project could have emitted about 1.3 billion more tons of greenhouse gases than if it were carrying conventional crude oil, the EPA report said.

Moreover, processing the tar sands in Alberta could also release large amounts of greenhouse gases from a carbon reservoir in Alberta into the atmosphere, making it difficult to meet the international goal of preventing the Earth from warming no more than 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit (2 degrees Celsius), scientists told Climate Central.

Related: When did Democrats and Republicans switch platforms?

Endangered Species Act

RNC platform: "There is certainly a need to protect certain species threatened worldwide with extinction. However, the Endangered Species Act (ESA) should not include species such as gray wolves and other species if these species exist elsewhere in healthy numbers in another state or country. To upset the economic viability of an area with an unneeded designation costs jobs and hurts local communities.

The science: The controversy surrounding gray wolves (Canis lupus), a keystone predator in ecosystems in the Western U.S., isn't a new one. Worldwide, gray wolves aren't listed as endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, but local populations in the United States have faced challenges. For instance, they were wiped out in Arizona in the 1940s, Live Science reported in 2014. Nowadays, gray wolves have federal protections in 39 states and in parts of five states, according to the U.S. government.

Even if a species exists elsewhere, the loss of a local population can have large ramifications for an ecosystem. "You would have lost the benefits supplied by those populations," Jennifer Hughes, lead author of a 1997 study on local population loss in the journal Science, said in a statement. "This is a tremendously important dimension of biodiversity, which is often ignored." [In Photos: The Fight Over Gray Wolves' Endangered Status]

Climate change

RNC platform: "Climate change is far from this nation’s most pressing national security issue. This is the triumph of extremism over common sense, and Congress must stop it."

The science: Climate change, or global warming, is the gradual heating of the Earth, and 97 percent of scientists attribute it to human activity.

In 2013, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a report on the science of global warming based on the scientific community's consensus that humans caused global temperature rise.

"Human influence has been detected in warming of the atmosphere and the ocean, in changes in the global water cycle, in reductions in snow and ice, in global mean sea level rise, and in changes in some climate extremes," the report said. "It is extremely likely that human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century."

In fact, 2016 is on track to be the hottest year on record. In a recent study, NASA data showed that each month in 2016 was the warmest respective month globally. According to Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City, there is a 99 percent probability that 2016, on average, will surpass 2015 as the hottest year on record.

Scientists say that continued warming of the planet will affect the ice sheet, global sea levels, ecosystems and can have other devastating impacts on the world.

Coal

RNC platform: "The Democratic Party does not understand that coal is an abundant, clean, affordable, reliable domestic energy resource. Those who mine it and their families should be protected from the Democratic Party's radical anti-coal agenda."

The science: Coal is a relatively inexpensive energy source, but mining and burning it can have severe effects on human health and the environment, scientists have found.

When burned, coal releases sulfur dioxide (a cause of acid rain) and the greenhouse gases carbon dioxide and nitrogen oxide (a cause of smog and acid rain), according to the Union of Concerned Scientists. Burned coal also releases particles into the air that can affect people with asthma and other health conditions, the Union said.

For instance, China burns almost half of the world's coal, according to a 2013 analysis by the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA). Beijing, a city surrounded by coal-burning plants, is known for its air pollution. In just one month ─ January 2013 – there were 19 days when Beijing's pollution rating was above 300, meaning that the air was extremely unsafe to breathe, the Washington Post reported.

Such hazardous air can lead to "serious aggravation of heart or lung disease and premature mortality in persons with cardiopulmonary disease and the elderly; serious risk of respiratory effects in general population," a U.S. Embassy representative in China told the Post.

In the United States, air pollution from coal-fired plants accounts for an estimated 13,000 premature deaths, 20,000 heart attacks and 1.6 million lost workdays every year, a 2010 study by the Clean Air Task Force found.

In 2015, coal accounted for about one-third of the United States' electricity, the EIA reported. The states with the most coal production include Wyoming, West Virginia, Kentucky, Pennsylvania and Illinois, according to a 2014 EIA analysis.

Nuclear energy

RNC platform: "We support the development of all forms of energy that are marketable in a free economy without subsidies, including coal, oil, natural gas, nuclear power and hydropower… We support lifting restrictions to allow responsible development of nuclear energy…"

The science: Experts say that the amount of greenhouse gases produced by nuclear power plants is negligible, suggesting that nuclear power plants could be an attractive alternative to coal-driven plants, which are responsible for an estimated 35 percent of the United States' carbon dioxide emissions.

Researchers have found that the public is concerned about the safety risks associated with nuclear power, particularly after the 2011 Fukushima nuclear power plant meltdowns, Yale University reported.

However, the immediate risks associated with coal are significantly higher. According to the World Health Organization, coal is responsible for more than one million deaths each year — an estimated 4,025 deaths from coal for every single death from nuclear power.

Electromagnetic pulse attacks

RNC platform: "A single nuclear weapon detonated at high altitude over this country would collapse our electrical grid and other critical infrastructures and endanger the lives of millions … Hundreds of electrical utilities in the United States have not acted to protect themselves from EMP, and they cannot be expected to do so voluntarily since homeland security is a government responsibility."

The science: Security experts are split on whether weaponized electromagnetic pulses, or EMPs, from hostile foreign powers are actually a legitimate threat.

If a rogue state such as North Korea were to detonate a nuclear weapon in the ionosphere, a region of the atmosphere filled with electrons and charged particles, it could release waves of atmospheric radiation that could span the continent. When the EMPs hit the ground, they could send huge pulses of electricity coursing through electrical wires and cables, shorting out transformers and decimating the electrical grid.

However, to launch such an attack would be suicide for any country involved, because American submarines could launch their own retaliatory nuclear missiles quickly, and they would not be affected by the EMPs, the Commission to Assess the Threat to the U.S. from EMP Attack said in testimony before the House Armed Services Committee in July 2008. In addition, any nuclear weapon that could create an EMP would have to somehow be deployed to the atmosphere above the center of the country without being detected, the commission noted.

Pornography

RNC platform: "Pornography, with its harmful effects, especially on children, has become a public health crisis that is destroying the lives of millions."

The science: Experts argue that research provides a mixed report on how pornography impacts society, with some studies indicating that pornography exposure has little to no effect on people. And scientists have found that some countries' rates of sexual violence decreased after pornography had been decriminalized and became more widely available, according to studies conducted by Milton Diamond, director of the Pacific Center for Sex and Society at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.

On July 15, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) wrote in a statement that the "CDC does not have an established position on pornography as a public health issue. Pornography can be connected to other public health issues like sexual violence and occupational HIV transmission," CNN reported.

Married mothers and fathers

RNC platform: "The data and the facts lead to an inescapable conclusion: Every child deserves a married mom and dad. The reality remains that millions of American families do not have the advantages that come with that structure."

The science: The Republican platform opposes both single parenting and gay marriage, and implies that the party would like to see a repeal of the Supreme Court decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, a 2015 decision that legalized same-sex marriage across the land.

Decades' worth of studies suggests that children from two-parent households tend to fare better on a raft of outcomes, from educational attainment to mental health to criminal behavior, than those with single parents. For instance, a 2010 study found that bullies were more likely to come from single-parent households, and a 2014 study in the journal BMJ Open found that children of divorce were likelier to be obese or overweight. However, studies have had difficulty teasing out what's behind this trend, whether it's the marital structure of the family, the conflict that preceded a divorce or prevented parents from getting married in the first place, or the financial hardships associated with single parenting that makes the most difference. For instance, one 2015 study found that money, rather than marital status, makes parents better.

Because gay people represent a relatively small fraction of the population, and gay parents an even smaller fraction, large studies on gay parents are scarce. However, much of the evidence suggests that gay couples may be as good, if not better, than straight parents. A 2010 review found no differences in mental health, school performance or social performance for children raised by two gay parents, rather than by a heterosexual couple.

Other researchers, in a 2015 study in Social Science Research, found little to no difference between children being raised by two gay or two straight parents.

Same-sex couples are also more likely than heterosexual couples to build their families through adoption, something the Republican platform supports. Gay parents often take in the neediest children – over half of children adopted to gay parents had special needs, while a quarter were older than 3, a particularly hard age to "place," according to a 2011 study by the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Agency.

Abstinence-only sexual education

RNC platform: "We renew our call for replacing 'family planning' programs for teens with sexual risk avoidance education that sets abstinence until marriage as the responsible and respected standard of behavior."

The science: Many studies suggest that abstinence-only sex education is not effective at preventing teen sex. A 2008 study found that teens who received abstinence-only sex education were just as likely to engage in intercourse, and become pregnant in their teens, as those who didn't receive any sex education.

On the other hand, those who received comprehensive sex education, which includes information about effective birth control, were less likely to become pregnant, the study found.

And the idea that teaching teens about safe sex will encourage them to have sex seems to be a myth. A 2012 study found that teens who received any type of sex education waited longer to have sex than those who didn't receive any sex education. Those who received sex education were also more likely to use contraception when they did become sexually active.

That study couldn't precisely tease out the differences between abstinence-only and comprehensive sex education, but found some evidence that young women who received information about birth control were more likely to use condoms during their first intercourse than those who received abstinence-only sex education.

The American Academy of Pediatrics says that "abstinence-only programs have not demonstrated successful outcomes with regard to delayed initiation of sexual activity or use of safer sex practices." Instead, "Effective programs tend to provide practical skills, such as exercising control and increasing communication and negotiation skills through role-playing," the AAP says.

Programs that encourage abstinence as the best option, but also discuss prevention of sexually transmitted diseases and the use of contraception, have been shown to delay the start of sex and increase use of birth control among those who do become sexually active, the AAP says.

When it comes to getting elected to political office in the U.S., looks matter — or rather, looking like you can get things done matters, a new study finds.

Researchers found that Americans preferred to vote for candidates who appeared more competent, according to the study, published today (April 21) in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science. Chinese participants, on the other hand, valued candidates who appeared to have better social skills, the researchers found.

In the study, the researchers sought to compare how cultural differences — for example, an emphasis on individualism in America versus an emphasis on collectivism, or giving priority to the group over the individual, in East Asia — would affect how people viewed elected leaders. [Smile Secrets: 5 Things Your Grin Reveals About You]

It turned out that the appearance of competence, or the ability to complete certain goals, was more important to American participants, while the appearance of "social competence," or the ability to navigate social situations and be sensitive to the needs of others, played a greater role in the decision for Chinese participants.

It's important to consider these cultural differences in how people view leaders, as the United States is becoming increasingly multicultural, Fang Chen, a professor of psychology at the University of Delaware and the lead author of the study, said in a statement.

In the study, the researchers recruited American students and Chinese students, and showed them 20 pairs of faces. Ten of the pairs were American men who had previously run against each other for a U.S. Senate seat, and 10 were Taiwanese men who had previously run against each other for a seat in the Taiwanese parliament.

For each pair of photos, the researchers asked the participants to indicate which candidate in the pair better appeared to exhibit a specific trait, such as likability, intelligence, trustworthiness or dominance, according to the study. Then, they asked the participants to rank, on a scale from 1 to 9, how much more the selected candidate exhibited that trait compared to the other candidate (for example, how much more likable one candidate was, compared to the other).

The researchers also asked the participants how likely they would be to vote for each candidate in a hypothetical election.

The American participants were more likely to vote for the candidates who they viewed as more competent, while the Chinese participants placed more stock in the candidates they viewed as more trustworthy and dominant, according to the study. In addition, the Chinese participants valued social competence more than the American participants did, the researchers found. [7 Personality Traits That Are Bad for You]

The researchers noted that the results of the hypothetical elections didn't always line up with the actual election results. In a real election, a candidate's views on issues and party affiliate also come into play, the authors wrote in the study. 

Follow Sara G. Miller on Twitter @SaraGMiller. Follow Live Science @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Originally published on Live Science.

When Donald Trump talks, he doesn't sound like an ordinary presidential candidate. His sentences are fragmented. He jumps around. On paper, his words appear garbled.

But there may be a good reason why this seeming incoherence hasn't hurt Trump in the Republican run for the presidential nomination: Trump's talk mirrors typical conversation, bolstering his status as an honest outsider.

"[Trump's] unique rhetorical style may come off as incoherent and unintelligible when we compare it with the organized structure of other candidates' answers," Georgetown University linguist Jennifer Sclafani told Live Science. "On the other hand, his conversational style may also help construct an identity for him as authentic, relatable and trustworthy, which are qualities that voters look for in a presidential candidate." [Quiz: Bizarre Presidential Elections]

Talking Trump

Trump's style is different from that of most modern public speakers. He has an especially repetitive style, University of Pennsylvania linguist Mark Liberman has pointed out on the blog Language Log. In a December post, Liberman excerpted a sample of an interview with Trump in which he was asked how to defeat the Islamic State group. Trump's response included variations of the phrase "bomb all these sites" three times in quick succession:

Well, if I were president, we probably wouldn't be in the problems we have right now, because it's incredible — we have an attack, and then all of a sudden, we bomb all these sites. Why didn't we bomb the sites before? We should have bombed the sites a long time ago.

Trump's vocabulary is also less diverse than other candidates', Liberman found, and his repetition tendency is a major cause of that. Trump also uses short verb phrases, which seem simplistic on their face, Sclafani said. She cited an example about immigration from the Feb. 25 Republican debate, in which Trump said:

But, we either have a country, or we don't have a country. We have at least 11 million people in this country that came in illegally. They will go out. They will come back — some will come back, the best, through a process. They have to come back legally. They have to come back through a process — and it may not be a very quick process, but I think that's very fair, and very fine.

Germanic verb phrases like "come in," "go out" and "come back," are shorter and lighter than Latin-derived alternatives like "immigrate" and "deport," which Trump avoids, Sclafani said. But those simple phrases allow for parallel constructions like, "They will go out. They will come back" — which mirrors the parallel, "We either have a country, or we don't have a country."

"Despite the lack of logical coherence in his response, the simplicity and rhetorical structure of his statements may be appealing on another level," Sclafani said.  [Oh Snap: 10 Memorable Political One-Liners]

An outsider's voice

Trump's rhetoric stands in sharp contrast to that of his opponents. Take this now-infamous tidbit from the March 3 Republican debate in Detroit, when Trump responded to a question about fellow candidate Marco Rubio attacking him personally in the preceding days:

Well, I also happened to call him a lightweight, OK? And I have said that. So I would like to take that back. He is really not that much of a lightweight. And as far as — and I have to say this, I have to say this. He hit my hands. Nobody has ever hit my hands. I have never heard of this. Look at those hands. Are they small hands? And he referred to my hands — if they are small, something else must be small. I guarantee you, there is no problem. I guarantee.

In contrast, Rubio started with a classic politician's segue when asked about the back-and-forth insults between he and Trump. "Yes, you know, Bret, let me say something," he began, addressing the moderator. He then launched into a relatively smooth speech, with only one false start:

This campaign — for the last year, Donald Trump has basically mocked everybody with personal attacks. He has done so to people that are sitting on the stage today. He has done so about people that are disabled. He has done it about every candidate in this race.

So if there is anyone who has ever deserved to be attacked that way, it has been Donald Trump, for the way he has treated people in the campaign.

On paper, Rubio looks a lot more coherent than Trump. But this kind of communication isn't how people talk every day, Sclafani said.

"If you listen carefully to the type of conversation among friends you might overhear in a café, their utterances will be full of incomplete sentences, abrupt topic shifts and non-sequiturs [unconnected statements]," she said.

Another, former outsider candidate, Sarah Palin (John McCain's running mate from the 2008 election) has a similar jumpy style, Sclafani said. But Palin's Alaska accent might make people more likely to think of her as mentally slow, she said, while Trump's rapid New York cadence may make him seem smarter. Trump is also a brand, Sclafani said, and his mode of speech is part of his image.

"He comes off as the same type of person in the political sphere as he did in the reality TV/business sphere," she said, "which works toward his image as authentic and trustworthy."

Follow Stephanie Pappas on Twitter and Google+. Follow us @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science.

Zing!

Politicians want their words to stick in voters' minds, and sometimes that means dispensing with niceties. A good political insult not only takes a rival candidate down a notch or two, but marks its maker as witty and bold. Research on incivility between candidates indicates that rude exchanges might lower the public's trust in the political process and politicians in general. But never mind that — here is a collection of some of the cruelest jibs in American history.

A superabundance of secretions

Low-down dirty politics started early in American history. President John Adams hated Alexander Hamilton, the first secretary of the treasury under George Washington — and John Adams could wield an acid pen when he wanted to. Adams wrote in an 1806 letter that Hamilton's political plans arose "from a superabundance of secretions, which he could not find whores enough to draw off."

Granted, Hamilton hadn't done much to engender Adams' good will. In 1800, he wrote a 58-page pamphlet entitled "Letter from Alexander Hamilton, Concerning the Public Conduct and Character of John Adams, Esq. President of the United States." It was not complimentary. [The Strangest Political Elections in US History]

Adams "is a man of an imagination sublimated and eccentric; propitious neither to the regular display of sound judgment, nor to steady perseverance in a systematic plan of conduct; and I began to perceive what has been since too manifest, that to this defect are added the unfortunate foibles of a vanity without bounds, and a jealousy capable of discoloring every object," Hamilton wrote. 

A slur upon the moral government of the world

John Adams and Thomas Jefferson were close friends, but when Jefferson ascended to the presidency, politics interfered. Adams made a number of last-minute appointments to undermine Jefferson's authority, according to the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, and the two stopped speaking for years. Eventually, the two men rekindled their correspondence, but the memory of that time stuck in the craw of John Adams' son John Quincy Adams, the fifth president of the United States. [Everything You Need to Know About Democracy]

According to "The Remarkable Education of John Quincy Adams" (Palgrave Macmillan 015), the younger Adams would later re-read Jefferson's papers from that era and write bitterly in his diary: "His success through a long life, and especially from his entrance upon the office of Secretary of State under Washington until he reached the Presidential chair, seems, to my imperfect vision, a slur upon the moral government of the world."

Presidential regrets

Andrew Jackson clashed with many people during his tempestuous life, including a rival plantation owner named Charles Dickinson, whom he killed in a duel. In 1824, Jackson won the presidential popular vote, but lost the presidency to John Quincy Adams because of the quirks of the electoral college, a situation Jackson deemed a "corrupt bargain." In the next election, Jackson won, but not until after a mudslinging contest that saw his wife Rachel accused of bigamy. She died of a heart attack right before his inauguration in 1828, and Jackson vowed never to forgive "her murderers." [The 10 Weirdest Inaugurations in US History]

Time did not mellow this most pugnacious of presidents. Upon leaving office in 1837, Jackson cited two regrets, both involving inflicting bodily harm on rivals: that he "had been unable to shoot Henry Clay or to hang John C. Calhoun."

Homeopathic pigeon soup

Before he ran for president, Abraham Lincoln matched up with incumbent Stephen Douglas for one of Illinois' Senate seats in 1858. The seven Lincoln-Douglas debates of the contest were focused on slavery and the fear that the practice might spread to free states like Illinois.

Douglas was a supporter of "popular sovereignty" on slavery, which would allow the people of a new state or territory to vote on the issue. He also originally supported the Supreme Court's Dred Scott decision of 1857, which denied a slave the right to sue for freedom despite being taken by his owner to Illinois and Wisconsin Territory, where slavery was illegal. In the debates, Lincoln excoriated Douglas' mental gymnastics on constitutionality and local control, saying that his notion of popular sovereignty was "as thin as the homeopathic soup that was made by boiling the shadow of a pigeon that had starved to death." 

Missing a back

James Garfield was president for a mere six months before his assassination in 1881, but he clashed with some powerful parties during that time. Chief among them was Senator Roscoe Conkling, who was infuriated when Garfield nominated a new Collector of the Port of New York without his consent. The shuffling about of people as a result of the appointment also ended up insulting former President Ulysses S. Grant, because his friend Adam Badeau, whom Grant had appointed Consul General in London, got moved from London to Copenhagen against his will — which had the domino effect of booting Grant's brother-in-law from a post in Copenhagen and his former Secretary of State from a post in Switzerland, according to "Garfield: A Biography" (Kent State University Press, 1978).

All of this political insider drama, however, yielded a doozy of an insult from Grant toward his successor. "Garfield," he said, "has shown that he is not possessed of the backbone of an angleworm."

Again with the backbone

Backbone is the subject of another political insult, this one contested. Theodore Roosevelt is commonly credited with sniffling in 1898 that President William McKinley "has no more backbone than a chocolate éclair." But this is the rare bon mot that has become the subject of much controversy. The quote has also been attributed to former Speaker of the House Thomas B. Reed, who lost the Republican presidential nomination to McKinley in 1896.

In 2006, Ohio State professor emeritus Richard Hamilton wrote in Presidential Studies Quarterly that the sourcing on this famous insult is thin. The first reference, he wrote, dates back to a 1927 textbook, which itself does not provide a source. The insult may have resonated because it fit with decades of scholarship portraying McKinley as weak and indecisive, Hamilton suggested.

Halitosis of the intellect

The populist senator Huey Long was a controversial figure in 1930s America. A fiery populist, Long championed the common man, battled oil companies and utilities and built a powerful political network in his home state of Louisiana.

As a senator, Long blurred the line between federal and state by drafting his own state bills, which were then passed by his friends in Louisiana's state legislature. It was this strategy that got him in trouble with the Roosevelt administration. Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes publically complained that Long was using his power in Louisiana's government to take control of federal funding sent to the state and he threatened to cancel federal projects. Long responded with belligerence, and Ickes shot back, "The trouble with Senator Long is that he is suffering from halitosis of the intellect. That's presuming Emperor Long has an intellect."

Lie to keep his hand in

Harry Truman did not like Richard Nixon. As a congressman, Nixon called then-President Truman soft on terrorism. Truman's later comments on Nixon would be far more withering.

"Richard Nixon is a no good, lying bastard," Truman once said. "He can lie out of both sides of his mouth at the same time, and if he ever caught himself telling the truth, he'd lie just to keep his hand in."

Football without a helmet

As House minority leader, future president Gerald Ford criticized President Lyndon B. Johnson's strategy in Vietnam. Johnson struck back with one of the more condescending comments in political history. Ford, he allowed, was a "nice fellow, but he spent too much time playing football without a helmet." (Ford went to the University of Michigan on a football scholarship.) That wasn't Johnson's only cutting comment about Ford. According to Ford's obituary, Johnson once commented, "Gerry Ford is so dumb he can't fart and chew gum at the same time." The press sanitized the quote to "walk and chew gum." Ford wasn't above a little self-deprecation, either. After being sworn in as vice president in 1973, he told the crowd not to expect eloquence: "I am a Ford, not a Lincoln."

No Jack Kennedy

One of the most famous lines in modern debate history happened during the televised vice presidential showdown between Lloyd Bentsen and Dan Quayle in 1988. Quayle compared his level of experience with that of John F. Kennedy – and Bentsen pounced.

"I served with Jack Kennedy. I knew Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you're no Jack Kennedy," he said.

The moment didn't get any less awkward from there. After applause from the audience, an affronted Quayle responded, "That was really uncalled for, Senator."

"You're the one that was making the comparison, Senator," Bentsen responded, packing disdain into the title. "And I'm one who knew him well, and frankly I think you are so far apart in the objectives you chose for your country, that I did not think the comparison was well-taken."

At heart, politics is a war of words. And sometimes, the pithiest phrases make the biggest impact.

As Donald Trump's primary campaign has shown, snappy insults can boost a candidate's stature among supporters, a factor that may play out more strongly than ever in social-media echo chambers. Unfortunately, political one-liners may also lead voters to have less faith in the political process, and in politicians more generally, experts say.  

With another Republican primary debate coming tonight (Feb. 25) and on March 3, the candidates will likely strive to produce the most memorable quotes of the night. This sort of attention seeking is particularly important in a crowded field, like that of the Republican primary, said Jacob Neiheisel, a political scientist at the University of Buffalo in New York.

"Anything you can do to garner free media or any kind of attention whatsoever is probably not the worst thing," Neiheisel told Live Science. [Quiz: Bizarre Presidential Elections]

Political insults

The insults of this primary season have been particularly memorable, if not always mature. "You are the single biggest liar," Trump told Sen. Ted Cruz at the Feb. 13 debate. "Adults learn not to interrupt each other," Cruz snapped at Trump at another point in the evening. Trump, for his part, has made insulting people the central point of his campaign. In less than 48 hours in mid-February, Trump wrote on Twitter that Fox News host Megyn Kelly should "get a life," called Sen. Lindsey Graham a "dumb mouthpiece" and mocked Jeb Bush for wearing contacts instead of glasses.

There have been tense exchanges on the Democratic side, too. After Sen. Bernie Sanders criticized Hillary Clinton for turning to former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger for advice, she shot back that no one knows who Sanders listens to on foreign policy, a jab at his perceived lack of expertise. Sanders quickly responded, "Well, it ain't Henry Kissinger." 

Insults may drive morning-after headlines, but it's not entirely clear what role they play in swaying voters. No one has directly studied the effects of a really sick burn on people's perceptions of candidates, Neiheisel said. [10 Historically Significant Political Protests]

There are many studies on incivility in politics, which might overlap with the headline-worthy debate insult. That research generally finds that mudslinging campaigns aren't great for the democratic process. In a 2005 study published in the journal American Political Science Review, researchers from the University of Pennsylvania and Stanford University in California created mock television debates for participants to watch. In some versions of the debates, the politicians (played by actors) were polite and civil. They didn't interrupt, they listened patiently to their opponents, and they acknowledged their opponents' points before providing their own answers.

In other versions, the politicians made the same arguments using most of the same words, but tried to interrupt, huffed and rolled their eyes when their opponents talked, and prefaced their answers with phrases like "you're really missing the point."

Participants who had seen the uncivil debates subsequently reported less trust in politicians, in Congress and in the entire United States political system than people who'd watched civil versions of the debates. A follow-up experiment tested galvanic skin responses, which reveal tiny changes in perspiration that signal agitation, and found that just watching a heated back-and-forth gets people hyped up, physiologically speaking. [Oh Snap: 10 Memorable Political One-Liners]

Media translations

For an outsider candidate like Trump, fomenting distrust in the political process might be a positive side effect of slinging insults. Politicians aren't just seeking to sway new voters at debates, Neiheisel pointed out — they also want to firm up their supporters and ensure those people are excited enough to vote.

"Candidates might have different objectives other than changing minds," he told Live Science.

Another question is how much control politicians have over their messages. An analysis of primary debate content published in a political science textbook in 2002 found that 75 percent of utterances in debates were about policy; 25 percent were about candidate character. Ohio University communications researcher William Benoit, who conducted that analysis, said he also found that candidates are generally more positive and policy-focused than the media, which disproportionately reports negativity and underreports on policy. It's quite possible that a policy-filled debate can be reduced to verbal jabs and jousts in news reports, skewing the public's perception of what candidates are saying, according to Benoit's research.

The latest wrench in the machinery is social media, which amplifies direct communication — and in-your-face voices like Trump's. Political science research on social media indicates that tweets and Facebook posts do have some impact on elections, but the details of what kind of tweets and posts sway voter opinion remain murky. A 2012 study on Facebook's "I voted" feature found that a get-out-the-vote message sent to 61 million users influenced 340,000 people to cast ballots who otherwise would not have made it to the polls.

However, a 2015 report by the University of Oxford's Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism found that in the United Kingdom, at least, traditional media remains more influential in securing voter engagement than does social media. That could change, though, if the growth in social media continues, the study noted.

To the extent that candidates are comfortable slinging insults online, their tone might influence the way everyday people talk to one another about politics, Neiheisel said.

"The things that elites talk about, the candidates, filter down," Neiheisel said. "I would have to imagine that the way in which they speak to each other would probably filter out into the electorate and serve as a model for how the electorate speaks about politics."

If bomb-throwing Twitter feeds like Trump's become more normal and do influence the overall political discourse, it would represent a shift. Despite stereotypes about dueling social media trolls, a Pew Research Center study from 2014 found that people's tendency to tiptoe around politics extends to the Internet. That research used the case of Edward Snowden, who revealed information about U.S. government surveillance, to ask people how likely they were to discuss a politically divisive topic on Facebook and Twitter.

Results showed that people were actually less likely to launch a discussion online than in person, with 86 percent of people saying they'd be willing to talk about U.S. surveillance face-to-face with someone, but only 42 percent saying they'd post about the topic on Facebook or Twitter. [The 7 Craziest Intelligence Leaks in U.S. History]

Notably, most people don't seem to relish a fight: Both online and in person, people said they were unlikely to talk about Snowden or surveillance in situations in which they thought their audience would disagree with them. So far, at least, it seems that the American public is less combative than the candidates they vote for.

Follow Stephanie Pappas on Twitter and Google+. Follow us @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science.

In the aftermath of the coordinated terrorist attacks across Paris last Friday (Nov. 13), support popped up in the new public arena: Facebook. The social network rolled out a tool allowing users to easily put a French flag overlay on members' profile pictures to express sympathy with the victims.

Almost immediately, though, the tool sparked backlash. "Got a French flag on your Facebook profile picture? Congratulations on your corporate white supremacy," read the headline of one op-ed in The Independent.

Emotions are high, to say the least.

The French flag overlay isn't the first overlay Facebook has developed in response to current events, but it came at a time when social media users seem divided on what a retweet, profile picture change or shared meme really means. Is using a Facebook flag overlay a simple act of solidarity, or is it a political statement? Are online expressions of emotion superficial examples of "slacktivism," or are they substantial and meaningful to the political process? [5 Ways Your Emotions Influence Your World (and Vice Versa)]

Social media support

Research on these social media expressions is still new, as are profile picture overlays themselves. Facebook created a rainbow "Celebrate Pride" overlay in June that became extremely popular after the Supreme Court struck down state prohibitions against same-sex marriage in June. Before that, the Human Rights Campaign designed a red equal sign promoting marriage equality. In March 2013, 3 million Facebook users changed their profile pictures to this logo (which replaced their photo instead of overlaying it). Making a statement via a profile picture is not a phenomenon limited to Facebook. During the 2009 protests in the Middle East known as the "Arab Spring," many Twitter users turned their profile pictures green to support protestors.

The urge to participate in global events through social media is clearly strong. However, there has been little investigation into why some people use Facebook as a political platform while others see it as more of a venue for baby pictures and vacation snapshots. The site does seem to play a role in providing social support, which might explain the urge to reach out and connect after a tragedy. A 2014 study found that for college students, more Facebook use was associated with receiving more social support. However, this social media support was not linked with a greater level of life satisfaction, so it's less clear whether social media support is beneficial to mental health.

There's no consensus on how helpful social media actually is to any given political cause, either. Many in the media trumpeted the value of Twitter to Tehran's "Green Revolution" of 2009, calling it a "Twitter revolution." However, journalist Evgeny Morozov, author of "To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism" (Public Affairs, 2014) pointed out in an article for Dissent magazine that social media revolutions can backfire, given that the government has access to public communications on Twitter. In fact, these "revolutions" can reveal a great deal about the protestors and how they're connected to one another. And although showing Facebook support for a cause may feel good, it's largely pointless, Morozov argued. [17 Developing Countries That Love Social Media More Than the US]

"What do 100 million people invited to join the Facebook group '100 Million Facebook members for Democracy in Iran' expect to get out of their membership?" he wrote. "Is it just a gigantic exercise in transcontinental wishful thinking?"

How Facebook responds

Attempting to topple a regime is different from showing solidarity and sympathy, which illustrates the differing motivations behind various social media support campaigns. While green Twitter avatars did little to change Iran's political situation after the Arab Spring, might French flag overlays comfort those directly affected or show unity against terrorism? [10 Ways Terrorist Attacks Have Rocked America]

There are no clear answers to the questions, which are complicated by the rapid backlash to the overlay. Many Facebook users protested that the social media network hadn't reacted as strongly to death and destruction in other countries, including to a suicide bombing that killed 43 in Beirut the day before. Some users have made and shared their own overlays, and are pressuring Facebook to expand its offerings. Founder Mark Zuckerberg has not addressed the flag controversy but said the company plans to offer its "Safety Check" feature — which allows users to let their Facebook friends know they are safe — for more human-made disasters going forward. (Prior to the Paris attacks, this check-in feature had been used only for natural disasters.)

"We care about all people equally, and we will work hard to help people suffering in as many of these situations as we can," Zuckerberg wrote on Facebook.

Facebook's influence

Facebook's built-in widgets certainly influence how people choose to express themselves on the site, and there is some evidence that the site really can change the real world. Reporting in a 2014 study, researchers found that emotions are contagious on Facebook. When users see more positive posts in their News Feed, they post more positive content themselves, and vice versa for negative posts. And a famous get-out-the-vote study conducted on Facebook on Election Day 2010 found that Facebook encouragement to vote resulted in 340,000 more people going to the polls than otherwise would have. And the effects spread through the network like falling dominoes. For every one person who saw the message, four more were indirectly urged to go to the polls by seeing their friends vote. It was the first study to show that online information can influence a real-world action, the authors of the study told Live Science at the time.

But Facebook is shaped not only by the site's algorithms and tools, but by how a person uses the site. A 2015 study published in the Proceedings of the 18th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing found that people's social milieu strongly influences whether they'll exhibit support for a cause via their Facebook profile photo. The research focused on the Human Rights Campaign red equal sign supporting same-sex marriage. Though support for same-sex marriage had become a majority position in America in the months before the equal sign's appearance, putting it up on one's profile still carried a degree of social risk, the study researchers wrote. Friends or family might disagree, creating conflict, the researchers said.

Perhaps this fear of putting one's neck out too far is why people generally didn't change their profile picture until they'd seen a few friends do so first. On average, people became more likely to change their profile picture after they'd seen eight other friends do so first. (To be precise, the median number was eight, and the mean was 14.4.) Any additional friends getting on the bandwagon after about eight did not further encourage people to adopt the equal-sign profile picture.

Because Facebook users select their own friends, it can be difficult to determine how much the site influences people's beliefs versus locking them in an echo chamber where their pre-existing views are amplified. Unsurprisingly, people with more gay and lesbian friends on Facebook were quicker to change their profile picture to an equal sign than those with fewer gay and lesbian friends.

Facebook's influence in changing the conversation about politics and policy is potentially curtailed by this self-selecting tendency. The site's algorithm tries to show users content they're likely to engage with. A 2015 study found that among 10 million users who'd declared a political affiliation, the algorithm decreased the amount of ideologically different viewpoints those people saw by 1 percent. Users' own choices of what to click on caused a 4 percent decrease in information from different points of view. Facebook has changed its algorithm since that study, possibly exacerbating the effect.

In other words, one person's Facebook feed may be a sea of French flag overlays, while another's might be flooded with shared op-eds on why French flag overlays are wrong. It's not clear how well these messages cut across ideological lines — or whether the cacophony of opinions is capable of changing hearts and minds.

Follow Stephanie Pappas on Twitterand Google+. Follow us @livescience, Facebook& Google+. Original article on Live Science.

There is no evidence that supports spacing out childhood vaccines — which two Republican candidates for president suggested in last night's presidential debate — instead of following the recommended schedule, experts say.

"I am totally in favor of vaccines, but I want smaller doses over a longer period of time," Donald Trump, one of the candidates for president, said at the debate.

Candidate and retired pediatric neurosurgeon Ben Carson responded by saying, "We have extremely well-documented proof that there is no autism associated with vaccinations," he said.

Carson went on, however, to agree with Trump about spacing out vaccines. "But it is true that we are probably giving way too many in too short period of time, and a lot of pediatricians now recognize that, and I think are cutting down on the number and the proximity in which those are done" he said.

Candidate Senator Rand Paul, an ophthalmologist, also agreed.

"I'm for vaccines, but I'm also for freedom," he said. "Even if the science doesn't say bunching them up is a problem, I ought to be able to spread my vaccines out a little bit at the very least."

But not only is there no evidence that spacing out childhood vaccines is good for children's health, but the evidence actually suggests quite the opposite, Dr. Paul Offit, chief of the division of infectious diseases at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, told Live Science.

There's evidence that supports not spacing out vaccines any further than they are scheduled under current recommendations, Offit said. [5 Dangerous Vaccine Myths]

"To suggest that you make your own schedule is dangerous," he said. "That's why we saw the measles outbreak in Disneyland this year" he said — because parents chose to delay vaccinating their children.

Spacing out the current vaccine schedule leaves children susceptible to diseases for longer periods of time than they need to be, Dr. William Schaffner, a professor of preventive medicine at Vanderbilt University, told Live Science.

Moreover, spacing out vaccines is an unproven way to vaccinate: No one's ever tested it, so scientists don't know how well it works or how safe it is, he said.

And it's been documented that a vaccine that is pushed back can become a vaccine that is never received, Schaffner added.

Although some parents have raised concerns that an infant's immune system may not be able to "handle" the numerous immunizations children are scheduled to receive, there is no evidence that shows this is true, Schaffner said. "That's been shown clearly not to be the case," he said. "It's safe and effective."

Whenever a new vaccine is added to the existing schedule, scientists are required to prove to the Food and Drug Administration that the new injection doesn't interfere with other vaccines, Offit said. "It's well-tested," he said.

"The immunization schedule is based on an elaborate amount of scientific research," Schaffner said. "It's designed to be maximally effective and maximally safe."

Shortly after the debate, the American Academy of Pediatrics released a statement that read, in part, "There is no 'alternative' immunization schedule. Delaying vaccines only leaves a child at risk of disease for a longer period of time; it does not make vaccinating safer."

Follow Live Science @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Originally published on Live Science.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. The publication contributed this article to Live Science's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

There are many complex reasons why people decide not to accept the science of climate change. The doubters range from the conspiracy theorist to the skeptical scientist, or from the paid lobbyist to the raving lunatic.

Climate scientists, myself included, and other academics have strived to understand this reluctance. We wonder why so many people are unable to accept a seemingly straight-forward pollution problem. And we struggle to see why climate change debates have inspired such vitriol.

These questions are important. In a world increasingly dominated by science and technology, it is essential to understand why people accept certain types of science but not others.

In short, it seems when it comes to climate change, it is not about the science but all about the politics.

Risky business

Back in the late 1980s and early 1990s differing views on climate science were put down to how people viewed nature: was it benign or malevolent? In 1995 leading risk expert John Adams suggested there were four myths of nature, which he represented as a ball on different shaped landscapes.

1. Nature is benign and forgiving of any insults that humankind might inflict upon it and it does not need to be managed.
2. Nature ephemeral. Nature is fragile, precarious, and unforgiving and environmental management must protect nature from humans.
3. Nature perverse/tolerant. Within limits, nature can be relied upon to behave predictably and regulation is required to prevent major excesses.
4. Nature capricious. Nature is unpredictable and there is no point to management.

Different personality types can be matched on to these different views, producing very different opinions about the environment. Climate change deniers would map on to number one, Greenpeace number two, while most scientists would be number three. These views are influenced by an individual’s own belief system, personal agenda (either financial or political), or whatever is expedient to believe at the time.

However, this work on risk perception was ignored by mainstream science because science up to now operates on what is called the knowledge deficit model. This suggests that people do not accept the science because there is not enough evidence; therefore more needs to be gathered.

Scientists operate in exactly this way, and they assume wrongly the rest of the world is equally rational and logical. It explains why over the past 35 years a huge amount of work gone into investigating climate change – even though, despite many thousands of pages of IPCC reports, the weight of evidence argument does not seem to work with everyone.

No understanding of science?

At first failure of the knowledge deficit model was blamed on the fact that people simply did not understand science, perhaps due to a lack of education. This was exacerbated as scientists from the late 1990s onwards started to be drawn into discussions about whether people believed or did not believe in climate change. The use of the word “belief” is important here, as it was a direct jump from the American-led argument between the science of evolution and the belief in creation.

But we know that science is not a belief system. You cannot decide that you believe in penicillin or the principles of flight while at the same time disbelieve humans evolved from apes or that greenhouse gases can cause climate change. This is because science is an expert trust-based system that is underpinned by rational methodology that moves forward by using detailed observation and experimentation to constantly test ideas and theories. It does not provide us with convenient yes/no answers to complex scientific questions, however much the media portrayal of scientific evidence would like the general public to “believe” this to be true.

It’s all about the politics

However, many who deny climate change is an issue are extremely intelligent, eloquent and rational. They would not see the debate as one about belief and they would see themselves above the influence of the media. So if the lack of acceptance of the science of climate change is neither due to a lack of knowledge, nor due to a misunderstanding of science, what is causing it?

Recent work has refocused on understanding people’s perceptions and how they are shared, and as climate denial authority George Marshall suggests these ideas can take on a life of their own, leaving the individual behind. Colleagues at Yale University developed this further by using the views of nature shown above to define different groups of people and their views on climate change. They found that political views are the main predictor of the acceptance of climate change as a real phenomenon.

This is because climate change challenges the Anglo-American neoliberal view that is held so dear by mainstream economists and politicians. Climate change is a massive pollution issue that shows the markets have failed and it requires governments to act collectively to regulate industry and business.

In stark contrast neoliberalism is about free markets, minimal state intervention, strong property rights and individualism. It also purports to provide a market-based solution via “trickle down” enabling everyone to become wealthier. But calculations suggest to bring the incomes of the very poorest people in the world up to just $1.25 per day would require at least a 15 times increase in global GDP. This means huge increases in consumption, resource use and of course, carbon emissions.

So in many cases the discussion of the science of climate change has nothing to do with the science and is all about the political views of the objectors. Many perceive climate change as a challenge to the very theories that have dominated global economics for the last 35 years, and the lifestyles that it has provided in developed, Anglophone countries. Hence, is it any wonder that many people prefer climate change denial to having to face the prospect of building a new political (and socio-economic) system, which allows collective action and greater equality?

I am well aware of the abuse I will receive because of this article. But it is essential for people, including scientists, to recognise that it is the politics and not the science that drives many people to deny climate change. This does mean, however, that no amount of discussing the “weight of scientific evidence” for climate change will ever change the views of those who are politically or ideologically motivated. Hence I am very sorry but I will not be responding to comments posted concerning the science of climate change but I am happy to engage in discussion on the motivations of denial.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article. Follow all of the Expert Voices issues and debates — and become part of the discussion — on Facebook, Twitter and Google +. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher. This version of the article was originally published on Live Science.

Calling all 3D printing enthusiasts! Today (Nov. 10) is the last day to submit designs for the first-ever White House 3D-Printed Ornament Challenge.

The contest — hosted by the popular maker website, Instructables — is an opportunity for DIYers and students from around the United States to share their 3D designs with each other and with the first family.

Contestants are asked to create an ornament that reflects "the theme of the magic and wonder of the holidays and the winter season," according to the contest rules. [The 10 Weirdest Things Created By 3D Printing]

Eight lucky finalists will have their designs printed and displayed in the East Wing of the White House during the 2014 holiday season. The winning ornaments will also be featured as a part of the Smithsonian's 3D modeling project, X 3D, which seeks to digitalize the museum's extensive collection of artifacts to make it more widely available to the public.

The winning designs will even join a select group of White House ornaments showcased in the Smithsonian National Museum of American History's political history division.

All submissions for the Ornament Challenge will be reviewed by two separate panels of judges — the first panel will choose 20 finalists from all of the submitted designs, and the second will select eight of those designs to be 3D-printed and displayed in the White House. Registered Instructables users can also vote for the designs they want to see hanging at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave, though public voting won't be used to make any final decisions about the winners.

So far, contestants have come up with an array of designs, some of which capture the whimsical wintery theme of the contest better than others. There's a lacey-looking ice skate that promises to win the judges' attention, as well as a beautiful homage to the traditional presidential holiday speeches of years past. And then there's an ornament shaped like the disembodied head of Abraham Lincoln, and one shaped like a squid.

But the 3D-Printed Ornament Challenge is more about inspiring Americans to make thingsthan it is about winning, according to contest organizers. The competition is part of the White House's effort to get the so-called Maker Movement flowing in full swing in the U.S., an effort that began with the first-ever White House Maker Faire in June.

There are only a few hours left to submit your design for this year's contest. To do so, visit the contest's home page on Instructables and upload your design as a new project in the Ornament Challenge. Instructables users can continue to vote on their favorite designs until Thursday (Nov. 13).

Follow Elizabeth Palermo @techEpalermo. Follow Live Science @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science.

Your politics may, quite literally, stink — at least to those who don't share such beliefs.

A new study finds that people prefer the scents of those who share their political attitudes, even though they aren't able to match a particular smell to a particular voting pattern. This small, subconscious preference could explain why people gravitate toward mates whose politics mesh with theirs — perhaps compatibility has a smell.

"There is something about someone who is politically similar to you that is being put out there and you're receiving that, and that might just slightly change your position," said study researcher Pete Hatemi, a political scientist at Pennsylvania State University. "It might make you a little more interested. It might make you just interested enough to stick around." [Top 10 Mysteries of the Mind]

The smell of politics

Hatemi and his colleagues knew that a great deal of research has shown that spouses tend to match each other's political views more so than any other trait beside religion. A longer relationship does not lead to greater convergence in views, suggesting this matching occurs because people pick someone politically similar to them in the first place. But Hatemi and his colleagues have found that people tend to avoid trumpeting their politics when angling for dates, suggesting political attitudes don't contribute much to first impressions.

It's possible that the tendency for people to seek out mates who are like them could cause people to choose partners with similar political preferences. But Hatemi and his colleagues wanted to go deeper. Another line of research has found that political attitudes, rooted as they are in personality and basic beliefs, have a biological component. Conservatives, for example, have stronger disgust reactions than liberals, and some early brain-scan data hints that the two sides of the spectrum process risk and fear differently. What's more, humans may rely more on smell than they realize when picking a mate, according to studies that find, for example, people are more attracted to the smell of those whose immune systems are compatible with their own.

Odor and ideology

To see if smell might also offer clues about a person's basic attitudes, Hatemi's team recruited 146 volunteers, ages 18 to 40, from a university and the surrounding city, and asked them about their political beliefs.

The researchers asked 21 of these volunteers, all of whom identified as strongly liberal or strongly conservative, to wear gauze pads taped under their armpits for 24 hours straight. To prevent odorous contamination, the participants couldn't shower, wear perfumes or deodorant, or even sleep in the same bed with another person during this period, among other rules.

Next, 125 other volunteers were asked to take a whiff of these pads, without knowing who they came from. These volunteers rated the appeal of the smells on a five-point scale and guessed the ideology of the person whose sweat it was.

The smells didn't give conscious clues to ideology — people were unable to correctly guess whether they were smelling sweat from a conservative or liberal. However, their preferences had an ideological bent.

"Conservatives liked the smell of conservatives, and liberals don't like the smell of conservatives," Hatemi said. Conservatives were neutral about the smell of liberals, and liberals were neutral about the smell of other liberals as well, the researchers found.

The researchers controlled for demographic factors, but the effect was small, Hatemi emphasized, and will need to be replicated with other participants before the results should be taken as certain. Statistically speaking, the findings were less than 10 percent likely to be by chance alone.

 Even if the smell preference holds, it's unclear how much it matters for real-life dating and mating choices, Hatemi said. If a spritz of cologne or a shower could erase the whole odor, for example, then it's unlikely to be very important. [6 Scientific Tips for a Successful Marriage]

Moreover, the findings should not be taken as an argument thatculture and society don't shape politics or love, Hatemi said, but rather that subtle, innate influences might play a small role.

"It's not necessarily that it's operating overwhelmingly on people," he told Live Science. "It's just kind of there in the background, maybe slightly influencing them."

There could be good reason for romantic chemistry to take ideology into account, said study researcher Rose McDermott, a professor of international relations at Brown University.

"I suspect that, ultimately, it relates to the fact that people who align politically are more likely to stay together long enough to raise their kids successfully to reproductive age, on average, and to garner the social support necessary to do so, because people like to be around them more on average because they are not fighting all the time," McDermott told Live Science.

The researchers reported their findings online Sept. 2 in the American Journal of Political Science.

Follow Stephanie Pappas on Twitter and Google+. Follow us @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science.

The moral high ground seems to be a crowded place. A new study suggests that religious people aren't more likely to do good than their nonreligious counterparts. And while they may vehemently disagree with one another at times, liberals and conservatives also tend to be on par when it comes to behaving morally.

Researchers asked 1,252 adults of different religious and political backgrounds in the United States and Canada to record the good and bad deeds they committed, witnessed, learned about or were the target of throughout the day.

The goal of the study was to assess how morality plays out in everyday life for different people, said Dan Wisneski, a professor of psychology at Saint Peter's University in Jersey City, New Jersey, who helped conduct the study during his tenure at the University of Illinois at Chicago. [8 Ways Religion Impacts Your Life]

The study's findings may come as a shock to those who think religious or political affiliationhelps dictate a person's understanding of right and wrong.

Wisneski and his fellow researchers found that religious and nonreligious people commit similar numbers of moral acts. The same was found to be true for people on both ends of the political spectrum. And regardless of their political or religious leanings, participants were all found to be more likely to report committing, or being the target of, a moral act rather than an immoral act. They were also much more likely to report having heard about immoral acts rather than moral acts.

However, there were some differences in how people in different groups responded emotionally to so-called "moral phenomena," Wisneski said. For example, religious people reported experiencing more intense self-conscious emotions — such as guilt, embarrassment, and disgust — after committing an immoral act than did nonreligious people. Religious people also reported experiencing a greater sense of pride and gratefulness after committing moral deeds than their nonreligious counterparts.

Liberals and conservatives also tended to think of moral phenomena in different ways. In other words, though they seemed to experience the same amount of moral and immoral acts, they had different ways of talking about these experiences.

"Liberals more often mention moral phenomena related to fairness and honesty," Wisneski said. "Conservatives more often mention moral phenomena related to loyalty and disloyalty or sanctity and degradation."

For three days, participants received five text messages a day that included a link to the study's mobile website, where they could record any moral phenomena that they had experienced in the past hour via their smartphones. On average, participants reported one moral experience per day, Wisneski said.

This approach to studying morality is a far cry from previous studies, most of which have been conducted in a laboratory setting and have focused on studying peoples' responses to hypothetical moral dilemmas, according to Wisneski.

"As far as I know, this is the first study that's used this kind of lived-experience approach to track morality as it's happening," he said.

In the future, Wisneski and his colleagues hope to use their smartphone-enabled approach to study morality in a more nationally representative sample of people, he said. They also think this method could be applied to studying morality in different parts of the world, such as Asia and the Middle East, where religious and political beliefs may have different influences than on people in North America.

The morality study, which was conducted by psychologists at the University of Illinois at Chicago, the University of Cologne, in Germany, and the University of Tilburg, in the Netherlands, was published online today (Sept. 11) in the journal Science.

Follow Elizabeth Palermo @techEpalermo. Follow Live Science @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science.

Americans living in politically liberal states and those living in conservative states have an equally low understanding of abortion's health effects and the laws regarding the procedure, a new national survey finds.

Just 74 out of the 569 people who took the survey answered at least four of the five questions about abortion correctly. The question that the greatest number people answered correctly was the one that asked whether it is legal to get an abortion during the first three months of pregnancy. In response, 7 percent of respondents incorrectly said "no," and another 11 percent were unsure. (Abortion during the first three months of pregnancy is legal in the United States.)

But only about a third of respondents knew that having an abortion in the first three months of pregnancy carries fewer health risks for women than giving birth, or that women who have abortions before 12 weeks of pregnancy do not face an increased risk of serious mental-health problems. [11 Big Fat Pregnancy Myths]

There were no differences in people's knowledge about abortion's health effects or abortion laws across liberal and conservative states, after the researchers took into account the respondents' individual characteristics, such as their political beliefs and whether they knew someone who had an abortion, the researchers said.

"Data does not support the red-versus-blue state hypothesis: Geography does not dictate the world views of Americans," lead researcher Danielle Bessett, a University of Cincinnati assistant professor of sociology, said in a statement. "Some individuals in all settings do have accurate information about abortion, regardless of political context."

The researchers also found that only 37 percent of respondents knew that women who have an abortion in the first three months of pregnancy are not more likely to have breast cancer than if they were to continue the pregnancy, and 35 percent knew that such women would not face a more difficult time becoming pregnant in the future.

When asked where they live, 53 percent of the participants reported living in a blue state, 26 percent in a red state and 20 percent in a swing state such as Ohio.

The respondents, ages 18 to 44, were randomly selected to take the online questionnaire. Fifty-three percent of the respondents were male. Thirty-eight percent of the participants said they were politically moderate, 37 percent identified as very or somewhat liberal and 25 percent reported they were somewhat or very conservative.

About one in three women in the U.S. has an abortion by age 45, the researchers said.

Twelve percent of respondents said they had a personal experience with abortion, and 65 percent reported that they knew someone who had an abortion.

The findings suggest that people in the U.S. are not well informed about the relative safety of abortion, or the laws surrounding it, the researchers said. More comprehensive and evidence-based resources could help educate the public about the health and legal issues concerning abortion, they said.

The study was presented today (Aug. 18) at the meeting of the American Sociological Association in San Francisco.

Follow Laura Geggel on Twitter @LauraGeggel and Google+. Follow Live Science @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science.

Seth Shulman is a senior staff writer at the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), a veteran science journalist and author of six books. This op-ed, and Shulman's other Got Science? Columns, can be found on the UCS website. Shulman contributed this article to Live Science's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

There's no question that hyper-partisanship has served as a major impediment to science-based decision-making in recent years, especially in Congress. But are Americans' views really as polarized as our national politics suggest? New data from the Pew Research Center reveal some illuminating — and heartening — surprises on the subject. 

But first, the bad news.

Polarization on the rise

Most of the headlines about Pew's study (the first of a planned series of five on the subject) emphasized the discouraging main finding: In a detailed poll of more than 10,000 Americans, the researchers found more political polarization  in the United States than at any time in the past two decades. 

The study found that the portion of people expressing "consistently conservative" or "consistently liberal" views has grown considerably, along with a rise in what the researchers describe as "ideological silos" on both the right and left in which people are increasingly surrounded by others who share and reinforce their own views. 

Meanwhile, as those shifts have occurred, animosity between the two parties also appears to have grown. Back in 1994, for instance, some 17 percent of Republicans and 16 percent of Democrats held "very unfavorable" opinions of the opposite party. Today, those numbers have more than doubled to 43 percent and 38 percent, respectively. Perhaps most disturbingly, more than a third of all Republicans (36 percent) now say that Democratic policies "pose a threat to the well-being of the country" and 27 percent of Democrats feel that Republican policies similarly pose a threat to the nation. Little wonder compromise has seemed so chronically elusive lately. 

But while this is where most of the reporting on the Pew study stopped, it tells only part of the story. A closer inspection reveals some considerably more interesting — and encouraging — findings. 

A vocal fringe

The first thing to note is that, despite the increases in polarization, die-hard political extremists appear to still be fairly small in overall numbers. Tested on a range of political-values questions, for example, just 9 percent of Americans showed up as "consistently conservative" and just 12 percent were found to be "consistently liberal" — in other words, small fractions of the populace. The big news here is the massive middle: the Pew study reveals that a whopping 79 percent of Americans hold some mixture of views on the issues of the day. 

To be sure, political views vary widely among that vast middle. As Pew's brand-new second installment tries to untangle, some 14 percent of Americans can be classified as "young outsiders," who tend to hold somewhat conservative views about the role of government but liberal views on social issues. Some 13 percent show up as "hard-pressed skeptics" who are financially stressed and generally pessimistic about the prospects for government action. And another 10 percent appear to be disenfranchised "bystanders" who tend to largely avoid political issues altogether. 

Importantly, though, across most of the segments the researchers identified, solid majorities of Americans say they believe our political leaders should compromise to solve the pressing problems we face as a nation. Given these findings — and the scarcity of political compromise in Washington these days — it is little wonder that separate polling has found Congress's current approval rating among the American public at an unprecedented, historic low of around 7 percent. 

Asleep in the middle

Perhaps the most important finding in the new studies is the extent to which they demonstrate a shocking "political activism gap." On measure after measure — whether primary voting, writing letters to officials, volunteering for or donating to a campaign — the Pew researchers found that there is an almost perfectly inverse relationship between politically centrist views and activism. 

In other words, the more "in the middle" people's political views stand, the less involved in politics they are likely to be. All of which adds up to the best hard evidence yet of a vocal, activist fringe and an extremely large, quiescent, apathetic and/or disenfranchised middle.

A question of engagement

Recent work by the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) anecdotally supports the findings of a pragmatic center. On climate change, for instance, as we've reached out to citizens and local elected officials in communities from Florida to Montana, we've consistently found people across the political spectrum eager to see action to confront local climate impacts. 

In Montana, our climate scientists worked with people concerned about impacts on local agriculture and what could be done about them. In Florida, we co-hosted a bipartisan group of 35 officials from Miami-Dade County who actively engaged to discuss practical responses to their growing vulnerabilities to sea level rise. 

Similarly, UCS's recent report, National Landmarks at Risk, details the climate impacts happening now that are threatening iconic landmarks cherished by all Americans — places such as Jamestown and the Statue of Liberty, both threatened by storm surges and rising seas. The findings have sparked concern and action among a diverse collection of patriotic citizens across the country.

Science and democracy: A powerful combination

On global warming, as on many of the planet's most pressing issues, science and solid evidence have a crucial, foundational role to play. It bears noting that in America, especially given the recent celebration of Independence Day, science and democracy were forged together from the start. It's no accident that Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, James Madison and George Washington all were citizen-scientists. 

As students of the Enlightenment, America's founders were committed to unleashing the power of reason to advance knowledge and to build an effective and responsive government. They understood the benefits that could come when science and democracy worked together. And they exemplified a kind of bold, American pragmatism that put problem solving above partisanship and sought to base our government's policies on the best available data and the most up-to-date understanding of the world.

It has proved a powerful partnership ever since. We need only think of how federal investments in medical research led to the successful containment of diseases such as smallpox and polio. Or how science-based laws such as the Clean Air Act  have saved hundreds of thousands of lives over the past four decades by effectively reducing deadly pollutants.

The latest data from Pew paint a picture of American pragmatism that is dormant but still very much alive. As UCS President Ken Kimmell put it, "Pragmatism is at the heart of patriotism. We have a proud history in this country of rolling up our sleeves to solve problems. Now we just need more Americans to raise their voices enough to be heard by their elected officials in Washington." 

Shulman's most recent op-ed was "Top 5 Signs It's Time to Stand Up for Science" This op-ed, and Shulman's other Got Science? Columns, can be found on the UCS website. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher. This version of the article was originally published on Live Science.