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Then the pandemic happened. In the years since, women have slowly regained their foothold in the labor force, although working mothers in particular have faced an uphill battle between strict in-office policies and ballooning childcare costs. As of February, however, women have overtaken men in the workforce yet again. A report from Indeed’s Hiring Lab last week highlighted that the gap has closed, driven in large part by job growth in sectors that are dominated by women. 

Between February 2024 and February 2026, the U.S. economy added 1.2 million jobs. A significant portion of this growth—over 814,000 jobs—was on account of women, and across sectors like healthcare that tend to draw more female workers. Even in a sluggish job market, healthcare is one of the few industries that has continued adding jobs and helped keep the economy afloat.

In fact, over the last year, significant job growth in healthcare has offset losses across the rest of the workforce: The U.S. economy added a total of 156,000 jobs overall, due to 375,000 new healthcare jobs. This pattern is even clearer over the past year: The share of jobs held by women has increased by nearly 300,000 since February 2025, while men saw an overall drop in employment of 142,000 jobs.

It seems this uptick in women’s labor force participation reflects a broader shift that was already underway, before it was derailed by the pandemic. But as Indeed notes, the gender gap isn’t closing because record numbers of women are entering the workforce. The real driver of this change is a notable decline in men’s labor force participation, as employment has dropped in sectors that have historically been dominated by men, such as manufacturing and construction.

It’s also clear, from recent data, that women’s employment is not exactly secure: In the first half of 2025, about 212,000 women left the workforce. There was also a noticeable dip in employment for certain women, according to an analysis by The Washington Post, which found that the number of working mothers between the ages of 25 and 44 dropped by nearly three percentage points between January and June of last year. 

With the rapid adoption of generative AI, new forces threaten to undermine labor force participation for all workers, just as men are facing other headwinds in the job market. And while there may be new opportunities available to women in the workforce, the very issues that have long limited their career growth—from pay inequities to caregiving responsibilities—still loom large, even as the economy continues to rely on their labor.

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As many Americans prepared to start the workweek, President Trump announced his intentions to destroy Iran’s electricity-generating stations and water-purifying plants should the regime fail to lift its blockade in the Strait of Hormuz.

“If for any reason a deal is not shortly reached, which it probably will be, and if the Hormuz Strait is not immediately ‘Open for Business,’ we will conclude our lovely ‘stay’ in Iran by blowing up and completely obliterating all of their Electric Generating Plants, Oil Wells and Kharg Island (and possibly all desalinization plants!), which we have purposefully not yet ‘touched,’” Mr. Trump wrote on social media early Monday morning.

The president’s ultimatum is a contemptible departure from the restraint that most wartime presidents have strived for. The bombing campaign Mr. Trump described holds the potential to affect millions of Iranian civilians, inflicting long-term consequences on their access to water, electricity, and other necessities. Such an attack order should never be given — in public or private.

His proposal, if acted upon, would almost certainly amount to a war crime. One of the central tenets of the laws that govern modern conflict is that the targeting of civilians is off-limits in military campaigns. Customary law of war principles would prohibit infrastructure providing essential services to civilians from targeted obliteration.

Should the U.S. military act on an order from Mr. Trump to indiscriminately destroy Iran’s civilian infrastructure, it will be a flagrant violation of the laws of armed conflict and international humanitarian law, said Robert Goldman, a law professor and the faculty director of the War Crimes Research Office at American University. “It’s wanton destruction that would bring about clear and foreseeable catastrophic effects on the civilian population,” Mr. Goldman said.

A military can justify its attacks on infrastructure when the facilities have a so-called dual use for both civilians and an adversary’s military. For instance, a bridge clearly benefits people in their daily commutes, but it can also be a vital artery to move troops and supplies in a war zone. A bridge can be legally destroyed under international law if it meets certain criteria in the way it’s being used by armed forces during active hostilities. But militaries can’t blow up every bridge inside the country they’re attacking.

Because the U.S. military now has near-total control over Iranian airspace, there doesn’t appear to be a pressing need to wipe out every electrical station that might power the country’s remaining operating air defense radars, sensors, or other equipment. Similarly, a desalination plant may provide water to Iranian bases and forces, but bombarding all desalination plants would most likely be disproportionate to the effect it could have on the 90 million people living in the country.

“Whether a power plant would constitute a military objective or civilian object would depend on the facts and circumstances, but the president’s categorical statement represents a threat to target even civilian objects regardless of the requirement for distinction, which would be a war crime,” said Brian Finucane, a former State Department lawyer who is a specialist in the laws of war. He said the same would be true of oil wells and desalination plants, according to international humanitarian law that dictates avoiding civilian harm.

These acts would also be antithetical to how the American military sees itself — maintaining a moral standing that dates back to the Revolutionary War. The foreword of the Pentagon’s own Law of War Manual says, “The law of war is a part of our military heritage, and obeying it is the right thing to do.” It continues, “But we also know that the law of war poses no obstacle to fighting well and prevailing.”

Gen. Joseph Votel, who was commander of U.S. Central Command during Mr. Trump’s first term, said that adhering to the legal standards aligns with our national values. “It gives us credibility with our partners, with our own service members and citizens, and with civilians in those areas we must operate,” he said. And while the United States’ treatment of enemy combatants and of civilians during war is also far from perfect, American forces often do go to great lengths to mitigate civilian casualties. An average airstrike has countless hours of analyzed intelligence behind it and a lawyer’s involvement. Mistakes still happen, such as the horrific Feb. 28 strike on an elementary school in Minab, which killed at least 175 people. The incident remains under investigation, and American military targeters may have believed the school was part of an adjacent naval base in southern Iran.

Mr. Trump’s threats to indiscriminately launch airstrikes on Iran’s infrastructure amount to holding a civilian population hostage as a means of coercing the government in Tehran.

Praising gratuitous death and destruction has been a running theme in Mr. Trump’s second term. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has publicly dismissed the “stupid rules of engagement,” which are drawn up by senior officers and U.S. military lawyers to protect both troops and civilians, and instead has called for “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy.”

This glorification of carnage has been echoed in the White House’s social media channels, which in recent weeks have published a series of stomach-churning propaganda clips that feature real footage of airstrikes in Iran cut with cartoons and scenes from video games and movies — all edited to guitar lick-laden soundtracks. War may appear super cool to Trump administration staffers who watch it from 6,000 miles away through a pop-culture viewfinder, but the rest of us should examine the human reality — and cost — of combat.

In Iran, no fewer than 1,443 civilians, at least 217 of them children, have been killed since Mr. Trump launched the war alongside Israel on Feb. 28, a consortium of human rights groups estimated in a recent report. The United Nations reports up to 3.2 million Iranians have been displaced from their homes. Across the region, 13 American military service members have been killed, and more than 300 U.S. troops have been injured. More than 1,110 people have been killed in Israel’s military campaign in Lebanon, more than 50 people have been killed in Persian Gulf countries, and at least 16 people have died in Iran’s attacks on Israel.

If the U.S. military follows through with the president’s proposed attacks, it will surely open an even bloodier new chapter as the war continues in its fifth week. It would be a major escalation that risks even greater Iranian retaliation against allies’ energy sites across the Gulf, causing a domino effect of suffering for civilians across the Middle East.

It would also be self-defeating. Mr. Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel have repeatedly called upon average Iranians to revolt and overthrow the regime. A bombing campaign against the critical utilities these very people depend on to live their lives is hardly an inspiring call to action. More likely, it would propagate a new generation of enemies for Americans to fight.

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Tierney L. Cross/The New York Times

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Static electricity is so commonplace that it can come across as simple. Rub a balloon against your head, and the transfer of charges will make your hair stand on end. Shuffle your feet on a carpet, and the charge imbalance you produce can shock an innocent passer-by.

So it might come as a surprise that static electricity — which arises from what researchers in the field call the triboelectric effect — has left scientists racking their brains for centuries. Some of the basics are clear. Materials transfer charges when they’re rubbed or otherwise come into contact with each other: one becomes more positively charged and the other more negatively charged. Opposite charges attract, whereas identical charges repel, and ta-da, you have a primary-school science experiment.

But most everything else in this field remains baffling. Is it the electrons, ions, or bits of material that transfer the charge? Why do some materials charge positively and others negatively? What happens when two samples of the same material come into contact? For instance, when “rubbing a balloon on a balloon”, says experimental physicist Scott Waitukaitis at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria in Klosterneuburg. A big part of the problem is that experiments tend to misbehave, with the same procedures producing different results.

Now, researchers are picking apart some of the puzzles that have long plagued the field. With sophisticated laboratory set-ups that carefully control for compounding factors, Waitukaitis and his team have found that the charging of some materials has a strange tendency to hinge on their past interactions. This week in Nature, Waitukaitis and his colleagues report that carbon-carrying surface molecules can have a role in guiding which way charge is exchanged.

These discoveries “are the best work in a really long time” in the field, says Daniel Lacks, a chemical engineer who has studied triboelectricity at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. Other teams are investigating how surface area and velocity during impact might govern charge transfer, and how the breaking of chemical bonds contributes.

The influx of research seems to be driven by a desire to scrutinize the fundamental physics at play, says Laurence Marks, a materials scientist at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. A better understanding of the science of static electricity could lead to improved devices that use it to power remote sensors or wearable technologies without batteries, for example. It could also help to prevent the electrical discharges that can cause industrial explosions.

It’s becoming increasingly clear that static electricity is far from a simple phenomenon that abides by one clear-cut set of rules, researchers say. Instead, each exchange of charges could be shaped by several factors that vary with the circumstances. Some of these factors are now known, and others are still waiting to be uncovered.

Ancient observations

The history of static electricity dates back to at least the ancient Greek period. Triboelectric includes the Greek words for ‘rubbing’ and ‘amber’, because, after amber is rubbed against fur, it attracts light objects such as feathers. At the end of the sixteenth century, English physicist William Gilbert identified other materials that had the same attractive power, including glass, diamonds and sapphires, and distinguished this type of electrical pull from that of magnetism. In the centuries that followed, scientists learnt that lightning was an electrostatic discharge, a supersized version of the benign zap that comes from shuffling feet across a carpet, and invented early electrostatic generators — forerunners of the Van de Graaff generators that wow students in science museums.

By the mid-eighteenth century, researchers had also begun documenting which materials became negatively charged and which positively, producing lists called triboelectric series. These rank materials from the most likely to charge positively to the most likely to charge negatively, with rabbit fur listed close to the top and silicon near the bottom, for instance.

There was a lull in efforts to understand the phenomenon for part of the twentieth century before interest resurged around the turn of the twenty-first century. Marks attributes this renewed interest at least in part to the invention of the triboelectric nanogenerator. This device relies on the triboelectric effect to convert mechanical energy into electricity. It attracted researchers who were interested in fresh ways to power small technologies. “In the last ten years, the field has literally exploded,” says Giulio Fatti, a mechanical engineer at Imperial College London.

Even with the attention boost, however, the fundamentals of triboelectricity have remained elusive. There are some generally accepted ideas, says Marks. A material has a specific potential for a charged particle to escape that depends on the material’s surface and composition. This potential is called the material’s work function and, so far, it applies best to metallic materials, Waitukaitis says. A sample also needs to be able to trap the charged particles, so they are kept in place when the materials separate after the exchange. But physicists are still pinning down the exact mechanisms behind these phenomena.

Other details of the contact seem to matter, too. But what matters most, under which circumstances, and for what material,s remains unclear. Whether triboelectricity can be explained by existing physics or whether it demands its own model has been an open question, says Marks.

Looking to the past

Waitukaitis and his team were investigating how samples of the same material can exchange a charge when they encountered the inconsistent results that have long frustrated researchers in the field. Triboelectric series are difficult to reproduce. Teams have obtained variable results concerning which materials become more positively or negatively charged, and, even, different findings with the same samples.

Waitukaitis tasked his then-PhD student, Juan Carlos Sobarzo, with attempting to form a series using samples of the same silicone-based polymer. But Sobarzo couldn’t obtain any consistent results. In one experiment, sample A would become negatively charged when interacting with sample B. In the next, it would become positively charged.

“For a very long time, we thought we were doing something wrong,” Waitukaitis says. “We thought there was some variable we weren’t controlling.”

Even when the team carefully controlled for humidity — because researchers thought that water on a material’s surface could affect how it charges — the results remained befuddling.

Then, Sobarzo dug up a set of samples that had already been through many experiments, and tested how they interacted with fresh ones. Quickly, the researchers noticed that the samples that had been through more contact tended to become negatively charged. In further experiments, they kept track of how many contacts each sample had already undergone.

“That’s when things started to make sense. The samples that had more touches in their history were always charging negatively,” Waitukaitis says. “What looked like chaos was an indication of the samples evolving.”

The researchers suspect this evolution has to do with how the sample’s surface deforms with each contact.

In the current paper, Waitukaitis, working with Galien Grosjean, an applied physicist at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, Spain, and their colleagues, looked deeper into how charge is exchanged between two seemingly identical materials. This time, they worked with oxides — materials, such as sand, that are made up of atoms bonded to oxygen — and used several technologies, including a device that levitates samples to keep their charge from changing. They also used a high-speed camera to measure the samples’ charge precisely.

Before the experiment, the scientists thought that water on the materials’ surface might affect the charge exchange. But samples stored in either a humid or dry environment did not seem to be affected noticeably. Then, the researchers baked the materials and found that the baked samples tended to become charged negatively after contact, and the unbaked ones positively.

After exploring the materials’ interfaces, the researchers realized that the baking process changed the results by getting rid of the carbon-carrying molecules on the materials’ surface. These types of molecule, such as the carbon-rich greenhouse gas methane, are commonly picked up from the air. They “slowly but surely get on every surface,” Grosjean says. The findings suggest that the material is more likely to become positively charged after contact if it has a greater number of carbonaceous molecules on its surface.

Waitukaitis says the team did a double-take after discovering that it was the carbon-carrying molecules at play. “You hardly ever hear people talk about those molecules in the static-electricity field,” he says.

These results provide first steps towards understanding which factors influence charge transfer the most. So far, the contact-history findings seem to pertain only to polymer materials such as plastics, whereas the latest results apply just to oxides.

Still, the work indicates that there is no one-size-fits-all answer to how materials charge. “The idea of a permanent triboelectric ordering among different materials is a mirage,” says Waitukaitis.

That such small factors could be so impactful isn’t necessarily a new idea, says Lacks. “But what is totally new are these really systematic experiments to prove that a particular contaminant is playing a governing, controlling role,” he adds. The field has “moved away from the hand-waving to a more scientific proof.”

Zapping forward

Other groups are doing their own disentangling. Researchers in South Korea, for example, reported that they could control the charge transfer by manipulating a material’s internal electric field. “This was meaningful because triboelectricity had long been considered largely uncontrollable,” says study co-author Sang-Woo Kim, who studies triboelectric energy harvesting at Yonsei University in Seoul. The findings, Marks says, fit with existing electromagnetic principles, suggesting that triboelectrification doesn’t need a fresh set of rules. And a team in Germany has found that as the impact velocity between two colliding metals increases, so does the impact surface area, which can affect charge transfer. The link between impact velocity and charge transfer had been up for debate.

Fatti and his collaborators have studied triboelectricity and the breaking of chemical bonds, finding that a metal can break the chemical bonds on a polymer’s surface when the two materials interact. This instability creates the right chemical conditions for electrons to be exchanged to re-stabilize the bond. The findings, reported last January, could help researchers to create better-performing triboelectric nanogenerators, they say.

Further research might also help to prevent the electrical discharges that cause damage or ignite explosions — at industrial factories, for instance. Other applications include controlling the charge held in materials through 3D printing to create a temporary electric equivalent of a permanent magnet and assessing the damage that the Moon’s prolific dust could do to future lunar base camps.

Marks says that since he started working in the field in 2018, he’s found that more physicists and chemists are applying “hard-core analysis” to static electricity, performing painstakingly careful measurements.

Waitukaitis agrees that more labs are “getting careful” with experiments. “Then those labs share the techniques that helped them with other labs,” he says. It’s still a small, tight-knit group of scientists with one dedicated conference a year — although he’s been trying to spread his enthusiasm for triboelectricity at larger physics meetings.

Now that groups are beginning to identify the parameters that matter most for some charge transfers, Waitukaitis hopes that physicists’ understanding of the phenomenon will be rounded out. “I’m not sure we’re making things simpler,” he adds. “But we’re doing what is necessary to make sense of this.”

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Brigadier-General Yahya Saree, a military spokesman for the Iran-allied group, said in a message broadcast on a Houthi satellite network that the attack had targeted “sensitive Israeli military sites”. 

He added that the attacks would continue “until the aggression against all fronts of the resistance ceases,” referring to Iran and its ally Hezbollah.  

The Israeli military said it identified the launch of a missile from Yemen and “intercepted the threat.”

The Houthis have repeatedly warned that they would enter the war on the side of Iran, which has supplied them with ballistic missile technology for years.   

The long-threatened entry of the group into the fray adds a new front to the regional conflict that began on Feb. 28 with a joint United States-Israeli attack on Iran that killed the country’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. 

In the month since, Iran’s counterattacks have struck U.S. bases across the Gulf, strategic Gulf infrastructure, and drastically slowed shipping in the Strait of Hormuz. 

Those attacks have had a dramatic impact on global oil and energy prices, and sent gas prices in the U.S. skyrocketing.  

Another Strait   

The Houthis played a similarly outsized role in upending global shipping between November 2023 and January 2025 when they attacked over 100 merchant vessels in the Red Sea in a campaign of solidarity with Palestinians during the Gaza war. 

The group regularly launched missiles towards Israel during the same period—although most were intercepted. Israel responded with heavy airstrikes against Houthi targets in Sanaa and across the group’s territory.

Thomas Juneau, a professor at the University of Ottawa’s Graduate School of Public and International Affairs and an associate fellow with Chatham House, tells TIME that if Houthi strikes remain limited to a small number of direct attacks on Israel, “they will not have a major impact on the evolution of the war.” 

“As we saw in past rounds of strikes, Israeli anti-missile defenses are able to intercept most Houthi missiles and drones; those that succeed in evading Israeli defenses have caused limited damage,” he says. 

But if the group decides to attack shipping on the Red Sea again, that would change things. 

“The Houthis would cause a much more important impact on the war if they were to start targeting maritime shipping in the Red Sea and try to close the Bab al-Mandab Strait. This would amplify the war’s already strong impact on oil and natural gas prices and on the global economy,” he says.

Attacks on the Red Sea and the Bab al-Mandab Strait would likely disrupt traffic through the Suez Canal, through which around 15% of global maritime trade — including 30% of container ship traffic—travels each year. 

Who are the Houthis?

The Houthis are a Yemeni political and military group that emerged in the 2000s and now control much of northern Yemen. The group is named after its founder, Hussein al-Houthi, and draws from the Zaydi branch of Shiite Islam. 

Although they are backed by and allied with Iran, the Houthis are not a straightforward proxy, and they often prioritize their own domestic interests. And although Iran has supplied it with sophisticated ballistic missile technology, the group has also developed the ability to assemble and manufacture its own weaponry inside Yemen.

The group rose to prominence after capturing Sanaa in 2014. That sparked a brutal civil war against the internationally recognized government and a Saudi Arabian-led bombing campaign. The Houthis proved remarkably resilient against that air campaign, which relied on U.S. support and killed an estimated 9,000 civilians.

The group has since faced two bombing campaigns by two successive U.S. administrations.

Joe Biden, Trump’s predecessor, launched airstrikes against Yemen on January 10, 2024, “in direct response to unprecedented Houthi attacks against international maritime vessels in the Red Sea.”

Those strikes failed to deter the Houthis and only stopped when a ceasefire was brokered between Israel and Hamas in January 2025.

The Houthis resumed their attacks when Israel imposed a blockade on food and aid entering Gaza in March 2025.

Trump launched his own bombing campaign in April 2025 to stop those attacks, which ended when the Trump Administration struck a deal with the Houthis in May to end airstrikes if the group stopped attacks on shipping. The deal did not include an agreement to stop attacks against Israel, which continued until an eventual ceasefire was reached in Gaza.

After striking a truce with the Houthis, Trump said of the group: “We hit them very hard. They had a great capacity to withstand punishment.” 

You could say there’s a lot of bravery there,” he added. 

‘Outlast the war itself’

The Houthis launches come as the U.S. and Iran are reportedly engaged in indirect negotiations for the first time since the war began, and Trump’s top officials are signaling that the war may be over within weeks, despite no sign of a diplomatic breakthrough. 

Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Friday that U.S. military operations were expected to be concluded in “weeks, not months”.

Trump has also implied that his Administration’s objectives in Iran have been achieved and signaled the war could end within the four to six-week timeline the White House initially set out.  

“We estimated it would take approximately four to six weeks to achieve our mission, and we’re way ahead of schedule,” the President said during a Cabinet meeting on Thursday.  “If you look at what we’ve done in terms of the destruction of that country, I mean, we’re way ahead.” 

uneau says that the Houthis may be able to exert some limited influence over Trump’s timeline. 

“The answer here depends on whether the Houthis further escalate or not,” he says. 

“If Houthi involvement remains limited to occasional strikes on Israel that cause little or no damage, the American calculus does not change much. If the Houthis do start attacking shipping in the Red Sea again, however, pressure on President Trump will ramp up, given that the impact on oil prices and on the global economy will be amplified.” 

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A Palestinian flag is raised as Houthis rally in solidarity with Iran and Lebanon, amid the US-Israeli war with Iran, in the Yemeni capital Sanaa on March 27, 2026. Mohammed Huwais—AFP via Getty Images

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America’s war on Iran began with what was meant to be an intimidating performance of overwhelming air power. Quickly, it became another kind of conflict, with low-cost missiles and drones effectively neutralizing a superpower by punishing its allies and paralyzing energy flows. By the time President Trump tried to threaten Iran into reopening the Strait of Hormuz with a 48-hour ultimatum, it was clear not just that the strait had become America’s singular strategic fixation but that the whole campaign was now a war about energy, in which oil prices and gas plants had become the central theater of conflict.

With Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the supply-chain disruptions of Covid, the war in Iran marks the third major energy shock in just a handful of years, years in which fossil loyalists argued that the green transition risked intolerable turmoil and political leaders cooled off on climate urgency in the name of “energy security.”

The world is still feeling the sting of the last shock, and the new one promises a brutal long tail, as well; the head of the International Energy Agency has called the war in Iran “the greatest global energy security threat in history.” One-fifth of the world’s liquefied natural gas flows through the Strait of Hormuz, along with perhaps one-fifth of its oil — and though the direct costs of the blockade have generated the most attention, the downstream price spikes are just as concerning. Across much of Asia and parts of Africa, fuel shortages and blackouts are likely. The world could be pulled into recession by the force of energy inflation, even if outright conflict subsides soon, and the higher costs of everything, including the inputs for semiconductors, the Financial Times has warned, might pop the A.I. bubble that is keeping the American economy afloat. A food crisis to dwarf the one that followed the invasion of Ukraine could follow, as the war disrupts not just the price of food but also the global flow of fertilizer — another product of fossil fuels — on the brink of planting season.

That so much could be pulled down the drain by a somewhat goal-less war of choice is partly a result of inept or indifferent planning. But this war is also a new kind of conflict, given shape by fossil-fuel turmoil and the uncertainty brought about by the energy transition of the last decade.

By many metrics and from many vantages, green energy has been a dizzying, ecstatic success. Renewables have grown faster than any new source of energy in history, surpassing nearly all expectations. But we are still in the middle of that transition, with the end of the old paradigm, built on oil and gas and coal, still decades away.

Climate advocates and energy analysts like to say that in the postcarbon future, the geopolitics of energy will be defanged. In the meantime, the energy transition has tightened fossil-fuel markets and concentrated fossil-fuel supply, drawing investment away from aging infrastructure. This has made energy supply somewhat more vulnerable to shock and energy infrastructure more attractive to military targeting. Even wars of choice unfold in a global context, and Iran is no different: a new age of resource conflict arising just as the old energy order was being upended, but before the new one has really taken hold.

Call it a midtransition war.

This Is the Midtransition

You can date the very beginning of the long green transition to the energy crises of the 1970s: Jimmy Carter slapping solar panels on the White House roof, France going all in on nuclear power, those first earnest lectures about “energy efficiency.” The price of solar panels fell 99 percent in the 50 years that followed, but global uptake was painfully incremental. It was only in the decade after the signing of the Paris Agreement in 2015 that the world really started to believe that renewables might soon dominate the energy future. Money followed, with worldwide investment in fossil fuels dropping by more than a third between 2015 and 2020 and clean-energy investment growing nearly twice as high since.

But global transformations take time, and for all the rapid green progress, we are still drawing a majority of our energy from legacy systems burning through fossil fuels.

The term “midtransition” comes from Emily Grubert, an environmental sociologist who uses it to describe just how messy decarbonization might be, even if it all goes inspiringly well. Take, just for instance, gas stations: How many of them should there be, once electric vehicles take over the roads while charging exclusively in garages and driveways, and what should we do about all the others made redundant? Or think about the electricity grid, which nearly everyone, considering the energy future now agrees must be rapidly expanded: Elsewhere in the world, users have flocked to rooftop solar to secure their own energy needs, shrinking their carbon footprints but also destabilizing the grid by depriving it of customers and revenue. What happens to the global shipping industry as the world moves away from fossil fuels, given that they account for some 40 percent of all shipping by volume? Literally: What are we supposed to do with all those tankers? This is the midtransition in energy.

There is also a midtransition in geopolitics, already underway. Look, for example, at the Arab gulf countries, petrostates that have spent the last decade channeling oil profits into Big Tech venture capital, bringing them further into alignment with the United States and Israel. Or at China, which now spends hundreds of billions on clean-energy investments abroad while maintaining a fossil-fuel partnership with Russia — and Iran.

And then there’s the midtransition in war. Though Vladimir Putin offered a mesmerizing array of justifications when he invaded Ukraine in 2022, Europe’s energy transition offered its own logic — or rather, its own timeline. The continent’s ambitious net-zero commitments meant that Europe was planning to move away from imports of gas, inevitably cutting Russia’s energy leverage over NATO. When the Nord Stream pipelines were blown up that September, it seemed so hard to understand that many assumed Russia was to blame. But even American intelligence now believes it was the Ukrainians, effectively applying the same midtransition principle in reverse: Blowing up the pipeline ensured that Ukraine’s NATO allies couldn’t make up with Russia easily and pushed Europe faster along its path of decarbonization. This used to be called ecoterrorism; now it was the strategic work of hardheaded nation states.

In Foreign Affairs last fall, Jason Bordoff and Meghan L. O’Sullivan declared “the return of the energy weapon.” For most of the modern era, they wrote, energy was a familiar tool of great power coercion. But over the last half-century, since the 1973 oil crisis, global powers had managed to mostly avoid the old conflicts and smooth out once-familiar disruptions. Citizens across the rich world were lulled into the expectation that the energy system would always work reliably for them. “Today, that complacency has been upended,” they wrote, with the global order and the energy system fragmenting at the same time. And that was before Trump ordered the kidnapping of President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela, partly to secure a new source of oil, and before the United States stumbled into a global energy crisis by trying to bomb a petrostate into regime change. No one has ever started a war over solar panels, as any climate activist will tell you. And the economic blast radius of the Iran conflict is large enough that it’s hard to miss the argument it makes for rapid decarbonization. Why continue to rely so heavily on imports from erratic authoritarians overseas when you can instead harvest the bountiful sun, wind, hydropower, and geothermal found nearly everywhere on earth?

In a time of resource wars, you get to reap additional rewards, too. The most outspoken Western critic of the war in Iran has been Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez of Spain, a country that has doubled its renewable capacity in the last five years and cut the influence of fossil fuels on its electricity price by 75 percent. The Spanish energy transition is far from complete, but the country has already bought back the right to speak its conscience.

The Wars of the Future

Not that a renewable future will be a peace-loving utopia. There are already heated trade wars over the minerals necessary for the batteries that power electric vehicles. The United States’ recent escalation with China reached its boiling point over rare-earth metals, and Trump grew thirsty for Greenland seemingly on the same basis. (As it turns out, Greenland doesn’t actually have particularly great rare-earth deposits, which aren’t all that rare anyway.) Lithium and cobalt mining are a source of intense conflict in countries from Bolivia to Congo. It’s not hard to imagine those fights spiraling out of control, with consequences all down the global supply chain.

Beyond the famous petrostates, plenty of governments across the developing world depend on tax revenue from energy companies or direct funding from state-owned fossil-fuel enterprises. That funding will dry up more quickly the faster the transition goes, leaving those states precarious and vulnerable. Anytime the world map of literal power changes, the political hierarchy shifts, too.

Then there’s the issue of water. In Iran, a six-year drought has pushed the country to the brink of what is called “water bankruptcy,” with regular supply curtailments and street protests demanding “water, electricity, life.” In December, taps in Tehran’s south began to run dry. Then came larger protests, brutal crackdown, and now war.

Already, desalination has become a miraculous lifeline in an increasingly inhospitable and unforgiving land, with parts of the Gulf drawing 90 percent of their drinking water from desalination plants. Over the last few years, the global green-energy boom has fed a dream that such free and abundant power will allow desalination to transform water-starved regions into oases. But what looks in the distance like techno-utopianism appears, in the meantime, more like a terrifying military vulnerability: Two desalination plants have already reportedly been struck — one in Iran, with the Iranians blaming the United States, and one in supposed retaliation by an Iranian drone in Bahrain.

This is all happening on a planet in the middle of its own transition, one that may well last thousands or even millions of years and to which few nations have even begun to properly adapt. In the meantime, vulnerabilities proliferate like heat.

More on the Fighting in the Middle East

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• A Toothless Iran?: A recent wave of strikes across the Middle East shows that Tehran has not lost the capacity to retaliate.

• Global Reliance on Natural Gas: From Western Europe to East Asia, countries are scouring the globe for natural gas after the war cut off the Persian Gulf fuel that they relied on to cook dinner, heat homes, and generate electricity. The United States, as the world’s biggest gas exporter, will almost certainly benefit from this upheaval, at least in the short term.

• Journalists Killed in Lebanon: An Israeli strike killed two prominent Lebanese television journalists and a cameraman, according to their news organizations and Lebanese officials. Israel accused one of the reporters of being a Hezbollah operative. Lebanon’s president said they were journalists and condemned the killings. The funerals drew hundreds of mourners.

• Houthis Attack Israel: The Iran-allied rebel group in Yemen joined the widening war with an unsuccessful missile attack on Israel.

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Photo illustration by Chantal Jachan

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Science has always relied on a curious human’s mind forming a hypothesis, designing an experiment, analyzing the results, and presenting the case to that person’s peers. Over centuries, we’ve built better tools such as electron microscopes, particle accelerators, and supercomputers, but the core loop of scientific discovery has remained stubbornly human. Now, for the first time, that loop has started with a new kind of mind.

So far, scientists have often had artificial intelligence help them with solving a predefined, narrow task, such as folding proteins, says Jeff Clune, a professor of computer science at the University of British Columbia. “We’re saying the AI gets to be the scientist,” he says.

In a recent Nature study, Clune and his colleagues unveiled the AI Scientist, an AI system that wrote a paper without human involvement that passed peer review for a workshop at the 2025 International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), a top-tier venue in the field of machine learning. The paper was mediocre, according to Clune and other experts. But its existence marks a turning point that the scientific community is only beginning to grapple with: AI has quickly moved from assisting scientists to attempting to be one.

The AI Scientist comprises multiple modules. After it is given a general topic prompt by researchers, it surveys available literature and generates hypotheses. “We’re just giving it a general direction like ‘Come up with something interesting to study on how the AI learns,’” Clune explains. The system then evaluates and refines those ideas, filtering out any that are not novel. From there, further modules plan and execute experiments, analyze and plot the data, and, finally, write the paper. It even does its own internal peer review process to find flaws in its papers, Clune says. (The system relies on existing foundation models such as Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet or OpenAI’s GPT-4o; the team’s contribution is the pipeline orchestrating these models).

To see if The AI Scientist’s output could meet human standards, the team submitted three papers generated by it to the I Can’t Believe It’s Not Better (ICBINB) workshop at the 2025 ICLR. One was accepted. (The conference organizers gave their permission for the AI-generated papers to be submitted, and all of the AI Scientist’s papers were withdrawn from the conference after the review process.)

The team behind the AI Scientist admits the bar for this workshop was lower than that of a main conference publication. “Would a mediocre graduate student get one paper in three accepted at a place that accepts 70 percent of papers? Sure!” says Jodi Schneider, an associate professor of information sciences at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, who was not involved in Clune’s study.

The AI’s papers “are okay but not great,” Clune says. To him, some of the AI’s ideas seemed truly creative, yet the system struggled with execution. “The logic and the writing and the thinking throughout the whole paper didn’t all fit together beautifully,” he notes. Further issues included hallucinated references, duplicated figures, and a lack of methodological rigor.

Overall, Clune and his colleagues’ new study has received a lukewarm reception. “The approach is agentic and without any real novelty,” says Maria Liakata, a professor of natural language processing at Queen Mary University of London, who was not involved in the work.

There was one metric, though, where the AI Scientist did outperform human researchers by a huge margin: it produced a formally passable paper on machine learning within 15 hours at a cost Clune estimated to be around $140. Compare that with the capability of a graduate student, who might take a full semester to write their first accepted workshop paper, according to Schneider.

As costs drop and output speeds increase, AI-authored papers present the scientific community with an immediate challenge. “The AI-written papers are probably going to make things much worse,” warns Yanan Sui, an associate professor at Tsinghua University in China and the senior workshop chair for ICLR 2026.

To safeguard against this flood, top-tier venues have begun setting limits. “There are strict rules for the main conference that do not allow submission of purely AI-written papers,” Sui says. The compromise, for now, is forced transparency—the authors using AI must clearly state how it was used. Sui admits, though, that journals and conferences usually lack the tools to reliably detect AI-generated contributions.

The tools to autonomously write these contributions, meanwhile, have already started to proliferate. Intology claimed its AI Zochi passed peer review for the main proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (though human researchers were involved in areas such as verifying results before submission and communicating with peer reviewers). Another group, called the Autoscience Institute, stated that its AI system created papers that were accepted at ICLR workshops before the AI Scientist.

“We’re not going to be able to remove the power to generate AI scientific papers,” says Aaron Schein, a data scientist at the University of Chicago and one of the ICBINB workshop organizers. “This technology is only going to get better. I don’t think there’s anything to do about that.”

But what if one day the AI-generated papers stop being mediocre?

Clune sees the transition unfolding in two phases. “In the very short term, you’re going to get a lot of slop and garbage, and the peer review systems are going to have to deal with that,” he says. But eventually, he argues, AI systems will be far better at science than human researchers. “I predict the AI Scientist actually marks the dawn of a new era of rapid scientific advances,” Clune claims, imagining humans reduced to curators witnessing AI achieve scientific wonders.

Liakata, though, thinks there’s still something for us humans to do. “I believe the future is not fully autonomous scientific discovery but advanced human-agent interaction where the human can scrutinize and contribute to the process,” she says.

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‘No Kings’ rallies draw crowds across US against Trump Adminstration

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Tens of thousands of people have joined “No Kings” protests across the U.S. against the war in Iran and President Donald Trump’s actions. (AP video by Mike Pesoli, Mark Vancleave, and Emily Wang)

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In big cities and small towns across the world, protesters gathered for thousands of rallies against President Trump and his policies and actions, with the self-stated goal of fighting dictatorship.

Demonstrators, including elected officials and community leaders, chanted defiant messages and carried homemade signs that condemned the war in Iran, threats against voting rights, and the White House’s mass deportation push, among other topics. Organized by a coalition of activist groups under the banner “No Kings,” it was the third such countrywide protest in the past 10 months.

No Kings organizers said eight million people took part, one of the largest protests in recent history. Their estimates in some cities were higher than those of local public safety officials. The New York Times is doing its own reporting on some of the turnout, but has not independently confirmed the numbers from the thousands of protest sites.

One of the largest rallies took place outside the Minnesota Capitol, where the singer Bruce Springsteen performed “Streets of Minneapolis,” which he wrote to protest the immigration crackdown that led to the fatal shootings of two American citizens by federal agents in January.

“They picked the wrong city,” Mr. Springsteen told the large crowd, adding that “these invasions of American cities will not stand.”

In Washington, D.C., some protesters marched to the military base where Stephen Miller, the White House official overseeing the mass deportation push, has been residing. Some chanted, “Stephen Miller’s got to go,” and “We’ve got the people outside your door.”

Protesters marched down small-town main streets and thoroughfares, many bundled up to withstand chilly temperatures. Attendees at small gatherings, including one in Richmond, Ky., waved American flags as drivers signaled support by honking. In Atlanta, protesters chanted for an end to immigration raids.

Demonstrators seized upon topics where they said there was overreach by the Trump administration, including health care and the environment.

A White House spokeswoman, Abigail Jackson, called the protests “Trump derangement therapy sessions” in a statement on Thursday.

The protests, organizers have said, intentionally lack a single, specific demand but rather seek to harness energy on a wide variety of grievances regarding Mr. Trump and his policies.

Like many silver-haired protesters gathered at Auditorium Shores, a riverside park in Austin, Texas, Gilbert Martinez, a 93-year-old Korean War veteran, sees Mr. Trump as reckless and rebellious. And that’s not aligned with the values Mr. Martinez has spent his life preaching.

He called the attack on Iran a “diversion.”

“That idiot is going to cause a lot of good military people to lose their lives,” he said.

A longtime local business leader, Mr. Martinez is from the Texas Panhandle and says he can trace his family lineage to El Paso. He started Austin’s Hispanic Chamber of Commerce in 1973, he said, because in those days, downtown was a “backwater” devoid of Hispanic-owned businesses.

“I’m an American,” Mr. Martinez said. “We didn’t just get here.”

Chicagoans gathered at Grant Park, where Saira Bensett, 60, a retired zoological worker, described the turnout as cathartic.

“When I watch the news, it’s often too much — the emotions I feel make me feel like I’m alone,” she said. “So I wanted to be here to feel like I’m not by myself.”

Lt. Gov. Juliana Stratton of Illinois, who is also the Democratic nominee for a Senate seat, told a crowd, “We all know the power of turning our anger into action.”

Many who gathered outside the Minnesota State Capitol said they had been driven to protest by the tumultuous monthslong presence of federal immigration officers in the Twin Cities region.

“We don’t want to walk out our door in fear,” said Chas Jensen, 68, who has lived in St. Paul his entire life and marched with his wife, Kitty Warner. “I’ve seen a lot over the years, but nothing like this.”

“It’s been hell, the last few months,” added Sadikshya Aryal, who came from South Minneapolis with her husband and two friends. Ms. Aryal, 32, still carries her passport whenever she leaves her house, she said.

Attendees said they felt the area had not returned to normal since the immigration operation but were comforted by how many people showed up Saturday.

“As much as it can feel helpless, this shows it’s not,” said Ms. Warner, 80.

The Minnesota governor, Tim Walz, gave a fiery address from behind a row of bulletproof glass panels, which underscored fears of political violence. Referring to the president’s oft-stated disdain for Somali immigrants, Mr. Walz said that their grandchildren would remain in the United States long after “the orange clown is in the dustbin of history.”

In New York City, Valerie Tirado said she decided to attend an anti-Trump demonstration for the first time because her son, a Marine, was set to be deployed to the Middle East.

“Trump is using these military men as pawns, just to flex,” said Ms. Tirado, 60, a registered Democrat.

Spouses Michael Bianco and Susan Draper said they had demonstrated in the streets for causes they support since 1968. What struck them most about Saturday’s was how many people their age were on the streets.

“I want to express my disdain,” said Ms. Draper, 77, a retired N.Y.U. urban anthropology professor.

Eileen McHugh, 59, traveled an hour from her Republican-leaning town in Westchester County to protest at Columbus Circle.

“The whole Republican Party has blood on their hands,” Ms. McHugh said. “Bombing boats in Venezuela and schools in Iran is murder.”

While immigration policy was the focus of past No Kings protests in Atlanta, demonstrators on Saturday drew attention to the war in Iran, the toll the partial government shutdown is taking on air travel, and a bill Republicans are championing to tighten voting rules.

“They just keep pushing the limits every day to see how far they can take their regime,” said Alan Reed, 72, who attended the protest using a walker and had a rainbow flag draped over his back. “To see how much authority they can grab, until they can cancel our elections.”

Nicholas Phillips, 34, of Long Beach, Calif., cooled himself outside Los Angeles City Hall with a rainbow fan, joined by friends.

Mr. Phillips, who is gay, said he came to protest the Trump administration’s anti-transgender policies and the potential for the Supreme Court to reverse the country’s marriage equality laws.

“It’s important to show up,” he said.

Later in the day, tensions escalated toward a separate group of protesters who had gathered outside of the Metropolitan Detention Center. Tear gas was deployed, and rubber bullets were shot into the crowd. The police declared an unlawful assembly, formed a line, and made several arrests.

In statements on social media, the Los Angeles Police Department said that federal authorities had used nonlethal measures to move the crowd back after protesters were warned not to throw items or try to tear down the gate.

A city councilor, Sameer Kanal, described “a sea of Portlanders” in a park near downtown. Many were wearing the inflatable animal costumes that have made the city’s anti-immigration rallies a viral sensation.

Deana Fredericks, 65, was among a group of women wearing outfits inspired by “The Handmaid’s Tale,” a show drawn from the Margaret Atwood novel that depicts a totalitarian society in which women are treated as property. “We’re concerned about women’s rights, but it’s also gone beyond that,” she said, citing the Iran war and voting rights.

Later, outside an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Portland, hundreds of protesters gathered, with some breaking open a gate at the entrance of the building. The authorities pushed them back. State and city police officers arrived to further break up the crowd.

No Kings protesters gathered at the park at Pier A in Hoboken on the banks of the Hudson River on a chilly morning. A local folk singer, Ed Fogarty, played the classic Bob Dylan protest song “Blowin’ in the Wind.”

Noah Schwartz, 54, one of the organizers of a march from Jersey City to Hoboken, used a bullhorn to lead the crowd in a chant.

“We will not stop our fun, our joy, our democracy,” he said. “Say it once, say it twice! We will not put up with ICE!”

Protesters with signs slung over their shoulders streamed into Anchorage’s Town Square Park, as temperatures hovered around 20.

Lynette Moreno-Hinz, a 67-year-old cabdriver from Anchorage, played a skin drum for the crowd. Ms. Moreno-Hinz, who is Tlingit, said she was protesting because Alaska Natives are concerned about federal support for myriad tribal programs. “He’s taking away the money for our Native people,” she said, referring to Mr. Trump.

The No Kings movement debuted in February 2025 on Presidents’ Day. The decentralized coalition had a stronger showing last June, on the day Mr. Trump marked his birthday by ordering the military to stage a large parade in Washington, D.C. The groups reported an even larger turnout in October.

In London, demonstrators carried scowling bobbleheads of Mr. Trump; the first lady, Melania Trump; and Vice President JD Vance. Caricatures of Elon Musk, Stephen Miller, and Kristi Noem also hovered over the crowd.

Carmen Kingston, a New Yorker who has lived in Britain for a decade, carried a poster with the words “Minab Massacre,” referring to the strike on an elementary school in Iran that killed at least 175 people, most of them children.

The war, she said, is “part of a domestics political climate that includes the erosion of democratic institutions, democratic guardrails, and unaccountable violence.”

More on the Fighting in the Middle East

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• Houthis Attack Israel: The attack by the Iranian-backed militia in Yemen marked an escalation in the conflict, bringing in a new actor who threatened to expand the war’s reach across the region.

• Strike on U.S. Base: A combined missile and drone attack by Iran injured 12 American troops, two of them seriously, at Prince ​Sultan Air Base in Saudi ​Arabia, two U.S. officials said.

• Iran’s Information War: With help from Russia, China, and A.I. tools, Iran is spreading content designed to exploit opposition to the U.S.-Israeli campaign and to deflect from its own considerable losses on the battlefield. Both U.S. and Iranian officials alike have used memes to taunt each other.

• Attacks on Iranian Infrastructure: Strikes on Iran’s industrial infrastructure widened, with attacks on two major steel production complexes that are vital to the country’s economy, along with other industrial sites. Iran attributed the strikes to Israel.

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Barreling through the universe with incredible power and speed, galactic cosmic rays are a major source of radiation in space. But thanks to Earth’s strong magnetic field, these charged particles don’t usually make it directly to our planet, so we are protected from the radiation’s damaging effects. This field may be doing much more: new data collected by China’s Chang’e 4 lunar lander shows that our magnetic field’s influence is so powerful that it extends farther into space than previously believed—stretching even beyond the moon.

n a study published on Wednesday in Science Advances, researchers describe a “cavity” in space between Earth and the moon where cosmic rays are deflected by Earth’s magnetic field. This suggests that the effects of our planet’s magnetism are present much farther from us than anyone could have expected.

Gravitational cosmic rays spiral through the heliosphere, but Earth’s magnetic influence shields a large area of space from some of the particles. From “A Galactic Cosmic Ray Cavity in Earth-Moon Space,” by Wensai Shang et al., in Science Advances, Vol. 12, No. 13; March 25, 2026

Launched in 2018, Chang’e 4 was the first spacecraft to land on the far side of the moon. Among the many scientific instruments onboard was the Lunar Lander Neutron and Dosimetry experiment, which was designed to measure the radiation future astronauts might experience if they were to land there. Scientists had long assumed most of the moon lay beyond the protection of Earth’s magnetic field, but in 2019, scientists began noticing something odd about the experiment’s data that suggested the moon was somewhat protected from galactic cosmic rays.

The finding came as “a surprise,” says Robert Wimmer-Schweingruber, a co-author of the study and a physicist at Kiel University in Germany. “Personally, I didn’t believe it for a long, long time. I thought it was an artifact in the data until we did a lot of statistical tests.”

Galactic cosmic rays originate from a variety of sources in space, such as stars, supernovae, and black holes. These diverse origins mean that by the time the rays get near Earth, they don’t all carry the same level of energy. The highest-energy particles move quickly through the solar system, while some of the weaker particles linger—and their radiation could affect astronauts, Wimmer-Schweingruber says.

“These low-energy particles weren’t that interesting to us until we saw this effect, and then we realized this is actually important for the skin dose of astronauts,” he says.

Shielding astronauts from the dangers of radiation is critical to ensuring a human presence in space. This means creating materials that are light enough to bring into space but protective enough to keep radiation at bay, says Philip Metzger, a professor of planetary science and space technology at the University of Central Florida, who was not involved in the new study. Knowing more about the distribution of radiation in space, and especially between the moon and Earth, could help scientists plan safer missions.

For example, if NASA’s plan to put humans on the moon in a semipermanent capacity comes to pass, then it may make sense for astronauts to schedule activities outside any sheltered habitats while the moon is within the influence of Earth’s magnetic field.

“It is brilliant research, and it just shows us that the more we study phenomena outside of our planet, the more we discover we don’t know,” Metzger says. “That’s why we need to do space missions.”

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Rapid eye movement, or REM sleep, is the final phase of the four stage cycle that occurs during sleep. Unlike non-REM sleep, the fourth phase is characterized by an increase in brain activity and autonomic nervous system functions, which are closer to what is seen during the awakened state. Similar to non-REM sleep stages, this stage of sleep is primarily controlled by the brainstem and hypothalamus, with added contributions from the hippocampus and amygdala. Additionally, REM sleep is associated with an increase in occurrence of vivid dreams. While non-REM sleep has been associated with rest and recovery, the purpose and benefits of REM sleep are still unknown. However, many theories hypothesize that REM sleep is useful for learning and memory formation.

Key Takeaways: What Is REM Sleep?

• REM sleep is an active stage of sleep characterized by increased brain wave activity, return to awake state autonomic functions, and dreams with associated paralysis.
• The brainstem, particularly the pons and midbrain, and the hypothalamus are key areas of the brain that control REM sleep with hormone-secreting “REM-on” and “REM-off” cells.
• The most vivid, elaborate, and emotional dreams occur during REM sleep.
• The benefits of REM sleep are uncertain, but may be related to learning and storage of memory.

REM Definition

REM sleep is often described as a “paradoxical” sleep state due to its increased activity after non-REM sleep. The three prior stages of sleep, known as non-REM or N1, N2, and N3, occur initially during the sleep cycle to progressively slow bodily functions and brain activity. However, after the occurrence of N3 sleep (the deepest stage of sleep), the brain signals for the onset of a more aroused state. As the name implies, the eyes move rapidly sideways during REM sleep. Autonomic functions such as heart rate, respiratory rate, and blood pressure begin to increase closer to their values while awake. However, because this period is often associated with dreams, major limb muscle activities are temporarily paralyzed. Twitching can still be observed in smaller muscle groups.

During REM sleep, brain wave activity measured on an electroencephalogram (EEG) also increases, as compared to the slower wave activity seen during non-REM sleep. N1 sleep shows slowing of the normal alpha wave pattern noted during the awake state. N2 sleep introduces K waves, or long, high-voltage waves lasting up to 1 second, and sleep spindles, or periods of low voltage and high-frequency spikes. N3 sleep is characterized by delta waves, or high voltage, slow, and irregular activity. However, EEGs obtained during REM sleep show sleep patterns with low voltage and fast waves, some alpha waves, and muscle twitch spikes associated with transmitted rapid eye movement. These readings are also more variable than those observed during non-REM sleep, with random spiking patterns at times fluctuating more than activity seen while awake.

REM and Your Brain

During REM sleep, brain wave activity measured on an electroencephalogram (EEG) also increases, as compared to the slower wave activity seen during non-REM sleep. N1 sleep shows slowing of the normal alpha wave pattern noted during the awake state. N2 sleep introduces K waves, or long, high-voltage waves lasting up to 1 second, and sleep spindles, or periods of low voltage and high-frequency spikes. N3 sleep is characterized by delta waves, or high voltage, slow, and irregular activity. However, EEGs obtained during REM sleep show sleep patterns with low voltage and fast waves, some alpha waves, and muscle twitch spikes associated with transmitted rapid eye movement. These readings are also more variable than those observed during non-REM sleep, with random spiking patterns at times fluctuating more than activity seen while awake.

The major portions of the brain activated during REM sleep are the brainstem and the hypothalamus. The pons and midbrain, in particular, and the hypothalamus contain specialized cells known as “REM-on” and “REM-off” cells. To induce the transition to REM sleep, REM-on cells secrete hormones such as GABA, acetylcholine, and glutamate to instruct the onset of rapid eye movements, muscle activity suppression, and autonomic changes. REM-off cells, as their name implies, induce the offset of REM sleep by secretion of stimulatory hormones such as norepinephrine, epinephrine, and histamine.

The hypothalamus also contains stimulatory cells known as orexin neurons, which secrete the hormone orexin. This hormone is necessary for maintaining wakefulness and arousal from sleep and is often decreased or absent in people with sleep disorders. The hippocampus and amygdala are also involved in REM sleep, specifically during periods of dreams. These areas of the brain are most notable for their functions in memory and emotional regulation. An EEG will show increased hippocampal and amygdala activity with the presence of high voltage, regular waves known as theta waves. 

Dreams and REM Sleep

Although dreams can occur in other stages of sleep, the most vivid dreams occur during REM sleep. These dreams are often elaborate and emotional experiences of imagined life, most often associated with sadness, anger, apprehension, or fear. A person can also more readily recall a dream when awakened from REM sleep rather than from non-REM sleep. The purpose of dream content is not currently understood. Historically, neurologist and father of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud suggested that dreams were a representation of unconscious thought, and therefore each dream had deeply significant meaning. His dream interpretation, however, is not a universally accepted theory. An opposing hypothesis proposes that dream content is a result of random brain activity that occurs during REM sleep, rather than a meaningful interpretive experience.

Benefits of REM Sleep

Sleep in general is necessary for health and well-being, as mild sleep deprivation increases risk for chronic health conditions and severe sleep deprivation can lead to hallucinations or even death. While non-REM sleep is required in order to survive, the benefits of REM sleep remain inconclusive. Studies in which participants were deprived of REM sleep by waking have shown no obvious adverse effects. Some drugs, including MAO antidepressants, lead to drastically decreased REM sleep without issue for patients even after years of treatment.

Due to the lack of conclusive evidence, many hypotheses exist concerning the benefits of REM sleep. One hypothesized benefit relates to the association of REM sleep and dreams. This theory suggests that certain negative behaviors, which should be “unlearned,” are rehearsed through dreams. Actions, events, and sequences related to fearful situations are often the subject of dreams and are therefore appropriately erased from the neural network. REM sleep is also proposed to help transfer memories from the hippocampus to the cerebral cortex. In fact, the cyclical occurrence of non-REM and REM sleep is often thought to enhance the body’s physical and mental rest as well as aid in memory formation.

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REM sleep is an active stage of sleep characterized by increased brain wave activity. Jamie Grill / Getty Images

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