UPDATE October 28, 2026: This story has been updated to correct when Marie Gluesenkamp Perez flipped District 3.

Ballots have been mailed to Washington residents, and the will take place on Nov. 3.听

Between critical contests across the country, prominent gubernatorial races and divisive ballot initiatives, there will be plenty to watch on Election Day. All 435 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives and 35 Senate seats are up for a vote. Democrats need a net gain of four seats in the House and four seats in the Senate to overturn the Republican majorities in both.

UW News spoke with and , professors of political science at the 黑料老司机, about midterm election trends, what they鈥檙e watching statewide and nationally, and more.

What will you be watching most closely in Washington state and/or nationally?

James Long: On the state level, is very competitive. Incumbent Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, a Democrat, won the district by about 4 points in 2024, having flipped it from Republican to Democrat control in 2022. This year, she is running against a Republican candidate, state senator John Braun. While all congressional races have a certain degree of localism and variation in candidate quality with respect to what matters in close races, should Gluesenkamp Perez hold onto the seat 鈥� and by a healthy margin 鈥� that could be a bellwether for how Democrats expect to perform in close House races nationwide. Similarly, if Braun flips the district back to Republican control, it could suggest that Republican losses across the country may not be as bad as many expect.

There are in Washington, all of which are controversial and speak to some current “culture war” divisions between the left and the right. I don’t have a sense of which of these initiatives will succeed or fail 鈥� polling on them is notoriously difficult. Voters may change their minds due to exposure to a variety of ads. They may also decide by reverting to how they view national conversations around parents’ involvement in educational curriculum, trans athletes in K-12 schools, and greater taxation of the wealthy in terms of whether and how they vote on these measures.

Mark Smith: In Washington, I鈥檓 particularly interested in the three ballot initiatives, especially . The state legislature is counting on the revenue from this tax in 2028. If the tax is repealed, the legislature will need to make major changes in their projected budget, with downstream effects for the UW.听

Nationally, I鈥檓 closely watching the competitive , partly because that鈥檚 where I鈥檓 from, but also because Ohio tells the tale of the changing geography of American politics. Ohio used to be considered a bellwether state, and it was the tipping-point state as recently as 2004. If John Kerry won Ohio, which he lost by only 2.1%, he would have been elected president. Since then, Ohio has trended strongly red. If Democrats win the Senate and governor鈥檚 races there, and polls have them favored in both, that would be a noteworthy result. If Democrats can win Senate seats in other red states such as Kansas, Iowa, Alaska and Texas, that would also grab my attention.听

What are the factors likely to impact voter behavior in these midterms?

JL: For Congressional races nationwide, this election really seems to be a referendum on Donald Trump and Republican control of Congress. It’s been a period of single party control across the executive and legislative branches, so it’s not unusual for the incumbent president and party to be the main focal point in a midterm election. Moreover, Trump’s and the Republicans’ policies are deeply unpopular with the American people, including the war with Iran, tariffs and the inability to tackle affordability.

MS: At the risk of sounding pedantic, it鈥檚 highly variable from person to person. Who people vote for, and whether they vote at all, is driven by a complicated combination of factors. Still, we can parse out some systematic effects that apply more generally. One of them is the dropoff in voter turnout of about 20% between presidential and midterm years. Twenty years ago, the kinds of people who always vote in midterm years were disproportionately voting Republican. Now they are disproportionately voting Democratic. Another way of saying that 鈥� based on the off-year elections in 2025 and the polling we have this year 鈥� is there will be more people who voted for Donald Trump in 2024 and don鈥檛 vote in 2026. That鈥檚 opposed to people who voted for Kamala Harris in 2024 and will stay home in 2026.

What patterns tend to emerge historically in midterm elections, and do you predict those patterns will hold this year?

MS: Since the time of World War II, the president鈥檚 party has lost an average of about 26 seats in the House and four seats in the Senate. But now regional polarization and gerrymandering have reduced the number of competitive House races, so it鈥檚 unlikely that Democrats will reach that average of 26 seats. But they only need to gain four to take the majority of the House. In the Senate, curiously, they need the same net gain of four seats to reach a majority. Current polling and prediction markets indicate that Democrats are likely to get there for both the House and Senate 鈥� though it鈥檚 somewhat less likely with the Senate. The fact that Republican PACs and committees are redirecting money toward states and districts they would normally win handily suggests that they fear a blue wave.

JL: It’s not just about whether there is a 鈥渂lue wave鈥� in Congress, which many observers are predicting. The margin of that seat gain and the margins of victory within districts also helps measure the depth of pro-Democratic Party support, or anti-Republican sentiment, which I believe will inform candidates from both parties who are thinking of running in the 2028 presidential cycle.

What issues currently appear to be most important to voters?

JL: Affordability, affordability, affordability. Joe Biden, Kamala Harris and the Democrats were unpopular in 2024 because inflation had not declined enough according to voters. Two years later, inflation is now growing at a higher rate than it was when Trump took office. A host of other policies, such as oil prices resulting from the U.S. attack on Iran and Trump’s tariffs, have hit the pocketbooks of every American, including those in rural areas who supported Trump and Republicans in 2024.听

It’s not so much that the Democrats have provided an alternative set of policies that voters find popular as it is that Trump and the Republicans are the focal point and it’s a brand whose stock has been declining of late.听

Moreover, candidates like Jon Ossoff 鈥� who is running for Senate reelection in Georgia and is a 2028 presidential candidate contender 鈥� have gained popularity by tying the affordability crisis to Trump and those in his orbit. While everyday Americans have seen wages flatten and costs rise, Trump, his family and his allies have grown enormously wealthy at the same time.

MS: One good source of data is the Gallup organization, which regularly asks Americans, 鈥淲hat do you think is the most important problem facing this country today?鈥� , the answers in order were the government/poor leadership (30%), high cost of living/inflation (13%), economy in general (11%), immigration (10%) and war in the Middle East (7%). The first three of those and the fifth clearly favor Democrats, with the fourth 鈥� immigration 鈥� hard to discern without more information. You don鈥檛 want to be the party in power when the government is perceived to be performing poorly and high prices are making even the essentials unaffordable for many people.

There have been as President Donald Trump has expressed his desire to exert more control. How serious are these potential threats?

MS: He on his biggest chance to exert more control, through restricting voting by mail. Some version of that proposal could come back, because the Supreme Court did not foreclose it entirely, but not in 2026. Anyone who lived through Jan. 6, however, would be foolish to say, 鈥淚t can鈥檛 happen here.鈥澨�

There has been speculation about President Trump sending federal law enforcement agents to polling places, or asserting widespread fraud and confiscating ballots or polling equipment after the election is held. Such an outcome becomes more likely if the election overall, or in certain important places, is very close. However, I would not rule it out even for a wave election. He could also take other, harder-to-predict actions to affect the results.

JL: I think explicit threats, and Trump has historically and in this cycle made them, should always be taken seriously. Whether or not they are successful is another matter. Trump and some Republican allies have attempted measures to restrict voting, suppress turnout, control mail-in ballots, and more, but have mostly been stopped so far by the courts, and the strategies don’t seem to be working. It mostly seems half-baked, but so did the “fake elector” scheme in 2020 that led to the riot, so protecting electoral integrity always requires eternal vigilance.

No doubt should Trump and the Republicans receive a “” 鈥� as President Barack Obama famously admitted when the Democrats suffered heavy losses in Congress in 2010 鈥� he will call the result “rigged” and likely spread misinformation about the election’s integrity. He appears ready to contest results, as . He has learned this is a costless way to avoid admitting defeat and it remains popular among his MAGA base. That said, evidence of any vote tampering should be investigated and, if it comes to it, adjudicated by the relevant judicial authority.

For more information, contact Lauren Kirschman at lkirsc@uw.edu.

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Last month, a group of 175 researchers, including eight from the 黑料老司机, co-authored published in Earth鈥檚 Future and the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.

The paper provides a roadmap for future climate assessments in the U.S. by synthesizing the science and identifying research priorities based on existing gaps. 鈥淯.S. Climate Collection: Informing Assessment of Risks and Solutions鈥� is the first article to appear in a launched by the American Geophysical Union and the American Meteorological Society.

Many of the scientists who co-authored this commentary were invited to contribute to the sixth National Climate Assessment (NCA), slated for early 2028, but were then dismissed in April 2025 after the Trump Administration for the assessment. The fifth NCA was published in 2023.听

The federal government is legally required to produce a National Climate Assessment chronicling climate change every four years per the . These assessments track new and evolving risks related to climate change, as well as options for mitigation and adaptation. The national scope is key to ensuring that funding and policies represent a broad range of experiences and concerns. 

鈥淚nternational assessments are valuable, but they are not always tailored to the specific regions and issues that are important in the United States. National assessments fill that gap,鈥� said , Washington state climatologist and a research scientist in the UW Climate Impacts Group.

The special collection is not intended to replace the NCA but rather compile research for other scientists, policymakers and members of the public to aid in decision making. The commentary kicks off the collection by identifying where research has advanced, and how risks have changed, in the years since the last assessment. 

鈥淥ur understanding of climate change and its impacts continues to evolve,鈥� said , professor of global health, of environmental and occupational health sciences, and of emergency medicine in the UW School of Medicine. 鈥淐onducting regular climate assessments allows us to systematically evaluate that new evidence, incorporate it into our understanding of current circumstances, present it to stakeholders, and apply it to near-term decisions in our respective sectors.鈥� 

UW News asked each of the UW contributors to elaborate on their role in authoring the commentary and how it connects to their research.

, research scientist, UW Cooperative Institute for Climate, Ocean, and Ecosystem Studies: 鈥淚鈥檓 an oceanographer with intimate experience in federal research funding mechanisms and with a broad familiarity with ocean warming and CO2 uptake with associated acidification and feedback on marine ecosystems and fisheries. Initially I was appointed to coordinate among federal agencies, academics and policymakers, but that changed dramatically when the Trump administration eliminated NCA6. In the scramble I became more of an author, and an editor of the Ocean section. 

鈥淪ome of my research at the UW involves ocean model development in collaboration with NOAA. It was a natural fit to contribute to the discussions on 鈥楽imulations of ocean conditions鈥� and on 鈥業nnovations in ocean observation and data science.鈥欌��

, professor of urban and environmental planning 鈥淚 led the urban team and the section on urban regions. Urban regions are central to climate assessments. They concentrate populations and human activities, contribute substantially to climate change, and shape how impacts propagate across neighborhoods, metropolitan systems, national supply chains, and global markets. They are also critical places to examine where mitigation and adaptation reinforce one another, where they create trade-offs, and how benefits, costs, and risks are distributed across communities. 

鈥淥ur section argues that future assessments must represent cities as complex dynamic systems. We call for comparative, long-term evaluation of urban mitigation and adaptation strategies. For nature-based solutions, that means testing performance under future climate conditions and assessing multiple functions, life-cycle costs, social and ecological outcomes, and trade-offs rather than simply measuring short-term, project-level benefits.鈥�

Mauger: 鈥淚 contributed to the Northwest section of the paper, based on my expertise in regional climate impacts and adaptation science, specifically around water and flooding. Our synthesis reflects many of the emerging issues I see in my work helping communities, tribes, agencies and others to understand and prepare for the effects of climate change. For example, we highlight new research on the effectiveness of resilience actions 鈥� as more communities take action on climate, I am seeing a greater need for research of this kind.鈥�

, principal scientist, UW Climate Impacts Group: 鈥淚 also contributed to the Northwest section of the paper. My work at UW aims to provide the science, tools and guidance needed by governments and communities as they respond to climate impacts and prepare for those to come. Most of this work is focused on the Northwest, with a heavy emphasis on ecosystems and natural resources. The Northwest section of the paper highlights many of the climate risks and adaptation advances and challenges my partners on the ground face every day.鈥�

Hess: 鈥�The takeaways from the health section, which I helped draft, are that we need more information on health impacts from extreme weather and compound events, as well as information on the costs of these impacts. We also need more strategies for advancing adaptation in public health and health care systems; we need health care interventions to protect patients at particular risk; we need more information on nature-based solutions; and we need more information to help convey the health benefits of a clean energy transition. 

鈥淭he recommendations related to interventions and adaptation in the health sector are particularly relevant to my work at the UW, which is focused on climate change health impacts and opportunities for increasing resilience of the public health and health care systems. I research these issues and also provide leadership related to sustainability and climate resilience for UW Medicine.鈥�

, professor of global health and of environmental and occupational health sciences: 鈥淚 was an author on the Air Quality chapter that focused on how climate change could alter exposures to poor quality, from pollen to wildfire smoke to indoor and outdoor air quality. One of my areas of research at UW is quantifying the extent to which reducing greenhouse gas emissions could reduce morbidity and mortality from outdoor air pollution. The evidence is robust that the economic value of the health benefits from reducing greenhouse gas emissions would be of the same order of magnitude 鈥� if not larger 鈥� than the costs of reducing emissions. In other words, reducing greenhouse gas emissions would benefit Americans by decreasing hospitalizations and deaths.鈥�

Other UW co-authors include , research scientist of environmental and forest sciences and Deputy Director of the Western Fire and Forest Resilience Collaborative and , affiliate professor of environmental and forest sciences. 

For more information, contact Alberti at malberti@uw.edu.

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This summer, OpenAI announced escaped a training environment and hacked into the AI company Hugging Face. Anthropic quickly followed with news that its AI agents also .听

Last week, an outgoing Anthropic employee took to X, posting that the 鈥�.鈥� Such talk has for years, though many AI experts have argued that these Terminator-esque claims are distractions from the real risks posed by current AI systems. Nevertheless, that viral X thread is .听听

To help make sense of all this, UW News talked to five AI researchers from the 黑料老司机:听

• , associate professor in the Information School;
• , professor in the Information School;
• , professor in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering;
• , professor in the Allen School and the UW鈥檚 vice provost for AI;
• and , professor in the Information School and the School of Law.

How alarming do you find the hacks announced by OpenAI and Anthropic?听

Franziska Roesner: I do find them somewhat alarming 鈥� not due to the hypothetical risks from an anthropomorphized runaway AI, but because complex interconnected systems are being built and seemingly run without much in the way of standard safeguards and auditing. The resulting outcomes are unsurprising to security experts, but are sensationalized as AI risk.

Ryan Calo: The timing makes me a little skeptical. Is OpenAI trying to match Anthropic by arguing that its systems are just as scary? Is Hugging Face trying to look relevant in advance of its purchase by Nvidia? But yes 鈥� this sort of emergent behavior is concerning.

Noah A. Smith: We鈥檝e been told that the beast got out of the cage, but we don鈥檛 know enough about the cage the beast was in. The demonstrations may establish an important new capability in these AI models without establishing the broader risk people are inferring. Assessing the underlying risk depends on what access, scaffolding, permissions and safeguards the system had. shows that the alarming behavior depended heavily on what tools the model was given, what it was allowed to access, and how the experiment was set up, not just on the model itself.

Chirag Shah: I鈥檓 in half-agreement with scholars like who warn that the big AI labs are creating this scare to distract us from real problems that AI is causing. I also concur with and others who have been warning us about the security threats posed by the frontier models. I don鈥檛 think these two viewpoints are mutually exclusive: Yes, there are many other potential harms being created by AI, but the hacks and other security issues are real too and could be more devastating. Worse, we may not have time or opportunity to react, fix or reverse.

Aylin Caliskan: When such a complex system is equipped with tools and capabilities that enable it to interact with other complex systems, we should expect unforeseen exploits, problems and unintended consequences by default. The safety of these systems needs to be rigorously evaluated under controlled conditions and in real time, and appropriate guardrails should be dynamically integrated while they鈥檙e running.

What do you make of former Anthropic that, 鈥�The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade鈥�?

RC: I worry engineers like Mr. Coxon are playing into an industry rhetoric that would have society focus on speculative, existential threats, rather than immediate, real-world harms. I argued as much in 2023 in .

The people making these claims and announcements largely have financial stakes in these companies, which are . How are you thinking about ulterior motives here?

CS: I see this as an attempt to steer the public into believing these companies are building world-changing tech that everyone needs to invest in or they鈥檇 miss out; that this tech would be so powerful that they rise up to national security level and gain power; and that the same tech could also be so dangerous that only they have the ability to curb it and they can self-regulate.

NS: It doesn鈥檛 take a conspiracy theorist to note that there are incentives at work. The financial stakes around prospective IPOs are enormous, and there are also long-standing concerns that safety arguments can shape regulation in ways that favor incumbent firms. Rules could reduce competition and independent scrutiny, concentrating both technological power and the authority to define what counts as 鈥渟afe鈥� in the hands of a few companies. They could also bar many people from participating in what the technology is designed to do, for example, by slowing or stopping work on open-source alternatives.

What should be done about AI risk?

NS: Risks need to be defined based on independent scrutiny and high-quality evidence, not messaging from organizations and people with a stake in what the response to risk looks like. We need sensible liability and accountability for harms, and governance proportional to demonstrated risks in real-world contexts rather than speculative narratives and science fiction. We should be especially wary of rules that entrench incumbent interests or treat closed, centralized control as synonymous with safety.听

Openness is part of safety: If outsiders cannot inspect, reproduce and challenge claims about dangerous behavior, we are left trusting the organizations that have the strongest incentives to frame the narrative.

RC: Some combination of common law liability and regulation needs to create adequate incentives for AI companies to address the inevitable harms of this trillion-dollar industry.听

FR: To me, the bigger question for safety is less, 鈥淲hat can AI models do in isolation?鈥� and more, 鈥淗ow and why are we building these models into increasingly complex systems?鈥� Computer systems security, for example, has already offered us examples of how to build these systems. More generally, we should all 鈥� whether we are building, integrating or using AI 鈥� anticipate how systems might be misused by people or harm them and adjust our systems accordingly.

AC: Academic freedom, independent evaluation and development, and open science play critical roles in analyzing and mitigating AI risks, as well as in effectively disseminating findings and evidence to inform policy and the public. To better manage risks, we should be designing AI deployment contexts in collaboration with stakeholders and communities, providing evidence to demonstrate net positive deployment effects that do not disproportionately benefit specific entities or groups, and iteratively identifying, isolating, and minimizing risks.

CS: Establish and fund commissions and taskforces that audit these companies and models and make independent assessments and recommendations. Make the companies rolling out these models accountable for any harms caused by their tech. Educate and empower the public through media, policies and democratic frameworks that give them a real say in what happens to their lives and labor through these technologies.

To set up an interview with an AI expert, contact Stefan Milne at stmilne@uw.edu.

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Why is it important to study mosquitoes?听

Willem Laursen: Mosquitoes have been an enduring scourge of humanity for millennia. Their bites are a nuisance to humans and animals alike, and ancient texts describe illnesses consistent with mosquito-borne diseases, such as malaria, long before the source of transmission was understood.

Globalization and climate change are expanding the geographic range of many mosquito species, and their increasing resistance to insecticides threatens the long-term effectiveness of current control strategies. As a result, we urgently need new approaches for controlling mosquito-borne disease.

If we can better understand the genetic and sensory basis of mosquito behavior, we might be able to find new opportunities to disrupt disease transmission. Critical behaviors such as host seeking and blood feeding are highly specialized and difficult to model in other organisms, making it essential to study these mechanisms directly in mosquitoes themselves.

Andrea Durant: These mosquito-related problems are not just for humans. Warmer winters and early-season snowmelt have led to massive swarms of mosquitoes coinciding with wildlife migration, which changes foraging patterns in the Arctic tundra and forces animals like caribou to use precious energy reserves on evading these mosquito-blackened skies. Mosquito swarms are also a big problem for agriculture, particularly cattle herds.

What do you study?

AD: My lab studies how mosquitoes maintain a stable internal environment when faced with changing external conditions. Mosquitoes start their life as an egg that is deposited in or near water, and the larval, or juvenile, stages are aquatic. Unlike the terrestrial flying adult mosquito that has agency in its choice of residence, a mosquito larva is tied to wherever it hatches 鈥� it must survive and develop there, or die.

Sometimes the aquatic reservoirs where an adult female has selected to lay her eggs can be quite extreme, such as very polluted freshwater and seawater. We study specialized adaptations that allow these larvae to survive 鈥� most mosquito species require clean freshwater for larval development. Our goal is to reveal how mosquitoes have been able to successfully expand their habitats to places like urban sewage systems and salty coastal habitats.

WL: In my lab, our research focuses on understanding how mosquitoes sense things at the cellular level. We are trying to determine what proteins mosquitoes use to detect human-associated cues, such as heat and humidity. By identifying the cellular and molecular machinery mosquitoes use to find hosts, food sources, mates and egg-laying sites, we hope to better understand how specialized behaviors, such as blood feeding, evolve, and to uncover new targets for controlling the transmission of mosquito-borne diseases.

Jeffrey Riffell: My lab studies the 鈥渉ow鈥� of mosquito biting behavior. We also study how they visit flowers and plants 鈥� yes, they can pollinate certain plants! 鈥� to understand their natural behaviors. By learning more about mosquito physiology and behavior, we would like to develop new tools for traps and ways to control mosquitoes around people’s homes.

Tell us what it’s like to be someone who studies mosquitoes.

JR: Mosquitoes, all day and all the time. Although we try to minimize the potential for mosquito biting in the lab and in our field sites, you have to grin and bear it when dealing with these little vampires.听

WL: Being around large swarms of mosquitoes all day does desensitize me a bit. Sometimes I will be out hiking or camping with family members and I won’t be paying much attention until I start hearing complaints about the mosquitoes. Working with mosquitoes also leads me to do funny things, such as collecting sweat or wearing a nylon stocking for days to collect human odors for behavioral assays.

Rearing transgenic mosquitoes in the lab is a bit like ranching: We have to keep track of large herds of animals. Because the life stages live in different environments, we have to constantly shuttle them around between water-filled trays, for the larvae/pupae, and cages, for the terrestrial adults. We also have to move the adults around on a specific schedule to make sure they have access to our artificial blood feeders. Some lab members jokingly put a sign on the door that says “Welcome to The Ranch.”

AD: Willem is to a rancher as I am to a protagonist in “Swamp People.” We often venture outside of the lab to hunt mosquitoes in their natural habitat in urban and peri-urban areas. Sometimes we find ourselves in picturesque places like the beautiful pillow basalt coastlines of the San Juan Islands. Most often, I can be found headfirst in a nutrient-rich septic system in someone’s backyard filled with mosquito larvae or marching into the fray of massive swarms of saline-tolerant mosquitoes that await in tidal marshlands and mangrove forests.

What is the coolest mosquito fact you know?

WL: There are over 3,500 species of mosquitoes, with vastly different appearances, life histories and host preferences. Many are generalists. A few strongly prefer humans and some feed from cold-blooded animals like frogs or earthworms. The large amber-encased Toxorhynchites elephant mosquito shown in the movie “Jurassic Park” feeds on other mosquito larvae and doesn鈥檛 actually drink blood at all.

JR: I like These mosquitoes are very pretty, and they shoot their eggs into tree holes.

What鈥檚 one thing you wish people understood about mosquitoes?

AD: The incalculable misery that mosquitoes exert on humans and other animals certainly overshadows any appreciation for the importance of mosquitoes in nature. Many species of mosquitoes are critical to biodiversity and are actually fundamental to the food chain. There are numerous examples of areas with reduced breeding success and animal survival because there have been effective vector control programs and non-targeted mosquito eradication efforts.

For more information, contact Laursen at wlaursen@uw.edu, Durant at durantan@uw.edu and Riffell at jriffell@uw.edu.

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The U.S. and Israel against Iran on Feb. 28 that targeted military and civilian infrastructure, missile launchers, and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The strikes killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and triggered hundreds of retaliatory missiles from Iran.

More than 1,200 civilians so far in the conflict, Iran reports, while nearly 10,000 civilian sites have been hit and 3.2 million Iranians have been displaced. An ongoing military investigation also determined the U.S. is responsible for a deadly strike on an Iranian elementary school, according to a .听

President Donald Trump, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth have offered for the war with Iran 鈥� now entering its third week 鈥� including the regime鈥檚 nuclear ambitions, its ballistic missile capabilities and its support for groups such as Hezbollah in Lebanon. Rubio said that the U.S. abandoned negotiations and bombed Iran because Israel had already attacked and Washington expected Iranian retaliation against U.S. bases.听

Before the strikes, in December 2025, massive anti-government protests erupted in Iran. The protests, driven largely by the economic crisis caused by U.S. imposed sanctions and regime corruption, were the largest since the 1979 revolution. The Iranian government thousands of protestors in response.

, a professor of Persian and Iranian studies at the UW, researches modern Iranian and Afghan histories and modern Persian literature and has been widely quoted in the media since the war began. He spoke with UW News about the U.S.-Israeli strikes, the impact on Iranians and more.

What should people know about how Iranians and the Iranian diaspora feel about the conflict?

Aria Fani: The Iranian diaspora is . A segment of Iranians in the West has advocated for war on Iran, while others have against military intervention. Voices from within Iran appear conflicted as well, reflecting the precarity and desperation of the moment. As we have seen in Iraq, Venezuela and Cuba, the U.S. has relied on a security, economic and political apparatus that creates a state of paranoia for the ruling regime and collectively punishes the population, pushing them to the brink of despair. Equally undeniable is the Iranian regime鈥檚 brazen corruption, both moral and economic, and its violent repression of protesters.

When weighing in public opinion, as reflected in the media, we should not forget that the U.S. media to be a reliable partner for the military-industrial complex. The way in which pro-war voices are currently being amplified is a testament to this alignment. I immigrated to the United States when President George W. Bush was running for re-election and remember how the media failed to hold his administration to account. In many ways the media landscape is even worse today, as of major outlets. Yet, unlike the early 2000s, we now also have a number of independent platforms that cover war with greater transparency and skepticism.听

On a personal note, as a teenager living under an Iranian regime that made anti-U.S. rhetoric a cornerstone of its revolutionary ideology, I held an abstract yet largely positive view of the U.S. Moving to the U.S. in 2004 鈥� studying its history and traveling through and living in Latin American countries it has ravaged 鈥� profoundly shifted my perspective. Two wrongs do not make a right. The mantle of anti-colonial and anti-imperial struggle has never been on the minds of this Iranian regime, but it is a mantle we cannot afford to put down for a livable planet.听

Iranian youth, much like their counterparts in places such as Hong Kong, Egypt and the United States, confront a militarized state that shows little regard for collective dignity and insatiable appetite for money and power. History teaches us that effecting durable change takes time. If change begins with a supposition of violence, it will undoubtedly end with more of the same. The spectacle of imperial violence is also designed to demoralize a generation of youth all over this beautiful planet who dare to dream of a different system. To them I say: do not despair and work toward positive change at any level you can.

What misconceptions about Iran do you see in Western media?

AF: The military-industrial complex thrives on generating hysteria and fear of racialized others. A familiar example is the claim that the Iranian regime is an ideological actor hellbent on the total destruction of the West. Yet the same regime entered into a nuclear agreement in 2015 with the United States and other world powers that placed its nuclear program under international scrutiny. Unlike the United States and Israel, both of which possess hundreds of nuclear weapons 鈥� the U.S. remains the only country that has used them 鈥� Iran is a signatory to the , and its nuclear facilities were regularly monitored before the United States withdrew from the agreement in 2018. Like Iraq, Iran is being attacked not because it has nuclear weapons, but because it does not.听

Every time politicians sell the public a new war, the narrative is predictably the same: baseless claims of an imminent threat paired with promises that military objectives will be easily attainable and the suffering minimal. However, Israel and the United States have a documented history of destroying civilian infrastructure; we have seen this clearly in Gaza and Beirut. That it is happening again breaks my heart. Whether one believes the current war is justified or not 鈥� and on what grounds 鈥� the abuse of power and through which it is conducted should concern everyone. Equally disturbing is the role of religious fundamentalism as evidenced by references to the .听

Let me be clear again: the Iranian regime鈥檚 willingness to engage in diplomacy abroad does nothing to absolve it of state violence, which it directs at . The regime poses a deadly threat to its own people and to Iran鈥檚 ecology, as evidenced by the brutal suppression of protesters in recent weeks.

How will this conflict impact Iran and its people in ways that are being overlooked?

AF: There are those in my community who accept any collateral damage if it means the Islamic Republic might ultimately collapse. This mindset is profoundly dangerous. For decades, the Iranian regime has invoked the men it lost during the (1980鈥�1988) to justify cracking down on dissent years after the war ended. In effect, the regime has argued that any sacrifice at home is justified if it preserves the revolutionary state. Yet some of its most ardent opponents now accept the same logic in reverse: that widespread bloodshed and ecological destruction are acceptable if it leads to the regime鈥檚 downfall.

Even more troubling is that their idea of who counts as part of the 鈥渞egime鈥� is dangerously broad. It is not difficult to imagine a similarly vengeful purge to the one carried out by the regime鈥檚 own founders in 1979, should the regime fall. My mother recounts how her father 鈥� the Friday prayer imam in Shiraz 鈥� fled Iran after the Islamic Revolution because he was aligned with the Shah. He was never in the Shah鈥檚 regime, a fact that mattered little to those who were doing the purging. We cannot break the cycle of violence by doing one last purge.听听

Vengeance does not offer a positive agenda for the working class and minoritized Iranians. The greatest victims in war are civilians and the infrastructure on which their lives depend. The more bombs that fall, the further we move from the day when those responsible for atrocities against the Iranian people might be held accountable.

For a big segment of the Iranian diaspora to throw up their hands and say, 鈥渂omb them,鈥� is not an act of courage but the greatest abdication of collective responsibility. And to ask the same power that has economically strangled Iran to save it through its bombs is the stuff of Orwellian fiction. Millions of American voters feel deeply disempowered by the ongoing dismantling of democratic institutions here at home. Yet who among them would seriously advocate for their country to be bombarded by a foreign power?听

The world has changed in the wake of the U.S.-Israel war on Iran. One thing seems increasingly clear: the cheerleaders of today鈥檚 war will later warn about a 鈥渃aravan of Muslim refugees鈥� supposedly arriving to invade the nation. This is already happening, as Iranian . While I do not begrudge any of my suffering compatriots celebrating the downfall of a brutal dictator, history suggests that the only actors ultimately left dancing on the global stage will be weapons manufacturers and oil industry executives.听

For more information, contact Lauren Kirschman at lkirsc@uw.edu.

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Scientists share their work by publishing articles in journals, such as Nature, Science or PLOS Biology. One major part of the publishing process involves having these manuscripts reviewed by unpaid peers. These scientists specialize in the same topic and volunteer to make sure the science is sound and the authors haven’t missed anything critical in their data analysis.

The peer review process has reached a critical point where there are too many manuscript submissions and not enough peer reviewers. , 黑料老司机 professor of biology, and , North Carolina State University professor of statistics, used mathematical modeling to demonstrate this crisis in the form of a self-perpetuating cycle. The team describes this cycle and potential interventions in PLOS Biology.

UW News reached out to Bergstrom and Gross to learn more about this cycle and how the potential interventions could mediate this crisis.

Why is the process of peer review important for science?

Carl Bergstrom and Kevin Gross: Peer review helps scientific literature maintain its credibility. The system of peer review guarantees that published research has been scrutinized by experts in the relevant field. While peer review is not, and never has been, a watertight seal of approval 鈥� peer reviewers are human, too! 鈥� it has proven to be a system that, by and large, helps ensure the reliability of the scientific literature.

What is happening to create and perpetuate this cycle you describe in your paper?

CB and KG: The basic insight that drives our paper is that when peer review functions effectively, it helps journals select the science most worthy of their readers鈥� attention and creates a strong motivation for scientists to be selective about where they submit their work. After all, a scientist gains little by having their paper rejected by a top journal. So high-quality reviewing encourages scientists to choose where they submit their work carefully, and to submit only their very best work to the most prestigious outlets. Thus, effective peer review reinforces itself through a virtuous cycle.

The cycle can spin in the other direction too. If peer reviewers have to dilute their efforts over a larger volume of submitted manuscripts, then each manuscript may receive less scrutiny and editors鈥� decisions consequently become less predictable. This encourages authors to try their luck at journals that might otherwise have been a stretch, increasing the volume of manuscripts that need to be reviewed even further and making editorial decisions even less predictable, and so on.

Why are we seeing this crisis now?

CB and KG: To be fair, scientists have been bemoaning the fragile state of peer review for decades. So we are far from the first to observe that using the goodwill of volunteers as a lynchpin of the scientific enterprise may not be a robust model.

But there is reason to believe that the situation is more dire now. There isn鈥檛 one single cause driving this more recent turn 鈥� many factors contribute. For example, over the past few decades, scientific communities have become larger and looser knit, and the willingness to volunteer tends to decline as groups become more diffuse.

Large commercial publishers have also discovered that scientific publishing can be a lucrative business 鈥� especially when they can dip into a tradition of free peer-review labor. Drawn by the sizable profits they could make, these publishers have launched countless new journals, crowding the journal landscape. Scientists, in turn, now have more options for what to do with a paper that has been rejected once or numerous times. There鈥檚 always another journal to send it to. And each time a paper is resubmitted, a new set of peer reviewers must be found.

The pandemic also shocked the system by compelling many researchers to reassess their time commitments. It seems that we have collectively yet to fully rebound to pre-pandemic levels of willingness to review.

Should people be concerned about the science described in current peer-reviewed papers?

CB and KG: Well, to back up a bit, the primary responsibility for the integrity and accuracy of the scientific literature rests squarely with the authors, as it always has. And, thankfully, most authors have strong reputational incentives to make sure that their work is solid and will stand the test of time. But authors have their blind spots.

Peer review isn鈥檛 going to suddenly collapse and take the literature down with it, but as the system becomes stressed, we might start to see a few more cracks emerge. While that isn鈥檛 catastrophic, it isn鈥檛 good for science, either. Social trust in science can wax and wane, and even a little slippage has real consequences for scientists, their livelihoods and society as a whole.

What about this crisis concerns you?

CB and KG: Perhaps our biggest concern is that journal editors who become frustrated with the inability to find willing peer reviewers will turn to AI for machine review instead. There may be ways in which machine review could complement human peer review, but we think it鈥檚 important that human review continues to be the engine of editorial deliberations at scientific journals.

Peer review is not just a process for making an accept-or-reject decision.听 Peer reviewers also provide commentary and feedback for the authors. These reports provide a venue for honest dialogue that helps researchers hone their ideas and grow in their careers. Outsourcing manuscript review to robots risks collapsing a discourse that is crucial to scientific progress.

One solution you discuss is to pay reviewers. Is this a viable solution?

CB and KG: Paying reviewers isn鈥檛 as crazy as it may sound. The landscape of scientific publishing includes both nonprofit and for-profit journals, and all sorts of business models in between. It seems reasonable that especially scientists who review for for-profit journals should be remunerated for their efforts when they provide a service on which the viability of the journal depends.

Perhaps the most compelling argument for paying reviewers is that, of all the possible interventions one could propose, it requires the least amount of coordination among different stakeholders to succeed. As soon as one journal figures out a working model for paying reviewers, then everyone will notice that paying reviewers is viable, and there will be market pressure on other journals to follow suit.

Another idea that we quite like is for journals to offer substantial monetary awards for the most constructive or helpful reviews. This idea has its drawbacks too. Editors would have to spend a little bit of time choosing the prizewinning reviews, and editors could always select their friends for the prize. But every alternative is going to have its drawbacks, and it鈥檚 important to focus on the net effect, especially when the viability of the status quo seems so tenuous.

If we want to keep peer review voluntary, what are other possible solutions?

CB and KG: There are lots of possible interventions. But the intervention that probably would enjoy the broadest support would be for university hiring and promotion committees to prioritize quality of publications instead of quantity. Most academic scientists today are working in a system that rewards a researcher for the number of publications above all else. This obviously creates incentives for researchers to submit lots of manuscripts, which puts lots of pressure on peer review. If the norms changed so that hiring and promotion hinged on a candidate鈥檚 top two or three papers instead, then researchers’ incentives would change and the pressure on peer reviewers would diminish.

This research was funded by the National Science Foundation and the Templeton World Charity Foundation.

For more information, contact Bergstrom at cbergst@uw.edu and Gross at krgross@ncsu.edu.

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Last December was the warmest on record for Washington, . As the mild winter continues, many of the plants in our gardens are starting to show signs of small buds, even though it’s only February.

, a 黑料老司机 professor of biology, studies the genes that plants use to monitor seasonal changes. UW News asked Imaizumi to talk about how plants know when to bloom and whether this might change in warmer winters.

How do plants know when it’s time to bloom?

Takato Imaizumi: There are two major factors that plants use to sense the seasons: light 鈥� the presence or absence, the intensity, or the color at a specific time of day 鈥� and temperature. To control flowering time, plants sense light conditions in the leaves and temperature at shoot tips, which are buds that contain cells that allow the plant to grow and make a flower.

All plants use both factors, but some plants rely more on temperature than light. Some examples include tulips, crocus and cherry blossoms. Plants that rely more on light include mustard greens, cabbage, rapeseeds and chrysanthemum, though temperature is still important for these plants.

Other environmental factors that can affect bloom time include water and the availability of nutrients.

How do you think the warmer weather in December has affected the plants here in Washington?

TI: Temperatures will affect plant growth and development. I assume that warmer ambient temperatures will accelerate the flowering process of some plants that use temperature information to control flowering time.

How does studying the genes involved in the timing of plant flowering help with conservation biology?

TI: Proper timing of flowering is crucial for reproductive success and the health of a plant species. Understanding how the flowering genes are regulated will help us predict how future changes in climate may affect flowering times. That will give us a better sense of which plants may struggle.

This information could also help us design restoration strategies for plants that are struggling. For example, if we wanted to introduce a plant to a novel environment, we would have some ideas about what it would require to thrive. Plants are adapted to local environments. Even within the same species, a plant that lives farther north may require different light and temperature conditions to grow and flower compared to the same species growing farther south. When we think about transplanting plants for conservation, learning specific environmental requirements may increase the chance of transplant success.

For more information, contact Imaizumi at takato@uw.edu.

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A recent documentary about the breeding habits of antelopes in India includes the story of how engaging with artists and local communities can help researchers share the importance of their work.

“MELA,” short for Mating Ecology of a Lek-breeding Antelope, is a short film about a research project that studies the mating behavior of blackbuck, an antelope species native to India and Nepal. During mating, male blackbuck aggregate into certain areas, called “leks,” to perform a series of feats to try to impress females.

This story of “MELA” is told in three chapters. The first chapter summarizes the science behind the project, including the technical challenges associated with creating continuous and sweeping drone footage across an entire lek. Then the second and third chapters focus on the researchers’ work with artists and local communities.

, a 黑料老司机 assistant professor of biology, is one of the leaders of the MELA project, which started when he was a postdoctoral research associate at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior and the University of Konstanz in Germany. UW News asked him for details about the project and the documentary.

How did this project get started?

Vivek Hari Sridhar: It started in 2019 when the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior put out a global call for collaborative research projects that addressed broad questions related to how animal societies emerge and function. The call was meant to support teams of two or three postdoctoral researchers.

The timing was perfect because I was in the latter stages of my doctoral degree. As part of my doctoral research, I discovered how animals choose between spatially separated objects. I developed a theory and validated my model predictions in both vertebrates and invertebrates under controlled laboratory conditions. For my postdoc, I wanted to explore if the theory could tell us something about spatial decisions made by animals in the wild.

I teamed up with , now an assistant professor at the Birla Institute of Technology & Science, and , a postdoc at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior. For her doctoral research, Akanksha had already worked with blackbuck and had recorded a few drone-based videos of the lek. This got me excited because leks seemed like the perfect study system to extend my doctoral work. Hemal is a computer vision and machine learning expert who develops software to process large-scale drone footage. Hemal was crucial in the establishment of our art-science collaborations.

The project developed from our common commitment toward supporting junior researchers in the field, working with local communities and establishing a research project in India, our home country.

Chapter 2 of the documentary talks about art and science. Can you talk about how they are similar?

VHS: Artists use various media 鈥� writing, visual art, performances, etc. 鈥� to try to understand the world around them and to tell the stories that matter most to them. As scientists, we engage in evidence-based storytelling. We gather data and then we analyze and interpret it to reveal something new about the natural world. In that sense, science can be thought of being a form of art.

What was it like working with artists on this project?

VHS: It was an incredible learning experience! I worked with , a German-based institution that brings artists and scientists together, for my artist residency.

At first I was nervous. The idea of working on something artistic myself felt daunting. Retrospectively though, it was one of the most rewarding experiences. I met several interesting people over the years and collaborated with many of them. They helped me realize that I had several stories that I wanted to share that I couldn鈥檛 do solely through science. Working with writers and sound artists, I have since been able to explore a creative side of myself that I didn鈥檛 know existed.

Chapter 3 explains that it was important to engage with the community where you did this research. Can you talk about why that is?

VHS: As academics, we spend much of our time within the confines of the university, engaging with literature within our field and building on those ideas. And while these are extremely important aspects of the job, it is only one of the many sources of inspiration, especially in the context of studying animal behavior 鈥� people in local communities spend their lives surrounded by these animals every day.

Conversations with the locals gave us a head start in terms of understanding the natural history and activity patterns of these animals. A great example of this is when the locals told us about the location of a new lek. Because leks are traditional mating grounds, they鈥檙e occupied by males year after year. We intended to conduct our study on a lek that had been around for nearly 40 years. But then the locals told us about a second location with a larger aggregation of males. This information allowed us to monitor both sites, which led to a whole new line of research inquiry.

Beyond science, I also believe we have an ethical obligation to let people know what we鈥檙e doing. Many people from these communities are curious to know why we’re visiting their corner of the world. Once we learned what interested different community members, we were able to engage with them accordingly. For example, we took some children birding because they were fascinated with our use of binoculars.

What do you hope people who watch the documentary will learn?

VHS: Perhaps that science is not just a knowledge-seeking endeavor 鈥� it’s also a human-endeavor. We can do more impactful work when we work together with other people from various walks of life. Here, we came together as three scientists collaborating with artists, local communities and students to produce what we believe is something more than “just science.”

But doing this work takes time, effort and resources. In a fast-paced and productivity-focused society, it is important to stop and consider what is important to us. We were fortunate to have the time and opportunity to shape our work and we hope this inspires others to think beyond the immediate call of their jobs.

This research was funded by a Collaborative Research Grant funded by the Department for the Ecology of Animal Societies at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior and the Centre for the Advanced Study of Collective Behaviour at the University of Konstanz.

For more information, contact Sridhar at behavior@uw.edu.

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Researchers are trying to understand how changes in the environment lead to changes in organisms. For example, how do warmer spring and summer days affect how well the caterpillar of a common Washington butterfly grows? One way to answer this type of question is by repeating an old experiment years later to see how results have changed over time.

, 黑料老司机 professor of biology, recently had the opportunity to organize a featuring papers that use these types of “functional resurvey” experiments to answer questions about a variety of organisms, from bacteria to plants and animals. For example, one study explores resurrecting flower seeds to reveal evolutionary responses to drought. Another compares the genetics of coral reef fish preserved in rum in 1908 to these same fish now to examine how populations changed over the past century.

UW News spoke with Buckley about these experiments and what they can tell us about how organisms change over time.

What are the benefits of repeating historical experiments?

Lauren Buckley: As environments shift, species are migrating, changing in abundance and interacting with new species in response. But we lack effective strategies to anticipate these changes and plan for impacts to agriculture, disease and biodiversity. Repeating historical experiments reveals the processes underlying biological responses and should allow us to improve our ability to predict what will happen in the future.

Are there any drawbacks involved in these experiments?

LB: Replicating methods based on the descriptions in published papers can be difficult. We also face challenges, such as working with poorly preserved data or specimens, or trying to control for other changes that have happened over time 鈥� for example, Seattle is drastically different than it was 25 years ago. Knowing the best time to repeat an experiment is also a challenge, but wait times can be surprisingly short for organisms with short life cycles, such as bacteria.

Our current work is uncovering evolutionary changes in Washington butterflies after 25 years. This research is made easier because we are collaborating with the original researcher, who is 25 years older than me. We joke that the undergraduate researchers, who are 25 years younger than me, are expected to repeat the study again in 25 years.

How common is this technique?

LB: When I was looking for examples of functional resurvey experiments to include in the special issue, I was surprised to find that not many people use the approach. Many of the experimental approaches that we think hold the most promise for repeating are now decades old 鈥� perfect timing to be repeated. Also, the accelerating environmental change over recent decades has rapidly expanded opportunities for more of these types of experiments. I hope more scientists will be inspired to use this technique.

Functional resurvey experiments can be great fun! It鈥檚 exciting to plot new data against past experimental results and, despite our best efforts at improving predictions, we are often surprised by the biological changes. We get to see evolution happening, but not necessarily in the way we expect.

听For more information, contact Buckley at buckley@uw.edu.

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The ancestors of our furry cats and dogs once looked similar to today’s modern mongoose, a mammal with a long body and small, round ears. In fact, all members of the , which includes a variety of mammalian species, such as bears, wolves and even seals, evolved from these ‘mongoose-like’ creatures.

How did such a variety of body shapes emerge from one body type? New research led by the 黑料老司机 suggests that two different climate transitions millions of years ago fueled this change.

The team, led by , a UW principal research scientist in biology, studied the skeletal shapes of more than 850 carnivoran specimens held at 17 different natural history museums. The specimens include almost 200 different species of carnivorans: 118 that currently exist and 81 that are extinct.

The researchers found that the Eocene-Oligocene Transition, which took place around 34 million years ago, led to changes in body shape between different carnivoran families 鈥� such as between cats and dogs. Then the Mid-Miocene Climate Transition, which took place around 15 to 13 million years ago, led to changes within families 鈥� such as changes between canid species.

The team Dec. 16 in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

UW News reached out to Law, who is also an affiliate curator at the UW Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture, to learn more about these results and what they mean for carnivorans today.

Can you talk about the significance of these results?

Chris Law: Major transitions in climate can lead to tremendous changes in biodiversity on Earth. Here, we found that climate and environmental transitions over the past 56 million years facilitated the diversification of modern carnivorans and their body forms.

Before these climate transitions, early carnivorous mammals occupied most niches as the top predators and therefore prevented the ancestors of modern carnivorans from exhibiting much body shape diversity. But climate transitions contributed to the extinction of these early carnivorous mammals, releasing the ancestors of modern carnivorans from these constraints and enabling them to exploit new environments and resources. Thus, climate transitions enabled the ancestors of modern carnivorans to increase their phenotypic diversity and fill these new niches. Our work shows how the radiation of carnivorans 鈥� and probably other animal groups 鈥� occurs in sequential evolutionary phases triggered by multiple climatic and environmental transitions.

What was happening climate-wise during the Eocene-Oligocene and the Mid-Miocene Climate transitions?

CL: The Eocene-Oligocene Transition, which lasted for about 500,000 years, was characterized by plummeting global temperatures and the appearance of the first Antarctic ice sheets. The Earth鈥檚 climate transitioned from a warm ‘greenhouse’ with relatively consistent temperatures to a cooler, temperate ‘icehouse’ with increased seasonality, all of which led to habitat transitions from warm humid forest to dry temperate forests interspersed with grasslands.

The Mid-Miocene Climate Transition, which lasted around 2 million years, can also be characterized as another major period of rapid temperature decline, increased aridity and enhanced seasonality, which in turn facilitated further trends toward grasslands from forest habitats.

Why do you think one transition led to diversification between families and the other led to diversification within families?

CL: The Eocene-Oligocene Transition was the first release point for modern carnivorans. It eliminated most competing early carnivorous mammals and allowed early modern carnivorans to exploit these novel habitats, resources and other opportunities. These led to the appearance of all modern carnivoran families from the Early Oligocene to the Mid-Miocene.

The onset of the Mid-Miocene Climate Transition created even more novel habitats and resources, giving modern carnivorans even more opportunities to further diversity and exploit the new ecological niches during the Late Miocene to the Pleistocene. And the lack of other competing carnivorous groups may have helped fuel this period of diversification. As niche space is filled to capacity, additional skeletal diversification and evolution of skeletal innovations within families may have also been necessary to help partition species that are ecologically similar to each other.

Can you give some examples of some of the mammals that reside in the order Carnivora?

CL: Modern carnivorans are very phenotypically diverse. They range from dogs and cats to small elongated weasels and robust bears. Seals, sea lions and walruses are also carnivorans even though they spend the majority of their time in water and have flippers.

Extinct pan-carnivoran groups also include animals like saber-tooth cats, hyena-like dogs and bear-dogs 鈥� dog-like animals the size of bears.

There are also some surprises: Pandas, red pandas and kinkajous all belong in the carnivoran lineage even though they are not carnivorous.

Why did modern carnivorans all start out with mongoose-like body plans?

CL: As far as we know, the mongoose body plan is a very generalized body form. That is, they are not specialized to eat a specific food or move in a certain way, unlike a specialized runner like a cheetah or wolf, a specialized digger like a badger or a specialized climber like a panda. An issue with being a specialist over evolutionary time is that you may be prone to extinction if your resources or habitat change. Thus, being a generalist can be evolutionary advantageous.

So did mongooses just not change that much over time?

CL: Most likely, the mongoose 鈥� and the similarly shaped civets 鈥� retained their body types from the early carnivorans. It鈥檚 the other carnivoran groups like felids, canids and ursids that are the weird ones, because they evolved different body forms from the generalized mongoose body plan.

Do these findings have any bearing on our current understanding of these species and on our current climate situation?

CL: This study shows how major climate transitions can have profound impacts on the evolution of one group of mammals. For example, climate transitions can be detrimental to one group, leading to extinction, but can be advantageous to another group by eliminating competitors, which creates new habitats and facilitates diversification. So in the present, anthropogenic climate change may lead to the extinction of some species but we could see others take advantage of it.

at the National Research Center on Human Evolution and at the University of California, Berkeley are also co-authors on this paper. This research was funded by the National Science Foundation, a University of Texas early career provost fellowship, an Arthur James Boucot research grant through the Paleontological Society, a Vertebrate Paleontology Collections Study grant through the Burke Museum and the European Research Council within the European Union’s Horizon Europe.

For more information, contact Law at cjlaw@uw.edu.

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