Nonrival

Expert analysis from think tanks and academia, on public policy, economics, and technology.
Human experts. AI summaries.

Ancient Coral Records Show Today's El Niño Events Are the Strongest in 1,000 Years

the_conversation

• Scientists drilled into living and fossil corals in the Galápagos Islands — nature's thermometers — to reconstruct a 1,000-year history of El Niño events, finding that the past 40 years have seen stronger El Niños than any prior period in the record.
• The intensification tracks closely with human-caused global warming, and exceeds what most climate models predict from natural causes alone, suggesting the devastating 1982-83 and 1997-98 El Niños may be a preview of worse to come.
• The findings underscore the urgency of maintaining climate monitoring infrastructure — satellites, ocean buoys, and improved models — as more powerful El Niños mean more extreme floods, droughts, and storms worldwide.

America's AI-Powered Bombing Campaign in Iran Is Repeating the Same Mistakes That Lost Korea and Vietnam

noema

• The U.S.-Israel air war on Iran, guided by AI targeting systems, killed hundreds of civilians including 120 children at an elementary school — the result of AI using outdated data and humans rubber-stamping algorithmic decisions too quickly to verify them.
• The author argues this reflects a century-old American delusion that strategic bombing can win wars on its own; from Korea to Vietnam to Iraq, it never has, and AI won't change that.
• Where AI actually works in warfare is at the tactical level — Ukraine's drone operations show that AI-guided autonomous swarms are transforming ground combat in ways that strategic bombing never could.

A Secret Chinese Biolab Sat Undetected in California for Years — and No One Would Have Known How to Respond Even If They'd Found It Sooner

think_global_health

• In 2022, a routine building inspection in Reedley, California uncovered an illegal, Chinese-funded biological laboratory stocked with nearly 1,000 genetically modified mice and vials containing HIV, tuberculosis, malaria, and other pathogens — with no regulatory agency having any idea it existed.
• The incident exposes a fundamental gap in U.S. biosecurity: oversight is built around known actors like universities and federally registered labs, leaving unauthorized or commercially disguised facilities entirely invisible to regulators.
• The authors argue the U.S. needs broader facility registration requirements, state-level biological assessment teams, and better cross-agency data sharing — because the next biological threat may look less like a weapons attack and more like ambiguous, deniable disruption.

In the News

The US-Canada Trade War Just Got Uglier, and American Consumers Will Pay the Price

the_conversation

• The US and Canada have tumbled into a full-blown trade war, with both sides imposing 50% tariffs on $20 billion worth of each other's goods after last-minute negotiations collapsed over steel, aluminum, and auto tariffs.
• Trump is using an obscure provision of the Depression-era Smoot-Hawley tariff law — never before invoked — to justify the new levies, a legally untested move with potentially serious economic consequences.
• Canada is deliberately targeting retaliatory tariffs at swing states like Wisconsin, Maine, and Kentucky, betting that political pain ahead of the 2026 midterms will eventually force a deal.

Analysis

Wall Street Is Selling Retail Investors a Worse Version of the Private Market Funds Rich People Get

promarket

• A new Harvard Law study finds that funds designed to give ordinary Americans access to private credit markets systematically underreport their volatility — making them look far safer than they actually are.
• Worse, the funds available to less wealthy investors deliver returns roughly 2.4 percentage points lower per year than similar funds sold only to richer, more sophisticated investors — suggesting retail customers are being steered toward inferior products.
• The Trump administration is pushing to expand private market access through retirement accounts, making the stakes higher; the author outlines four regulatory fixes, but warns that the retirement-account approach could backfire if oversight is weak.

Also Worth a Look

• Nepal's Catastrophic Glacier Collapse Is Exactly What Climate Scientists Warned About (yale_climate)
• Globally, Views of America and Views of Trump Have Become Nearly Inseparable (pew)
• Conservative Justices Are Adopting Liberal Legal Tactics — and Vice Versa (scotusblog)
• Rural America Is Filling Empty Prisons With ICE Detainees — Just as It Filled Them With Federal Prisoners 150 Years Ago (the_conversation)
• American public transit is failing because we keep asking it to solve problems it was never meant to solve (works_in_progress)
• Israel's Supreme Court Is Fighting for Its Own Survival While Deciding the Country's Biggest Cases (scotusblog)
• De novo design of RNA pseudoknots with deep learning (science)