by Marisa De La Villa When people think of Maria Ressa, they tend to picture a Philippine journalist, and now Nobel Prize winner, in court, battling against strongman Rodrigo Duterte’s government. 1  Yet, while her clashes with Duterte made global headlines, Ressa was fighting a different battle– one against Facebook (among other social media platforms, especially those under META). 2 In 2012, Ressa co-founded  Rappler , a small, digital newsroom based in Manila, built on the idea that social media could help increase civic participation. 3  In the Philippines, most people went to  Facebook  as the way to access the internet– Rappler was made to lean into that idea, but it never grew to outshine the Meta platform. To the untrained eye,  Facebook  was perfect. But in 2016, Ressa and her team noticed some patterns. 4  Networks of strange accounts were on the rise, posting the same memes, boosting pro-government propaganda, and overall, there ...

  by Nik Polyakov The beginning of the climate realization came from a fitting spokesman, an up-and-coming NASA researcher. The late 1960s saw Dr. James James Hansen working with Iowa physicist James van Allen, an architect of NASA's early instrumentation. They were focused on an important question: Was Venus’s high microwave radiation due to an ionosphere or is it just extremely hot? In 1970 the Soviet Venera spacecraft issued a retrospectively sobering reality: Venus had an average temperature of almost 482°C.   In the months following, Alan and Hansen were tasked with understanding why. Following a successful satellite launch led by Hansen, smog was discovered on the planet. A now familiar explanation was offered: Carbon dioxide was insulating the planet and functioning as a planetary greenhouse. Venus is not alone in experiencing this effect. Having known Earth's atmosphere is changing in composition, particularly in carbon dioxide, Hansen now turned to studying the a...

Roots of Democracy by Aditi Singh Democracy is often viewed as a Western, European concept, tracing back to ancient Athens. But if we look deeper, we find that the roots of democratic governance reach far beyond Europe, into the forests and river valleys of North America where indigenous democratic systems were thriving. Among the most notable were the Haudenosaunee, also known as the Iroquois Confederacy, and the Huron-Wendat people. The Haudenosaunee Confederacy was a powerful alliance of five nations—Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca—later joined by the Tuscarora. 1 Before European contact, they occupied territory across what is now New York State and Ontario. Their political union is widely recognized as one of the oldest participatory governance systems in the world. Meanwhile, the Huron-Wendat lived further north in southern Ontario. 2 Closely related to the Iroquois in language and culture, they also followed a matrilineal, clan-based system, but it is important t...