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The war in Ukraine and Moscow’s global reach

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theconversation.com – Ronald H. Linden, Professor Emeritus of Political Science, University of Pittsburgh – 2025-02-10 07:42:00

Russia’s shrinking world: The war in Ukraine and Moscow’s global reach

Ronald H. Linden, University of Pittsburgh

Russia President Vladimir Putin sent a guarded message of congratulations to Donald Trump on inauguration day, but then held a long direct call with his “dear friend,” Chinese leader Xi Jinping.

From Putin’s perspective, this makes sense. Russia gets billions of dollars from energy sales to China and technology from Beijing, but from Washington, until recently, mostly sanctions and suspicion.

Moscow is hoping for a more positive relationship with the current White House occupant, who has made his desire for a “deal” to end the Ukraine war well known.

But talk of exit scenarios from this 3-year-old conflict should not mask the fact that since the invasion began, Putin has overseen one of the worst periods in Russian foreign policy since the end of the Cold War.

Transatlantic unity

The war in Ukraine has foreclosed on options and blunted Russian action around the world.

Unlike the annexation of Crimea in 2014, the 2022 invasion produced an unprecedented level of transatlantic unity, including the expansion of NATO and sanctions on Russian trade and finance. In the past year, both the U.S. and the European Union expanded their sanction packages.

And for the first time, the EU banned the re-export of Russian liquefied natural gas and ended support for a Russian LNG project in the Arctic.

EU-Russian trade, including European imports of energy, has dropped to a fraction of what it was before the war.

The two Nordstrom pipelines, designed to bring Russian gas to Germany without transiting East Europe, lie crippled and unused. Revenues from energy sales are roughly one-half of what they were two years ago.

At the same time, the West has sent billions in military and humanitarian aid to Ukraine, enabling a level of resilience for which Russia was unprepared. Meanwhile, global companies and technical experts and intellectuals have fled Russia in droves.

While Russia has evaded some restrictions with its “shadow fleet” – an aging group of tankers sailing under various administrative and technical evasions – the country’s main savior is now China. Trade between China and Russia has grown by nearly two-thirds since the end of 2021, and the U.S. cites Beijing as the main source of Russia’s “dual use” and other technologies needed to pursue its war.

Since the start of the war in Ukraine, Russia has moved from an energy-for-manufactured-goods trade relationship with the West to one of vassalage with China, as one Russia analyst termed it.

Hosting an October meeting of the BRICS countries – now counting 11 members, including the five original members: Brazil, Russia, India, China and South America – is unlikely to compensate for geopolitical losses elsewhere.

Two men in suits hold wine glasses.
Russian President Vladimir Putin and China President Xi Jinping toast their friendship in March 2023.
Pavel Byrkin/AFP via Getty Images

Problems at home …

The Russian economy is deeply distorted by increased military spending, which represents 40% of the budget and 25% of all spending. The government now needs the equivalent of US$20 billion annually in order to pay for new recruits.

Russian leaders must find a way to keep at least some of the population satisfied, but persistent inflation and reserve currency shortages flowing directly from the war have made this task more difficult.

On the battlefield, the war itself has killed or wounded more than 600,000 Russian soldiers. Operations during 2024 were particularly deadly, producing more than 1,500 Russian casualties a day.

The leader who expected Kyiv’s capitulation in days now finds Russian territory around Kursk occupied, its naval forces in the Black Sea destroyed and withdrawn, and its own generals assassinated in Moscow.

But probably the greatest humiliation is that this putative great power with a population of 144 million must resort to importing North Korean troops to help liberate its own land.

… and in its backyard

Moscow’s dedication to the war has affected its ability to influence events elsewhere, even in its own neighborhood.

In the Caucasus, for example, Russia had long sided with Armenia in its running battle with Azerbaijan over boundaries and population after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Moscow has brokered ceasefires at various points. But intermittent attacks and territorial gains for Azerbaijan continued despite the presence of some 2,000 Russian peacekeepers sent to protect the remaining Armenian population in parts of the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh.

In September 2023, Azerbaijan’s forces abruptly took control of the rest of Nagorno-Karabakh. More than 100,000 Armenians fled in the largest ethnic cleansing episode since the end of the Balkan Wars. The peacekeepers did not intervene and later withdrew. The Russian military, absorbed in the bloody campaigns in Ukraine, could not back up or reinforce them.

The Azeris’ diplomatic and economic position has gained in recent years, aided by demand for its gas as a substitute for Russia’s and support from NATO member Turkey.

Feeling betrayed by Russia, the Armenian government has for the first time extended feelers toward the West — which is happy to entertain such overtures.

Losing influence and friends

Russia’s loss in the Caucasus has been dwarfed by the damage to its military position and influence in the Middle East. Russia supported the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad against the uprisings of the Arab Spring in 2011 and saved it with direct military intervention beginning in 2015.

Yet in December 2024, Assad was unexpectedly swept away by a mélange of rebel groups. The refuge extended to Assad by Moscow was the most it could provide with the war in Ukraine having drained Russia’s capacity to do more.

Russia’s possible withdrawal from the Syrian naval base at Tartus and the airbase at Khmeimim would remove assets that allowed it to cooperate with Iran, its key strategic partner in the region.

More recently, Russia’s reliability as an ally and reputation as an armory has been damaged by Israeli attacks not only on Hezbollah and other Iranian-backed forces in Lebanon and Syria, but on Iran itself.

Russia’s position in Africa would also be damaged by the loss of the Syrian bases, which are key launch points for extending Russian power, and by Moscow’s evident inability to make a difference on the ground across the Sahel region in north-central Africa.

Dirty tricks, diminishing returns

Stalemate in Ukraine and Russian strategic losses in Syria and elsewhere have prompted Moscow to rely increasingly on a variety of other means to try to gain influence.

Disinformation, election meddling and varied threats are not new and are part of Russia’s actions in Ukraine. But recent efforts in East Europe have not been very productive. Massive Russian funding and propaganda in Romania, for example, helped produce a narrow victory for an anti-NATO presidential candidate in December 2024, but the Romanian government moved quickly to expose these actions and the election was annulled.

Nearby Moldova has long been subject to Russian propaganda and threats, especially during recent presidential elections and a referendum on stipulating a “European course” in the constitution. The tiny country moved to reduce its dependency on Russian gas but remains territorially fragmented by the breakaway region of Transnistria that, until recently, provided most of the country’s electricity.

Despite these factors, the results were not what Moscow wanted. In both votes, a European direction was favored by the electorate. When the Transnistrian legislature in February 2024 appealed to Moscow for protection, none was forthcoming.

When Moldova thumbs its nose at you, it’s fair to say your power ranking has fallen.

Wounded but still dangerous

Not all recent developments have been negative for Moscow. State control of the economy has allowed for rapid rebuilding of a depleted military and support for its technology industry in the short term. With Chinese help and evasion of sanctions, sufficient machinery and energy allow the war in Ukraine to continue.

And the inauguration of Donald Trump is likely to favor Putin, despite some mixed signals. The U.S. president has threatened tariffs and more sanctions but also disbanded a Biden-era task force aimed a punishing Russian oligarchs who help Russia evade sanctions. In the White House now is someone who has openly admired Putin, expressed skepticism over U.S. support for Ukraine and rushed to bully America’s closest allies in Latin America, Canada and Europe.

Most importantly, Trump’s eagerness to make good on his pledge to end the war may provide the Russian leader with a deal he can call a “victory.”

The shrinking of Russia’s world has not necessarily made Russia less dangerous; it could be quite the opposite. Some Kremlin watchers argue that a more economically isolated Russia is less vulnerable to American economic pressure. A retreating Russia and an embattled Putin could also opt for even more reckless threats and actions – for example, on nuclear weapons – especially if reversing course in Ukraine would jeopardize his position. It is, after all, Putin’s war.

All observers would be wise to note that the famous dictum “Russia is never as strong as she looks … nor as weak as she looks” has been ominously rephrased by Putin himself: “Russia was never so strong as it wants to be and never so weak as it is thought to be.”The Conversation

Ronald H. Linden, Professor Emeritus of Political Science, University of Pittsburgh

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People say they prefer stories written by humans over AI-generated works, yet new study suggests that’s not quite true

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theconversation.com – Martin Abel, Assistant Professor of Economics, Bowdoin College – 2025-03-18 07:52:00

Artificial intelligence is expected to generate a growing share of the world’s creative work.
karetoria/Moment via Getty Images

Martin Abel, Bowdoin College and Reed Johnson, Bowdoin College

People say they prefer a short story written by a human over one composed by artificial intelligence, yet most still invest the same amount of time and money reading both stories regardless of whether it is labeled as AI-generated.

That was the main finding of a study we conducted recently to test whether this preference of humans over AI in creative works actually translates into consumer behavior. Amid the coming avalanche of AI-generated work, it is a question of real livelihoods for the millions of people worldwide employed in creative industries.

To investigate, we asked OpenAI’s ChatGPT 4 to generate a short story in the style of the critically acclaimed fiction author Jason Brown. We then recruited a nationally representative sample of over 650 people and offered participants US$3.50 to read and assess the AI-generated story. Crucially, only half the participants were told that the story was written by AI, while the other half was misled into believing it was the work of Jason Brown.

After reading the first half of the AI-generated story, participants were asked to rate the quality of the work along various dimensions, such as whether they found it predictable, emotionally engaging, evocative and so on. We also measured participants’ willingness to pay in order to read to the end of the story in two ways: how much of their study compensation they’d be willing to give up, and how much time they’d agree to spend transcribing some text we gave them.

So, were there differences between the two groups? The short answer: yes. But a closer analysis reveals some startling results.

To begin with, the group that knew the story was AI-generated had a much more negative assessment of the work, rating it more harshly on dimensions like predictability, authenticity and how evocative it is. These results are largely in keeping with a nascent but growing body of research that shows bias against AI in areas like visual art, music and poetry.

Nonetheless, participants were ready to spend the same amount of money and time to finish reading the story whether or not it was labeled as AI. Participants also did not spend less time on average actually reading the AI-labeled story.

When asked afterward, almost 40% of participants said they would have paid less if the same story was written by AI versus a human, highlighting that many are not aware of the discrepancies between their subjective assessments and actual choices.

Why it matters

Our findings challenge past studies showing people favor human-produced works over AI-generated ones. At the very least, this research doesn’t appear to be a reliable indicator of people’s willingness to pay for human-created art.

The potential implications for the future of human-created work are profound, especially in market conditions in which AI-generated work can be orders of magnitude cheaper to produce.

Even though artificial intelligence is still in its infancy, AI-made books are already flooding the market, recently prompting the authors guild to instate its own labeling guidelines.

Our research raises questions whether these labels are effective in stemming the tide.

What’s next

Attitudes toward AI are still forming. Future research could investigate whether there will be a backlash against AI-generated creative works, especially if people witness mass layoffs. After all, similar shifts occurred in the wake of mass industrialization, such as the arts and crafts movement in the late 19th century, which emerged as a response to the growing automation of labor.

A related question is whether the market will segment, where some consumers will be willing to pay more based on the process of creation, while others may be interested only in the product.

Regardless of how these scenarios play out, our findings indicate that the road ahead for human creative labor might be more uphill than previous research suggested. At the very least, while consumers may hold beliefs about the intrinsic value of human labor, many seem unwilling to put their money where their beliefs are.

The Research Brief is a short take about interesting academic work.The Conversation

Martin Abel, Assistant Professor of Economics, Bowdoin College and Reed Johnson, Senior Lecturer in Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies, Bowdoin College

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Cells lining your skin and organs can generate electricity when injured − potentially opening new doors to treating wounds

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theconversation.com – Sun-Min Yu, Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Polymer Science and Engineering, UMass Amherst – 2025-03-17 14:47:00

Your skin cells can generate electricity when wounded.
Torsten Wittmann, University of California, San Francisco/NIH via Flickr, CC BY-NC

Sun-Min Yu, UMass Amherst and Steve Granick, UMass Amherst

Your cells constantly generate and conduct electricity that runs through your body to perform various functions. One such example of this bioelectricity is the nerve signals that power thoughts in your brain. Others include the cardiac signals that control the beating of your heart, along with other signals that tell your muscles to contract.

As bioengineers, we became interested in the epithelial cells that make up human skin and the outer layer of people’s intestinal tissues. These cells aren’t known to be able to generate bioelectricity. Textbooks state that they primarily act as a barrier against pathogens and poisons; epithelial cells are thought to do their jobs passively, like how plastic wrapping protects food against spoilage.

To our surprise, however, we found that wounded epithelial cells can propagate electrical signals across dozens of cells that persist for several hours. In this newly published research, we were able to show that even epithelial cells use bioelectricity to coordinate with their neighbors when the emergency of an injury demands it. Understanding this unexpected twist in how the body operates may lead to improved treatments for wounds.

Discovering a new source of bioelectricity

Don’t laugh: Our interest in this topic began with a gut feeling. Think of how your skin heals itself after a scratch. Epithelial cells may look silent and calm, but they’re busy coordinating with each other to extrude damaged cells and replace them with new ones. We thought bioelectric signals might orchestrate this, so our intuition told us to search for them.

Almost all the vendors we contacted to obtain the instrument we needed to test our idea warned us not to try these experiments. Only one company agreed with reluctance. “Your experiment won’t work,” they insisted. If we made the attempt and found nothing worthwhile to study, they feared it would make their product look bad.

But we did our experiments anyway – with tantalizing results.

We grew a layer of epithelial cells on a chip patterned with what’s called a microelectrode array – dozens of tiny electric wires that measure where bioelectric signals appear, how strong the signals are and how fast they travel from spot to spot. Then, we used a laser to zap a wound in one location and searched for electric signals on a different part of the cell layer.

Close-up of a person's hand stretching a gel-like material with an array of metal strips radiating from the center towards the edges
Microelectrode arrays detect electrical signals in cells.
Kwayyy/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

Several hours of recording confirmed our intuition: When faced with the emergency need to repair themselves, bioelectrical signals appear when epithelial cells need a quick way to communicate over long distances.

We found that wounded epithelial cells can send bioelectric signals to neighboring cells over distances more than 40 times their body length with voltages similar to those of neurons. The shapes of these voltage spikes are also like those of neurons except about 1,000 times slower, indicating they might be a more primitive form of intercellular communication over long distances.

Powering the bioelectric generator

But how do epithelial cells generate bioelectricity?

We hypothesized that calcium ions might play a key role. Calcium ions show up prominently in any good biology textbook’s list of major molecules that help cells function. Since calcium ions regulate the forces that contract cells, a function necessary to remove damaged cells after wounding, we hypothesized that calcium ions ought to be critical to bioelectricity.

To test our theory, we used a molecule called EDTA that tightly binds to calcium ions. When we added EDTA to the epithelial cells and so removed the calcium ions, we found that the voltage spikes were no longer present. This meant that calcium ions were likely necessary for epithelial cells to generate the bioelectric signals that guide wound healing.

We then blocked the ion channels that allow calcium and other positively charged ions to enter epithelial cells. As a result, the frequency and strength of the electrical signals that epithelial cells produce were reduced. These findings suggest that while calcium ions may play a particularly crucial role in allowing epithelial cells to produce bioelectricity, other molecules may also matter.

Further research can help identify those other ion channels and pathways that allow epithelial cells to generate bioelectricity.

Microscopy image of human large intestine tissue, which appears as two curved arms layered with fringe
Epithelial cells line your large intestine.
Choksawatdikorn/Science Photo Library via Getty Images

Improving wound healing

Our discovery that epithelial cells can electrically speak up during a crisis without compromising their primary role as a barrier opens doors for new ways to treat wounds.

Previous work from other researchers had demonstrated that it’s possible to enhance wound healing in skin and intestinal tissues by electrically stimulating them. But these studies used electrical frequencies many times higher than what we’ve found epithelial cells naturally produce. We wonder whether reevaluating and refining optimal electric stimulation conditions may help improve biomedical devices for wound healing.

Further down the road of possibility, we wonder whether electrically stimulating individual cells might offer even more healing potential. Currently, researchers have been electrically stimulating the whole tissue to treat injury. If we could direct these electrical signals to go specifically to where a remedy is needed, would stimulating individual cells be even more effective at treating wounds?

Our hope is that these findings could become a classic case of curiosity-driven science that leads to useful discovery. While our dream may carry a high risk of failure, it also offers potentially high rewards.The Conversation

Sun-Min Yu, Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Polymer Science and Engineering, UMass Amherst and Steve Granick, Professor of Polymer Science and Engineering, UMass Amherst

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Researchers created sound that can bend itself through space, reaching only your ear in a crowd

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theconversation.com – Jiaxin Zhong, Postdoctoral Researcher in Acoustics, Penn State – 2025-03-17 14:01:00

For your ears only.
Cinefootage Visuals/iStock via Getty Images Plus

Jiaxin Zhong, Penn State and Yun Jing, Penn State

What if you could listen to music or a podcast without headphones or earbuds and without disturbing anyone around you? Or have a private conversation in public without other people hearing you?

Our newly published research introduces a way to create audible enclaves – localized pockets of sound that are isolated from their surroundings. In other words, we’ve developed a technology that could create sound exactly where it needs to be.

The ability to send sound that becomes audible only at a specific location could transform entertainment, communication and spatial audio experiences.

What is sound?

Sound is a vibration that travels through air as a wave. These waves are created when an object moves back and forth, compressing and decompressing air molecules.

The frequency of these vibrations is what determines pitch. Low frequencies correspond to deep sounds, like a bass drum; high frequencies correspond to sharp sounds, like a whistle.

Waves of particles moving horizontally, with ridges of compression and valleys of rarefaction
Sound is composed of particles moving in a continuous wave.
Daniel A. Russell, CC BY-NC-ND

Controlling where sound goes is difficult because of a phenomenon called diffraction – the tendency of sound waves to spread out as they travel. This effect is particularly strong for low-frequency sounds because of their longer wavelengths, making it nearly impossible to keep sound confined to a specific area.

Certain audio technologies, such as parametric array loudspeakers, can create focused sound beams aimed in a specific direction. However, these technologies will still emit sound that is audible along its entire path as it travels through space.

The science of audible enclaves

We found a new way to send sound to one specific listener: through self-bending ultrasound beams and a concept called nonlinear acoustics.

Ultrasound refers to sound waves with frequencies above the human hearing range, or above 20 kHz. These waves travel through the air like normal sound waves but are inaudible to people. Because ultrasound can penetrate through many materials and interact with objects in unique ways, it’s widely used for medical imaging and many industrial applications.

In our work, we used ultrasound as a carrier for audible sound. It can transport sound through space silently – becoming audible only when desired. How did we do this?

Normally, sound waves combine linearly, meaning they just proportionally add up into a bigger wave. However, when sound waves are intense enough, they can interact nonlinearly, generating new frequencies that were not present before.

This is the key to our technique: We use two ultrasound beams at different frequencies that are completely silent on their own. But when they intersect in space, nonlinear effects cause them to generate a new sound wave at an audible frequency that would be heard only in that specific region.

Diagram of ultrasound beams bending around a head and intersection in an audible pocket
Audible enclaves are created at the intersection of two ultrasound beams.
Jiaxin Zhong et al./PNAS, CC BY-NC-ND

Crucially, we designed ultrasonic beams that can bend on their own. Normally, sound waves travel in straight lines unless something blocks or reflects them. However, by using acoustic metasurfaces – specialized materials that manipulate sound waves – we can shape ultrasound beams to bend as they travel. Similar to how an optical lens bends light, acoustic metasurfaces change the shape of the path of sound waves. By precisely controlling the phase of the ultrasound waves, we create curved sound paths that can navigate around obstacles and meet at a specific target location.

The key phenomenon at play is what’s called difference frequency generation. When two ultrasonic beams of slightly different frequencies, such as 40 kHz and 39.5 kHz, overlap, they create a new sound wave at the difference between their frequencies – in this case 0.5 kHz, or 500 Hz, which is well within the human hearing range. Sound can be heard only where the beams cross. Outside of that intersection, the ultrasound waves remain silent.

This means you can deliver audio to a specific location or person without disturbing other people as the sound travels.

Advancing sound control

The ability to create audio enclaves has many potential applications.

Audio enclaves could enable personalized audio in public spaces. For example, museums could provide different audio guides to visitors without headphones, and libraries could allow students to study with audio lessons without disturbing others.

In a car, passengers could listen to music without distracting the driver from hearing navigation instructions. Offices and military settings could also benefit from localized speech zones for confidential conversations. Audio enclaves could also be adapted to cancel out noise in designated areas, creating quiet zones to improve focus in workplaces or reduce noise pollution in cities.

One person looking up and smiling at the camera, amid a crowd of closely packed people
A sound only you can hear.
Daly and Newton/The Image Bank via Getty Images

This isn’t something that’s going to be on the shelf in the immediate future. For instance, challenges remain for our technology. Nonlinear distortion can affect sound quality. And power efficiency is another issue – converting ultrasound to audible sound requires high-intensity fields that can be energy intensive to generate.

Despite these hurdles, audio enclaves present a fundamental shift in sound control. By redefining how sound interacts with space, we open up new possibilities for immersive, efficient and personalized audio experiences.The Conversation

Jiaxin Zhong, Postdoctoral Researcher in Acoustics, Penn State and Yun Jing, Professor of Acoustics, Penn State

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