Good Day, this is the Commonwealth Report.
Geeky Science Friday!
News for the public, not the powerful.
Is AI Stealing Our Children’s Ability To Think?
Teachers across the country are watching something disappear. Students hand their essays to chatbots, and with the essay goes the thinking. Cognitive psychologist Ronald Kellogg told the New York Times, “Writing is a technology for thinking.” It builds working memory. It builds planning. It builds your awareness of your own mind. Kellogg says drafting a simple essay taxes the brain the way digging a ditch taxes the body, and that’s the point. An MIT study this year found people who wrote with AI showed lower brain activity than people who didn’t, and afterward they couldn’t recall one line they’d just produced. Schools are going back to pencil and paper. Princeton dropped its unsupervised honor code exams. A country full of people who can’t build an argument is a country that can’t defend itself from the people selling one.
Trump Opens 45 Million Acres Of Wild Forest To The Chainsaws
On Tuesday the Trump administration moved to erase 25 years of protection for the wildest land we have left. The Agriculture Department filed a proposal to rescind the roadless rule, the Clinton-era protection that bars road building and commercial logging on nearly 45 million acres of national forest. That’s roughly a third of the whole national forest system. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins says she’s doing it to fight wildfire. But the Forest Service’s own numbers show nine out of 10 wildfires are started by people, and most human ignitions happen along roads. Last fall the public filed more than 625,000 comments. 99% opposed the repeal. This time you get 30 days to comment. Idaho and Colorado are exempt. Nobody else is. The NRDC’s Andrew Wetzler put it plainly. “The American people will not let this plan stand.”
Can Europe Stop Its Forests From Burning?
While Washington opens the forests to loggers, Europe’s forests are burning. A new study from the Potsdam Institute, published in Global Change Biology, projects that even in the best case, where the planet warms 1.8 degrees Celsius, Europe will burn 39% more land every year by the end of the century. In the high emissions case, 3.6 degrees, the burned area nearly triples. The United Nations has us headed for 2.8 degrees. Better fire management helps. The researchers found stronger prevention and firefighting could cut the burned area by more than 70%. But lead author Maik Billing was blunt. “Fire management cannot replace climate mitigation.” Europe is already living it. 616,000 hectares gone this year through August 19, the third-worst fire season on record. Central Europe, western Europe and the Mediterranean take the worst of it.
Do Police Now Know Who’s Riding In Your Car?
Here’s your reminder that the surveillance state doesn’t stand still. A company called Leonardo is rolling out a system named SignalTrace. It works alongside license plate cameras, but it doesn’t read your plate. It reads your gadgets. Your phone, your earbuds, your fitness tracker and your car stereo all broadcast Bluetooth and Wi-Fi signals, and SignalTrace picks up that combination as it rolls past. Leonardo calls it an electronic fingerprint. Once the system knows your mix of devices travels together, it can flag you anywhere on the network, even when your plate isn’t visible. Indiana University researcher Nicole Bennett warns that investigators “may no longer need to begin with a known person or vehicle.” One study found four time and place readings are enough to pick out 95% of 1.5 million people. That’s not police work. That’s a dragnet.
Trump Kills Alzheimer’s Research To Score Points Against DEI
The National Institutes of Health just canceled another round of grants, and this time the target is Alzheimer’s disease. Researchers at Emory University and the University of Pittsburgh lost at least three grants worth $15 million, each studying how discrimination and disinvested neighborhoods affect long-term brain health. NIH director Jay Bhattacharya wrote that the projects no longer fit NIH’s priorities and complained that self-reported surveys aren’t measurable science. Ann Cohen, whose Pittsburgh grant was killed, called that political interference and said it isn’t “a good way to do science.” 7.4 million Americans live with Alzheimer’s or dementia, and Black Americans are twice as likely to get it. Federal law requires NIH to study those disparities. So the government is breaking its own rules to make sure we learn less about a disease that’s coming for all of us.
Could A COVID Shot Buy Brain Cancer Patients Another Year?
Let’s end with hope from a place nobody expected. Doctors at the University of Alabama at Birmingham looked at 187 patients with glioblastoma, the aggressive brain cancer that has no cure. Patients who got a COVID vaccine within 100 days before their biopsy or surgery lived twice as long as patients who didn’t. Half the vaccinated group made it 743 days or more. For the unvaccinated, median survival was 349 days. That’s an extra year of life. And the effect showed up only with the mRNA COVID shots, not flu or pneumonia vaccines. The study is a preprint and hasn’t been peer-reviewed, so this is a lead, not a cure. Neurosurgeon James Markert says it plainly. “We think this provides hope.” Remember the next time somebody in power tells you mRNA research isn’t worth funding.
And that’s the way it is today, Friday, August 21, 2026. I’m Thom Hartmann.
