The Conspiracies Swarming Campus Protests | Uncle Sam Wants You to Join the Mining Industry | Who Really Has Brain Worms?, and more

Because people aren’t the appropriate host for the young tapeworms, they end up on a fruitless journey, meandering through the body in a desperate attempt to find pig muscle. A common final destination for the larvae is the brain, where they enclose themselves into cysts in the hopes of maturing; eventually, unable to complete their life cycle, they die, leaving behind little more than a calcified nub.
This is, to put it scientifically, some pretty gnarly stuff. But many cases are “completely asymptomatic,” Boghuma Kabisen Titanji, also an infectious-disease physician at Emory University, told me. In other people, though—especially those with a lot of larval cysts—the presence of the foreign invaders can spark a wave of inflammation, which in turn triggers swelling and tissue destruction. Individuals with cysts in their brain may develop headaches or seizures, though those problems can take years or even decades to manifest, Titanji said.

Drone Dilemma and the U.S. Air Force  (Clifford Lucas, War on the Rocks)
A surface-launched weapon traveling through the air struck and killed U.S. servicemembers in the Middle East, ending the decades-long streak of air dominance keeping U.S. forces on the ground safe from aerial attacks. A recent article argued that this almost-71-year streak of air dominance ended in Jordan on Jan. 28, 2024, when three U.S. servicemembers were killed in a one-way attack-drone strike, threatening the relevance of today’s U.S. Air Force. If one agrees the U.S. Air Force is approaching irrelevance on account of one-way attack drones, then perhaps the streak ended 33 years ago. For the event described in the first sentence is not from January 2024; rather, it is describing the SCUD missile attack that killed 27 servicemembers in Saudi Arabia on Feb. 25, 1991, during Operation Desert Storm.
There is certainly a consistent threat from drones, missiles, and rockets resulting in U.S. servicemember casualties, apparent from the more than 150 attacks by Iranian-backed militia groups on U.S. locations in Iraq and Syria since January 2021, as well as the missile attack from Iran in January 2020. However, the problem with the argument about the Air Force’s supposed irrelevance, voiced by Dave Barno and Nora Bensahel, is that it is missing the context of how control of the air is accomplished. To understand this, we must look beyond how air superiority is gained and maintained by the U.S. Air Force to the key role U.S. Army air defense plays in this mission, as well as the greater similarities between one-way attack drones to surface-to-surface missiles rather than traditional air-to-surface attacks. The drone dilemma ought not raise questions of a particular armed service’s relevance in the struggle for air dominance. Rather, it is a reason for leaders to revisit how roles and missions are allocated across the military services and to assess resources for air defense capabilities that are affordable, scalable, and fully integrated with the fight for air superiority.

Bird Flu Detected in Colorado Dairy Cattle − a Vet Explains the Risks of the Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza Virus  (Jason Lombard, The Conversation)
Colorado has highly pathogenic avian influenza – also known as HPAI or bird flu – on a dairy farm, the ninth state with confirmed cases. The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Veterinary Services Laboratories confirmed the virus on April 25, 2024, in a herd in northeast Colorado.
This farm is one of 35 dairy farms across the U.S. with verified cases of bird flu in cattle as of May 7, 2024, according to the USDA.
Bird flu is not new to Colorado. The state experienced an outbreak in poultry that began in 2022. Since then, the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service has reported that 6.3 million birds in nine commercial flocks and 25 backyard flocks have been affected by the virus. The most recent detection was in February 2024.
But this is the first time the disease has made cattle in Colorado sick.

Uncle Sam Wants You to Join the Mining Industry  (Christina Lu, Foreign Policy)
As the United States rushes to develop domestic supplies of critical minerals—the coveted resources powering the energy transition—Washington is finding that a major talent squeeze could complicate its mining ambitions. 
The resources in question—which include minerals such as lithium and copper as well as the powerful rare earth elements—are key components of both clean energy technologies and advanced weapons systems. China overwhelmingly commands the processing and refining of many of those materials, a dominance that has worried U.S. lawmakers and accelerated U.S. efforts to forge new global mineral partnerships and harness domestic resource riches.
But the United States may not have the talent pipelines to realize those ambitions, as large percentages of the current mining workforce prepare to retire and fewer people choose to enter the industry. At the same time as almost half of all mining engineers are estimated to reach retirement age over the next decade, U.S. mining graduations have plummeted by 39 percent in the last eight years. 
And it’s not just Washington that is grappling with these challenges, either; other Western mining giants, including Canada and Australia, are also facing similar labor crunches.
“We’re losing mine workers at a time when we really need to be ramping up mineral production,” said Kray Luxbacher, the head of the Mining and Geological Engineering department at the University of Arizona. “The scope is pretty massive.”
The U.S. mining workforce has already shrunk by 20.4 percent in the last decade, according to Deloitte. At the university level, the United States’ 14 mining schools have collectively graduated roughly 185 to 200 mining engineers per year, into an annual demand of 400 to 500, over the last few years, said Stephen Enders, head of the mining engineering department at the Colorado School of Mines. 
“Professionally, we just don’t have the student numbers in our mining-related university programs to meet the demand of the current needs for the industry,” he said. 

The Conspiracies Swarming Campus Protests  (Leah Feiger et al., Wired)
Campus protests over the war in Gaza have been going on for months at American universities. Now that they’re at an all-time high, protests have been getting a lot more attention—and tons of disinformation and conspiracies are spreading. Today on WIRED Politics Lab, we talk about some of that disinformation and what student journalists on the ground are doing to report the facts. Plus, we look at how foreign actors are exploiting the dissent.

A (Strange) Interview with the Russian-Military-Linked Hackers Targeting US Water Utilities  (Andy Greenerg, Wired)
When the activities of Russian hacker groups are exposed in a major public report and tied to a government agency—such as the Russian military’s Sandworm unit, which has targeted Ukrainian electrical utilities to trigger three blackouts over the past decade, or the Russian foreign intelligence service’s APT29, which is believed to have carried out the notorious SolarWinds supply chain attack—they tend to slink into the shadows and lay low until their next operation.
When the cybersecurity firm Mandiant last month highlighted the Cyber Army of Russia, by contrast, noting its haphazard attacks on Western critical infrastructure and the group’s loose ties to the Russian military, the hackers took a very different approach. “Comrades, today the collective rotten West recognized us as the most reckless hacker group