How Alaska Native communities navigate a potential $170 billion gold mine
Peer-Reviewed Publication
In honor of Indigenous Peoples' Day, we’re exploring how Indigenous communities contribute to science, conservation, health research, and much more.
Updates every hour. Last Updated: 20-Oct-2026 10:16 ET (20-Oct-2026 14:16 GMT/UTC)
What does it mean to weigh a $170 billion gold mine against a way of life? Researchers at Kyushu University and Oita University found that for Alaska Native communities, the answer cannot be reduced to simple ‘support’ or ‘opposition.’ Many community members occupy multiple, often conflicting roles, and must balance economic opportunity, cultural survival, and environmental stewardship. The findings call for governance structures that center Indigenous worldviews and their own definitions of well-being.
When it comes to assessing breast cancer risk, most datasets that inform existing models come from white women, with consequences for using such models with non-white patient populations. Now, researchers show that an emergent AI-based predictor trained on people from diverse demographics can evaluate breast cancer risk accurately regardless of patients’ race or ethnicity. They tested its risk assessment accuracy by having it evaluate mammographs from more than 226,000 women with diverse demographic backgrounds. Breast cancer is among the most common cancers diagnosed in women. Risk models can predict patients’ likelihood to develop the disease, facilitating early detection, but most datasets behind existing models come from white cohorts. Consequently, they don’t predict breast cancer risk as well for populations of non-European origins. However, Shu Jiang and colleagues write: “Recent work on the use of mammogram risk scores (MRS), an AI-based mammogram image texture summary feature, developed in a racially diverse population, has shown considerable promise.” Now, they have further assessed this tool’s performance across two major North American cohorts. Data came from routine mammography screenings of more than 226,000 women, aged 40 to 74, and involved East Asian, South Asian, Indigenous, Non-Hispanic white, and Non-Hispanic Black demographics. Score values came from AI-based analyses of breast tissue’s texture and characteristics. The scores, which encompassed risk over a period of 5 years, were significantly associated with breast cancer risk and highly calibrated with outcomes for each racial and ethnic subgroup. “This work shows that the MRS is independent of self-reported race and ethnicity, which allows for universal clinical implementation of personalized risk assessment,” Jiang et al. conclude.
Rates of violence against women have remained largely unchanged in California for nearly two decades, with Black and multiracial women facing the highest risks, a sweeping new analysis by UC Berkeley public health researchers has found.
Black women under age 65 were at the highest risk of violence, researchers found. Across all ages, assault injury rates among Black women were 3.8 times those of white women. Notably, the group at greatest risk of violence over age 65 shifted to multiracial women, signaling how vulnerability evolves throughout one’s life.
Indigenous and local communities are not secondary actors in biodiversity conservation, but decisive agents who are already protecting the natural environment worldwide. Their ancestral knowledge and environmental stewardship practices — often invisible and unknown to academia and policy — are essential for designing more effective and inclusive strategies that sustain biodiversity and foster a fairer, more sustainable future.