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Every year, millions of people travel to remote, protected "dark-sky parks" in search of experiences that depend on true darkness — photographing the Milky Way's heart arcing overhead, observing nocturnal wildlife in its natural rhythm, or simply standing beneath an ink-black sea of stars unblurred by artificial light.

Scientists have long warned that rising levels of artificial light — increasingly amplified by satellite megaconstellations orbiting our planet — are steadily eroding these nightscapes , disrupting ecosystems, affecting human health and dimming views of stars and distant celestial objects. Darkness itself carries no price tag, however, meaning its loss has largely been absent from the economic calculations that guide development and outdoor lighting decisions. Now, new research attempts to translate that loss visible in monetary terms.

A study combining satellite data with on-the-ground surveys of visitors at several "gold-tier" dark-sky sites found that people were less likely to choose parks with greater artificial skyglow or poorer night-sky conditions, and showed a clear willingness to pay more for darker skies.

On average, visitors would pay about $18 more per trip for marginally darker skies, and roughly $45 more per night for a one-step improvement on the Bortle Dark Sky Scale, a widely used measure of night-sky quality.

"This may seem really small at the per-visitor and per-trip unit estimate," said Jordan Smith , the study's lead author and director of the Institute of Outdoor Recreation and Tourism at Utah State University, "but when we scale through park-wide visitation, it becomes very, very significant."

Over a four-month period, the researchers estimated that light pollution reduced the recreational value of flagship dark-sky destinations in the U.S. by between $25 million and nearly $66 million.

The figures, presented at the 248th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in California, do not represent lost park revenue, but what economists call "welfare losses" — the decline in visitor satisfaction when environmental quality deteriorates. The concept is akin to paying for a concert expecting excellent sound and instead finding the speakers distorted; the performance still occurs, but it feels worth less than anticipated.

By assigning a dollar value to changes in night-sky quality, the researchers argue, policymakers gain a way to weigh the hidden costs of artificial lighting against the benefits of development and outdoor illumination.

"It's a foundational building block that allows that cost-benefit analysis to subsequently occur," Smith said.

Speaking at a press briefing during the conference, Smith said a central challenge is the gap between measuring light pollution and measuring what it costs in lived experience. Satellites and ground instruments can track where artificial light is spreading and how quickly it is increasing , he said, "but they can't tell us much about what that value is — what is actually lost due to anthropogenic light at night?"

This image of Great Basin National Park, one of the darkest places in the U.S., was taken in 2025 by the VIIRS (Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite) on the Suomi NPP satellite. VIIRS can detect signals such as auroras, city lights and reflected moonlight. You can see the contrast between the dark sky zone and major light sources like Las Vegas and Salt Lake City. (Image credit: NASA) To bridge that gap, Smith and his colleagues focused on the Colorado Plateau, a rugged region spanning Utah, Arizona, Colorado and New Mexico that contains one of the world's highest concentrations of "gold-tier" dark-sky sites, a designation that signifies the darkest and clearest night skies on Earth .

Over 82 nights in April, May, September and October, researchers interviewed visitors after dusk at campgrounds, scenic overlooks and parking areas. In total, they surveyed 634 travelers across nine destinations, including Arches, Bryce Canyon, Canyonlands and Natural Bridges National Monument, focusing on visitors whose trips depended specifically on high-quality night skies, the study notes.

By pairing survey responses with satellite measurements of nighttime brightness and local atmospheric conditions — including humidity, moonlight and airborne particles, all of which affect sky visibility — the team found a consistent preference for darker skies and a willingness to pay more for them.

The highest projected welfare losses, the researchers found, were heavily concentrated at premier destinations, led by the Grand Canyon and Zion national parks. Smaller or more remote parks showed comparatively modest total losses, a result driven by fewer visitors rather than an absence of dark-sky value, the study notes.

The researchers suggest that extending this kind of monitoring across a full year and over multiple years could help treat the night sky not only as a scientific and cultural asset, but as a measurable economic asset whose value changes with lighting policy, development and conservation.

As cities expand and artificial light continues to spread, studies like this are reframing a question once largely confined to science as an economic one: what is a star-filled sky worth?

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BRUSSELS — The European Commission fired back Monday at Donald Trump’s fresh tariff threats against Europe’s tech rules, just as EU and U.S. officials opened talks in Washington meant to repair their increasingly strained digital relationship.

A delegation led by the EU’s top tech official, Roberto Viola, is in Washington until Wednesday for what the Commission is calling a “dialogue on a future potential dialogue” with its U.S. counterparts.

The visit comes after the U.S. president threatened new tariffs on EU countries that impose digital service taxes on American tech companies in a post on his social media platform Friday. The U.S. State Department also called recent EU initiatives to boost tech sovereignty “protectionist,” in a comment to POLITICO on Sunday.

“Our position is very clear,” Commission spokesperson Thomas Regnier told reporters on Monday. “The EU and its member states have the sovereign right to regulate any economic activities on their territory.”

“The EU will respond swiftly and decisively,” Regnier added, should Washington follow through with “unilateral measures targeting such legitimate policies.”

Since Trump’s return to the White House, the U.S. administration has ramped up attacks on the bloc’s tech laws, accusing them of unfairly targeting American firms.

Trump’s top envoy in Brussels, Andrew Puzder, told POLITICO in March that Washington wants the tech dialogue to include the EU’s tech rules, which U.S. companies say are too burdensome.

The EU executive recently unveiled a long-awaited legislative package designed to reduce Europe’s years-long reliance on U.S. technology, which is increasingly seen as a strategic vulnerability. The plan is a long game: boosting European tech champions while giving governments new ways to shut U.S. players out of the most sensitive parts of the public-sector market.

“Protectionist measures in upcoming EU tech sovereignty laws risk undermining our partnership,” a spokesperson for the U.S. State Department said in a statement to POLITICO, recalling the recent trade deal that “requires eliminating non-tariff barriers to trade.”

“The path forward is deregulation and collaboration on AI and chips,” they added.

The comment came just after the U.S. moved to partially lift the export restrictions on Anthropic’s latest superhacking AI models, which sparked an uproar in Europe and kept fueling fears of a so-called tech kill switch at Trump’s fingertips.

“We believe that we are a trusted partner, not a security risk,” Regnier said, not ruling out that the issue of foreign access to AI models could be raised in this week’s meetings.

An internal preparatory document seen by POLITICO shows that the talks will involve artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, the online protection of minors, connectivity, chips and digital trade. “The discussion is currently ongoing, which shows that both sides definitely want this,” Regnier said.

Jasper Bennink contributed to the reporting.

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Ahead of Mind Drama ‘s publication, science journalist Donna Jackson Nakazawa sent a copy of the book to someone working on a similar topic. The person betrayed her trust by later attempting to publish several key findings under their own name. Although the situation was eventually resolved, Jackson Nakazawa’s mind kept replaying the upsetting incident. Falling prey to a “lifelong tendency to get sucked into a vortex of obsessive thought,” she found herself “trapped in [her] own head, and it was a bad neighborhood to be in.”

Jackson Nakazawa is hardly alone in this regard. In a 2010 study , Harvard psychologists found that people spend as much as 46.9% of their waking hours thinking about things other than what is happening to them in the present moment, and this “mind-wandering” is a strong predictor of unhappiness. Other studies indicate that the percentage has continued to grow, especially since the COVID-19 pandemic. That’s a problem because ruminating about what has been or could be isn’t just bad for our mental health. It’s bad for our physical health, too.

“Each time your mind relives a stressful scenario,” Jackson Nakazawa explains, “your body relives it, too.”

When we relive stressful situations from the past — or imagine stressful situations in the future — we activate our acute stress response. As part of this response, our bodies produce cortisol, a hormone that helps regulate arousal and reduces inflammation. While some inflammation is perfectly healthy, chronic inflammation has been linked with memory loss, as well as an increased risk of cardiovascular disease and some types of cancer. And the more cortisol our bodies produce, the less our cells respond to it, leading to an overabundance that can limit the hormone’s anti-inflammatory effect.

Of course, not ruminating is easier said than done. Many people ruminate without realizing it, while those who do often may not seek help because of fear or shame. But even if you are aware of the problem — and willing to address it — the road can still be long and arduous.

Jackson Nakazawa would like to say she can “slam the brakes on [her] escalating mind drama.” But despite everything she knew as a science journalist and the “meditation and yoga [she’d] stacked into [her] days for decades,” she couldn’t. Fortunately, she discovered several science-based techniques to help.

Ruminating on rumination

To draw the curtains on your inner monologue, you first have to understand what rumination is and where it comes from. Talking to Big Think over Zoom, Jackson Nakazawa called it a kind of “survival response gone wrong” — an evolutionary adaptation that remains as potent as ever despite not being as useful as it once was.

As she writes in Mind Drama : “The human nervous system evolved long before conscious, logical thought, so it maneuvers within a significant margin of error when it comes to assessing how much danger you face.” In prehistoric times, ruminating on danger kept our ancestors alive. Today, when genuine life-threatening encounters are few and far between, it tends to prevent us from living well.

Rumination arises from a network of brain regions collectively called the default mode network (DMN). “It’s actually three areas,” Jackson Nakazawa explains: one in the front of the head, one on both sides, and another on the back. “For a long time, we thought this network was a big nothingburger — an idling station, like when your car idles in the driveway.” Thanks to fMRI technology, we now know that the DMN is responsible for daydreaming, recalling memories, imagining future scenarios, and reflecting on social scenarios.

Put differently, Jackson Nakazawa writes, it’s the “seat of your sense of self […] your brain’s storyteller, where you spin stories about who you are, how you got there, what’s happened to you in your life — and who you can become.”

Through the mental MIST

When people seek professional help for their mental health, they’re often introduced to cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). Dubbed the gold standard of psychotherapy — or, in Jackson Nakazawa’s words, the “first line” — CBT can be loosely described as trying to improve your well-being by interrogating your thoughts and changing your behavior. It’s effective for many problems, from OCD to eating disorders.

However, according to a 2024 systematic review , CBT doesn’t always work for rumination. Instead, the review’s authors found preliminary evidence that rumination-focused cognitive behavioral therapy (RFCBT) — a form of CBT that focuses on changing the process of thinking rather than the content of individual thoughts — was more effective at treating depressive symptoms, especially in people who tend to ruminate.

For her part, Jackson Nakazawa recommends the MIST approach. This approach works by addressing three distinct experiences generated by the DMN: M ental imagery, I ntense emotions, and B odily sensations. (The T , if you’re curious, stands for “tie it all together.”)

There are two steps to MIST. The first is describing. By putting the images, feelings, and sensations generated by your DMN into words, you’re able to step outside the aforementioned vortex and see the things you’re ruminating about more clearly. Asked about the science behind this process, Jackson Nakazawa points to the research of UCLA neuroscientist Matthew Lieberman, who found that simply describing an emotion causes the amygdala — your brain’s threat detector — to relax.

MIST takes this a step further: By doing the same for the physical sensations we feel and the mental images we conjure, we are better able to stop our ruminations in their tracks.

“The language you come up with for your own experiences,” the author tells Big Think, “is the language your brain will pay the most attention to.”

The second step of MIST is to listen. When we ruminate, it’s tempting to try to ignore or suppress intrusive thoughts. However, Jackson Nakazawa argues we should do the opposite. Because while rumination “feels like an immersion into our suffering, it’s actually a means of avoidance.” As the philosopher Bertrand Russell said, “Every kind of fear grows worse by not being looked at.”

When we ruminate, we don’t face our problems so much as we run away from them. But if “properly heard,” Jackson Nakazawa writes, “our ruminations are an invitation to tend to the fearful, anxious, grieving, angry, unheard parts of ourselves.”

Ultimately, she tells Big Think, “we all ruminate about the same thing, and get stuck in storylines that share a common denominator: Do I feel I matter to the people who matter most to me? The stories we’re getting caught in are stories which tell us that in some way we are not feeling that sense of matter that we long to feel.”

And once you’re able to listen, you can formulate a plan to address what’s wrong.

Don’t feed your mind drama

Mind Drama explores many other techniques to deal with rumination, as well as the science behind them. Cyclic sighing, for example, “signals the respiratory system it’s okay to calm down,” while self-distancing, or talking to yourself as you would to another person, has been found to help people “regulate their emotions when reflecting on negative experiences,” as one study notes.

Other techniques, like journaling, daydreaming, and MIST itself, aim at treating rumination by stimulating creativity. That’s because creativity and rumination are associated with increased activity in the DMN. The difference, Jackson Kanazawa explains, lies in how this network operates:

“When we are thought spiraling, the DMN is firing on a closed circuit. It’s not interacting with the rest of the brain, kind of like a shut-down airport. But when we are being creative, the network goes from being the villain to the hero: Instead of a closed circuit, it’s interfacing.”

This helps explain why rumination loops in on itself. When we ruminate, we look for an answer to our problems, “but the answer never comes because we’re locked out of the areas of the brain responsible for problem solving.”

“The default mode network,” she summarizes, “gives rise to [those] horrible lost hours of negative overthinking and to the best ideas we have ever had. It’s like the word itself. In the dictionary, rumination means both recursive, unrelenting thought spiraling, and to muse, to ponder, and ideate. The difference? We exit the storyline emotionally. We stop the mind drama.”

And by stopping the drama, the rest of the brain opens back up.

Like any thoughtful book on therapy or mental health, Jackson Kanazawa’s concludes with a number of caveats. Getting better is a matter of practice and dedication, and techniques that work for one person may not work for someone else. But while therapy isn’t a quick fix — Jackson Kanazawa speaks of healing rather than curing — there are many reasons to be hopeful, not least our constantly improving understanding of the brain itself.

“Early in my career,” she reflects, “we were told the brain is only neuroplastic until the age of 5, then until 18, 25, and 28. Now, we’re seeing the birth of new neurons in the hippocampus throughout life. Your ruminations are nothing more than neural grooves through your default mode network that were laid down early in life, and that’s reversible.”

This article Why your brain gets hung up on troubling thoughts — and what to do about it is featured on Big Think .

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Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney, who recently criticized Valve's use of mandatory Steam disclosures for games with AI-generated content, will surely not be using a new browser plugin which makes those disclosures significantly more noticeable and even hides AI-aided games in Steam search results.

Self-described Linux gamer and coder seeeeew shared the "AI warning for Steam" plugin on Bluesky earlier this month, shortly before Sweeney made the case that Steam's disclosures make it "much, much, much harder for a game developer to have a chance of success".

The plugin is available for Firefox and Google Chrome directly, and is also listed on Github. I've seen reports of workarounds that can get it running in the Steam client itself, but I haven't been able to confirm this functionality.

I have tested the Chrome version myself, and it works as described. When you open the Steam store page of a game with any sort of AI content disclosure, that disclosure will appear as a pop-up when you first load that page, making it utterly unmissable.

Additionally, in Steam search results, any AI-aided games are blurred out by default, covered with a label reading, "AI Generated Content Disclosure found." If you consider any gen AI use to be a deal-breaker, or if you're just a stickler for the tech, this plugin could save you some time filtering or checking games on Steam.

Many people discovered this plugin during the latest Steam Next Fest , a week-long showcase of Steam demos for upcoming games. As Palworld lead John Buckley lamented , more and more Steam Next Fest entries use AI-generated images or assets, reflecting a broader rise in the use of the technology.

Sweeney has repeatedly pushed Steam to drop AI content disclosures, which are not used on the Epic Games Store. His latest argument is that they attach a "Scarlet Letter" to games which use AI and can invite a "hater community trying to kill the game".

Sweeney says devs "have to choose from either not using tools that can make you way more productive, and probably failing due to competition that does," reiterating his stance that AI will be central to game development going forward, and suggesting that devs who don't use AI tools will fall hopelessly behind.

In a report featuring over 30 game developers from across the industry and around the world, GamesRadar+ repeatedly heard that many game devs do not want to use generative AI for myriad reasons.

Joint The Witcher 4 and CD Projekt Red CEO says fully AI-generated games are coming, but he has "some doubts whether this is really the path to follow."