Source: The Conversation – UK – By Emrah Atasoy, Associate Fellow of English and Comparative Literary Studies & Honorary Research Fellow of IAS, University of Warwick
Is there any past work of fiction that can help us make sense of today’s troubling trends? Taking into account the proliferation of references to obfuscating “Newspeak”, Big Brother-style leaders and impossible-to-circumvent surveillance systems in newspaper articles, this question cries out for a simple answer: “Yes – and that work is George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.”
People on both the political left and right see Orwell’s 1949 novel as the book from the last century that speaks to the present most powerfully. But there are others who regard consumer culture and social media obsession as the primary concerns of today. They have a different answer: “Yes – and that work is Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.”
We, however, think the answer is “both”.
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In the long-running debate over who was the most prophetic writer of their era, Orwell, who was a pupil of Huxley’s at Eton, is generally the favourite.
One reason for this is that international alliances that long seemed stable are now in flux. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, his final novel, Orwell envisioned a future tri-polar world divided into competing blocks with shifting allegiances.
In the short time since the US president, Donald Trump, began his second term, his policies and statements have triggered surprising realignments. The US and Canada, close partners for more than a century, have faced off against each other. And in April, an official from Beijing joined with his counterparts from South Korea and Japan to push back as an unlikely trio against Trump’s new tariffs.
That is perhaps why there is a booming field of “Orwell studies”, with its own academic journal, but not “Huxley studies”. It also probably explains why Nineteen Eighty-Four, but not Brave New World, keeps making its way on to bestseller lists – sometimes in tandem with Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985). “Orwellian” (unlike the rarely heard “Huxleyan”) has few competitors other than “Kafkaesque” as an immediately recognisable adjective linked to a 20th-century author.
Trailer for the film 1984, an adaptation of Orwell’s novel.
As wonderful as Atwood and Kafka are, we are convinced that combining Orwell’s vision with Huxley’s offers scope for deeper analysis. This is true in part because of, not despite, how common it has been to contrast the modes of autocracy Orwell and Huxley describe.
Orwellian and Huxleyan visions as one world
We live in an era when all sorts of systems of control limit our freedoms of expression, identity and religion. Many do not quite fit the template that either Orwell or Huxley imagined, but instead combine elements.
There are certainly places, such as Myanmar, where those in power rely on techniques that immediately bring Orwell to mind, with his focus on fear and surveillance. There are others, such as Dubai, that more readily evoke Huxley, with his focus on pleasure and distraction. In many cases, though, we find a mixture.
This is especially clear if you take a global view. That’s something we specialise in as international and interdisciplinary researchers – a literary scholar from Turkey based in the UK, and a Californian cultural historian of China who has also published on southeast Asia.
Like Orwell, Huxley wrote many books that were not dystopian fiction, but his foray into that genre became his most influential. Brave New World was well known throughout the cold war. In courses and commentaries, it was commonly paired with Nineteen Eighty-Four as a narrative illustrating a shallow society based on indulgence and consumerism, as opposed to the bleaker Orwellian world of suppression of desire and strict control.
While it is common to approach the two books via their contrasts, they can be treated as interconnected and entangled works as well.
Trailer for an adaptation of Brave New World, released in 2020.
During the cold war, some commentators felt that Brave New World showed where capitalist consumerism in the age of television could lead. The west, according to this interpretation, could become a world in which autocrats like those in the novel stayed on top. They would do this by keeping people busy and divided among themselves, happily distracted by entertainment and the drug “soma”.
Orwell, by contrast, seemed to provide a key to unlock the harder mode of control in non-capitalist, Communist Party-run lands, especially those of the Soviet bloc.
Huxley himself in Brave New World Revisited, a non-fiction book he published in the 1950s, thought it was important to think about ways the techniques of power and societal engineering in the two novels could be combined, approached and analysed. And there is even more value in combining the approaches now, when capitalism has gone so global and the autocratic wave keeps reaching new shores in the so-called post-truth era.
Orwellian hard-edged and Huxleyan soft-edged approaches to control and social engineering can be and often are combined. We see this within countries such as China, where the crude repressive methods of a Big Brother state are used against the Uyghur population, while cities such as Shenzhen evoke Brave New World.
We see this mixing of dystopian elements in many countries – variations on the way that science fiction writer William Gibson, author of novels such as Neuromancer (1984), wrote about Singapore with a phrase that had a soft-edged first half and a hard-edged second: “Disneyland with the death penalty.”
This can be a useful first step toward better understanding, and perhaps beginning to try to find a way of improving the troubling world of the mid-2020s. A world in which the smartphone in your pocket both keeps track of your actions and provides an endless set of enticing distractions.
The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
After more than three years and 14 rounds of negotiations, the UK and India have finally announced a free trade agreement (FTA). UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer will formally sign the deal on a visit to India later this year. This is the biggest and most economically significant bilateral trade deal the UK has struck since leaving the EU. It will have implications for both businesses and workers.
In 2024, the UK’s trade with India was worth £43 billion – £17.1 billion of exports and £25.5 billion of imports. Government modelling estimates that trade between the nations will increase by as much as 39% and the UK’s GDP will expand by £4.8 billion or 0.1 percentage points per year as a result.
India’s economy is growing fast. It is expected to expand by 6% annually, becoming the world’s third largest economy by 2028 after the US and China. This certainly makes the deal with the UK very timely.
With a population of more than 1.4 billion and a growing middle class, the country offers huge market potential. Its import demand is predicted to grow by 144% between 2021 and 2035. This combination of strong economic growth and increasing numbers of citizens with disposable cash makes a compelling case for the deal.
Both the UK and India have agreed to reduce tariffs under the deal. India will immediately lower its 150% tariffs on Scotch whisky and gin to 75%, and then to 40% within ten years. Tariffs on foodstuffs such as lamb, salmon and cheeses will fall from around 30% to zero.
Simplified trade rules, including faster customs processing, reduced barriers such as complex labelling requirements, and enhanced support for small businesses should bring gains for companies. Timely customs clearance will support exports of perishable items like Scottish salmon, where delays reduce the product’s shelf life. Similarly, exporters of things like biscuits and cheese will benefit from streamlined paperwork and be able to compete in India’s growing market.
There will no longer be limits on the number of UK businesses allowed to provide telecommunications, environmental and construction services. And UK businesses will not need to set up a company in India or be a resident in India to supply their services in these sectors.
Once the FTA comes into force, which could take up to a year, the UK will allow 99% of Indian imports duty-free access into the UK. The sectors set to benefit most are footwear, textiles and clothing, as well as processed prawns, basmati rice and ready meals. These reductions will mean lower prices for UK consumers, given tariffs on clothing and footwear are 12% and 16% respectively.
Tariffs on luxury cars will also be reduced from more than 100% to 10% under quotas on both sides. The FTA locks in zero tariffs on industrial machinery, advanced materials for use in hi-tech industries, and components for electric vehicles. This will position British suppliers inside a manufacturing market ranked the world’s second-most attractive after China.
In terms of workers, there were well publicised fears that the agreement might lead to UK workers being undercut by Indian counterparts. Plans for a so-called “double contribution convention” grants a three-year exemption from national insurance contributions for Indian employees temporarily working in the UK. But this is a reciprocal deal and is likely to apply only to workers who are seconded from one country to the other, so should not result in UK workers being more expensive to hire.
And although no changes to immigration policy are planned, the FTA will offer easier movement for skilled workers. UK providers of services like construction and telecoms will have access to India’s growing market.
Both countries have committed to encouraging the recognition of professional qualifications. A professional services working group for UK and Indian government officials will provide a forum to monitor and support this initiative.
Timing is everything
Against a backdrop of rising protectionism and geopolitical tensions, the UK-India FTA stands out as a strategic deal. It is also a significant milestone in Britain’s Indo-Pacific “tilt”. This approach gives UK firms a hedge against over-reliance on any single region or country-centric supply chains, to keep trade flowing in the event of more US tariff shocks, for example.
With the US fixation on tariffs, and global supply chains facing continued disruption, securing preferential access to the world’s fastest-growing major economy is a strategic win for the UK. From India’s perspective, the trade deal is aligned with its rise as a “China-plus-one” manufacturing hub (where businesses diversify to ensure they do not invest only in China).
The UK and India share historical ties that are underpinned by cultural, educational and people-to-people links. The UK-India FTA marks a new phase in this relationship, where shared economic interests define a forward-looking partnership between the two countries.
And in terms of its ongoing talks with the EU, India could use the agreement to showcase its willingness to negotiate ambitious trade deals. For the UK, given its own upcoming trade and cooperation talks with the EU, the FTA with India demonstrates that new partnerships can be built while maintaining vital European ties.
Sangeeta Khorana has received funding from UK-ESRC, EU and other international organisations. She is affiliated with Chartered Institute of Export and International Trade as a Trustee Director.
Source: The Conversation – UK – By Neil J. Gostling, Associate Professor in Evolution and Palaeobiology, University of Southampton
Over the course of seven decades, Sir David Attenborough’s documentaries have reshaped how we see the natural world, shifting from colonial-era collecting trips to urgent calls for environmental action.
His storytelling has inspired generations, but has only recently begun to confront the scale of the ecological crisis. To understand how far nature broadcasting has come, it helps to return to where it started.
When Attenborough’s broadcasting career began in the 1950s, Austrian filmmakers Hans and Lotte Hass were already pushing the boundaries of what was possible by taking cameras below the sea and touring the world aboard their schooner, the Xafira.
In one of their 1953 Galapagos films, a crewman handled a sealion pup, having crawled across the volcanic rock of Fernandina honking at sealions to attract them. A penguin and giant tortoise were brought on board Xafira. And as Lotte Hass took photographs, she’d beseech some poor creature to “not be frightened” and “look pleasant”.
This is a world away from today’s expectations, where both research scientists and amateur naturalists are taught to observe without touching or disturbing wildlife. When the Hasses visited the Galápagos, it was still five years before the creation of the national park and the founding of the island’s conservation organisation Charles Darwin Foundation. Now, visitors must stay at least two metres from all animals – and never approach them.
At the same time, television was beginning to shape public perceptions of the natural world. In 1954, Attenborough was working as a young producer on Zoo Quest. By chance, he became its presenter when zoologist Jack Lester became ill.
The programme followed zoologists collecting animals from around the world for London Zoo. Zoo Quest was filmed in exotic locations around the world and then in the studio where the animals found on the expedition were shown “up close”.
David Attenborough’s Zoo Quest for a Dragon aired in 1956.
Yet, Zoo Quest was also groundbreaking. The series brought viewers face-to-face with animals they might never have seen before and pioneered a visual style that made natural history television both entertaining and educational. It helped establish Attenborough’s reputation as a compelling communicator and laid the foundations for a new genre of science broadcasting – one that has evolved, like its presenter, over time.
After a decade in production, Attenborough returned to presenting with Life on Earth (1979), a landmark series that traced the evolution of life from single-celled organisms to birds and apes. Drawing on his long-standing interest in fossils, the series combined zoology, palaeobiology and natural history to create an ambitious new template for science broadcasting.
Life on Earth helped cement Attenborough’s reputation as a trusted communicator and became the foundation of the BBC’s “blue-chip” natural history format – big-budget, internationally produced films that put high-quality cinematic wildlife footage at the forefront of the story. The series did not simply document the natural world. It reframed it, using presenter-led storytelling and global spectacle to shape how audiences understood evolutionary processes.
For much of his career, Attenborough has been celebrated for showcasing the beauty of the natural world. Yet, he has also faced criticism for sidestepping the environmental crises threatening it. Commentators such as the environmental journalist George Monbiot argued that his earlier documentaries, while visually stunning, often avoided addressing the human role in climate change, presenting nature as untouched and avoiding difficult truths about ecological decline.
Building on the legacy of Life on Earth, Attenborough’s later series began to respond to these critiques. Blue Planet (2001) expanded the scope of nature storytelling, revealing the mysteries of the ocean’s most remote and uncharted ecosystems. Its 2017 sequel, Blue Planet II, introduced a more urgent tone, highlighting the scale of plastic pollution and the need for marine conservation.
Although Blue Planet II significantly increased viewers’ environmental knowledge, it did not lead to measurable changes in plastic consumption behaviour – a reminder that awareness alone does not guarantee action. The subsequent Wild Isles (2023) continued the shift towards conservation messaging. While the main series aired in five parts, a sixth episode – Saving Our Wild Isles – was released separately and drew controversy amid claims the BBC had sidelined it for being too political. In reality, the episode delivered a clear call to action.
Attenborough’s latest film, Ocean, continues in this more urgent register, pairing breathtaking imagery with an unflinching assessment of ocean health. After decades of gentle narration, he now speaks with sharpened clarity about the scale of the crisis and the need to act.
A voice for action
In recent years, Attenborough has taken on a new role – not just as a broadcaster, but as a powerful voice in environmental diplomacy. He has addressed world leaders at major summits such as the UN climate conference Cop24 and the World Economic Forum, calling for urgent action on climate change. He was also appointed ambassador for the UK government’s review on the economics of biodiversity.
On the subject of environmemtal diplomacy, Monbiot recently wrote: “A few years ago, I was sharply critical of Sir David for downplaying the environmental crisis on his TV programmes. Most people would have reacted badly but remarkably, at 92, he took this and similar critiques on board and radically changed his approach.”
Attenborough not only speaks. He listens. This is part of his charm and popularity. He is learning and evolving as much as his audience.
What makes Attenborough stand out is the way he speaks. While official climate treaties often rely on technical or legal language, he communicates in emotional, accessible terms – speaking plainly about responsibility, urgency and the moral imperative to protect life on Earth. His calm authority and familiar voice make complex issues easier to grasp and harder to dismiss.
Frequently named Britain’s most trusted public figure, Attenborough has become something of an unofficial diplomat for the planet – apolitical, measured, and often seen as a voice of reason amid populist noise. Despite his criticisms, Attenborough’s documentaries walk a careful line between fragility and resilience, using emotionally ambivalent imagery to prompt reflection. He shares his wonder with the natural world and brings people along with him
Ocean shows our blue planet in more spectacular fashion than Lotte and Hans Hass could ever have imagined. But it is also Attenborough’s most direct reckoning with environmental collapse. With clarity and urgency, it confronts the damage wrought by industrial trawling and habitat destruction.
After 70 years of gently guiding viewers through the natural world, Attenborough’s voice has sharpened. If he once opened our eyes to nature’s wonders, he now challenges us not to look away. As he puts it: “If we save the sea, we save our world. After a lifetime filming our planet, I’m sure that nothing is more important.”
Don’t have time to read about climate change as much as you’d like?
The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
As British prime minister Keir Starmer vowed to “finally take back control of our borders” in a landmark speech on immigration on May 12, it felt a little like déjà vu.
Some nine years earlier, we had heard those exact words repeated over and over in the build-up to the Brexit referendum from former prime minister Boris Johnson and the Leave campaign. It was a refrain also used by Nigel Farage and UKIP.
Of course, this direct reference was the point. Starmer used it to claim that the Labour government’s white paper on immigration was finally going to deliver on what had been promised and desired for many years.
In these opening lines, the tone was set. And as the speech went on, there were echoes of far-right language and ideas reverberating throughout. Starmer lamented the “squalid” state of contemporary politics, the “forces” pulling the country apart, and the previous government’s so-called “experiment in open borders”.
This speech and the white paper that it unveiled are but the latest indication of the rightward direction of travel within UK politics, led by mainstream and far-right parties alike – as exemplified in recent months by the footage released of immigration raids and deportations.
Some will argue this is Labour’s response to the rising threat of Reform UK, with results in the recent local elections seen as evidence of the far right’s growing popularity. So the story goes, Labour is proving that they can be tough on immigration, showing would-be Reform defectors that they can be trusted after all.
This familiar narrative seems to follow a prevailing wisdom which is parroted in political, media and public debates – that appeasing the far right is the way to defeat it. Rather than beating the far right at their own game, however, research shows that these techniques simply legitimise their key talking points and further normalise exclusionary politics.
Starmer’s speech is a case in point. In using “take back control” from the outset, there was no hiding the intended audience or message. Starmer claimed that this project would “close the book on a squalid chapter for our politics, our economy, and our country”, implying that excessive immigration has directly caused these problems and that stopping it solves them. This chimes with classic far-right narratives where migration is framed as the root of all societal ills.
When these kinds of ideas are pushed by those in government, with great authority and influence, they are given greater credence and weight. A strikingly clear example of this came in the summer of 2024 when participants in racist riots waved posters containing the slogan “stop the boats” (a phrase popularised by the previous Tory government).
Another component of the speech that was reminiscent of far-right tropes was the idea that increased immigration was a deliberate tactic by the previous government. Starmer suggested that the Conservatives were actively pursuing a “one-nation experiment in open borders” while deceiving the British public of their intentions.
Far-right conspiracies are often premised on the idea that elites are deliberately encouraging mass immigration. It’s not hard to see how Starmer’s words could act as a dog whistle in this scenario.
These claims are especially damaging when we think about the draconian measures introduced under former Conservative governments, such as the Rwanda policy. Labour is now indicating that these proposals didn’t go far enough.
To justify bringing far stricter immigration rules, Starmer stated that “for the vast majority of people in this country, that is what they have long wanted to see”. As far-right parties so often do, Labour suggests that they are delivering on “people’s priorities”. Yet are they really a priority for people, or are we told that they are a priority which then makes them more of a priority?
Research by Aurelien Mondon, senior lecturer in politics at the University of Bath, illustrates how people’s personal and national priorities differ dramatically. When people in the UK were asked to name the two most important issues facing them personally, immigration didn’t even make it into the top ten.
However, when asked the same question about the issues facing their country, immigration topped the list. How can something that doesn’t affect you in your day-to-day life suddenly become a top priority for your country? We need to challenge the narrative that the government is simply acting on people’s wishes and acknowledge its own capacity to set the agenda.
Other priorities
Some will say that harsher anti-immigration policies are a necessary evil to defeat the far right. However, if people’s personal priorities are really the cost of living, housing and education, why is the government not focusing more of its energy on these things rather than scapegoating migrants?
What’s more, research shows that even based on these terms, these strategies are ineffective and can actually boost the success of the far right electorally. After all, its ideas are being repeatedly normalised.
In all this tactical talk, we lose sight of the fact that people are living the consequences of this rhetoric and policies right now. Rather than focus on Reform’s potential performance in a general election that is probably years away, we should recognise the immediate consequences of the rhetoric that has accompanied this white paper. Even if this did put a dent in Reform’s prospects, what is the meaning of defeating them if the policies they promote become part of the mainstream in the process?
The bottom line is that you do not beat the far right by becoming them. It doesn’t work electorally or ideologically, and even if it did, minoritised communities suffer the consequences regardless. The far right is not some threat lying waiting in the future – its normalisation is happening now.
Katy Brown has received funding from UK Research and Innovation and the Irish Research Council. She is affiliated with the Reactionary Politics Research Network and Manchester Centre for Research in Linguistics.
We agree with the need to ensure economic stability and independence in Canada — but as scientists, we know this is only possible if resource development and exploitation are done responsibly and sustainably. Otherwise, Canada will be burdening itself and future generations with immeasurable costs to the economy, health and quality of life.
Cutting red tape can certainly speed up new development, but environmental regulations are not just red tape. They are designed to ensure the short- and long-term potential consequences of development decisions are fully considered, and are then minimized or avoided.
Without strong environmental impact assessments, development can have devastating impacts on human health, resource sustainability and the rich natural resources Canadians rely upon. We are fearful of a future where obsolete infrastructure and exhausted resources are abandoned by the proponents of development, burdening the public with the cleanup or long-term consequences.
Resources aren’t infinite
Canada has a large land mass bordering three oceans and bountiful freshwater resources, including the Great Lakes. But its resources are not infinite.
Impacts of resource development also extend to people. Effective impact assessment must recognize Indigenous rights and sovereignty, in keeping with the right to self-determination reinforced by the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
Effective land stewardship by Indigenous nations is the foundation of Canada’s rich natural heritage. When Canadian politicians talk about fast-tracking developments and resource exploitation, they inherently ignore the moral and legal rights of Indigenous Peoples and governments that are enshrined in Canada’s Constitution and in international law.
Simply harvesting and selling raw logs or minerals as fast as possible will not solve it. However, Canada can escape its innovation problem by using resources more efficiently in a value-added, circular economy.
The boreal forests and wetlands found in Canada represent the lungs and kidneys of the planet. Canada’s boreal forest is the largest intact forest in the world.
Canada’s wildlife is iconic and careful management of our wildlife benefits both Canada and the world. Canada’s current environmental policies and regulations represent the collective effort of opposing political parties that have recognized the shared need for clean air and water are non-partisan issues.
Environmental requirements
As Canada aggressively explores markets other than the United States for its resources, including the European Union, it will gain a competitive advantage by ensuring exports are sustainable and extracted without harming the environment and local people.
That’s because markets like the European Union now require that all importers of many agricultural and household products prove that their production did not contribute to deforestation. As other jurisdictions see the fallacy of short-term gains at the expense of the environment, Canada can be ahead of the curve in providing sustainable products.
The long-term health of Canada’s economy relies on sustainable resource management, and polling repeatedly shows that Canadians want a healthy environment. Sustainable resource extraction can deliver long-term benefits for nature and future generations, rather than short-term, financial benefits to only a select few.
We implore politicians to ensure that development decisions are informed by rigorous and diverse forms of evidence, and robust and equitable policies that consider environmental justice. They should refrain from focusing solely on the short-term economic windfall. Instead, they must plan for resource use that is sustainable and equitable over the long term.
Four ways to ensure sustainability
We recognize that resource development is integral to maintaining Canadian prosperity and sovereignty — and the good news is that it can be done sustainably.
The details may be complex, but the big picture is simple:
Ensure that Indigenous rights-holders are not simply consulted but actively involved in planning, managing and leading development activities.
Some of Canada’s international neighbours are enacting short-term actions, including cutting environmental regulations and spurring unfettered resource development.
These actions are simultaneously a threat to Canada and an opportunity for Canadians to reject that approach and do better. If Canada chooses that path, it can gain a distinct competitive advantage today and long into the future and become less vulnerable to the political whims of other countries.
Elbows up, Canada — let’s be proud of protecting what we have.
Steven J Cooke receives funding from various government, NGO and industry partners. He is affiliated with the Great Lakes Fishery Commission, the Collaboration for Environmental Evidence, KeepFishWet, and the Canadian Centre for Evidence-Informed Conservation.
Christina Davy receives funding from various Canadian government, NGO and industry partners. She is affiliated with the Canadian Herpetological Society.
Dalal Hanna receives funding from various Canadian Government and NGO partners. She is affiliated with Ripara.
Joseph Bennett receives funding from various government and NGO sources. He is affiliated with the Canadian Institute for Ecology and Evolution and the Canadian Centre for Evidence-Informed Conservation.
However, attempts to circumvent constitutional term limits are not unprecedented elsewhere.
Virtually every country in Latin America has enshrined constitutional term limits as a safeguard against tyranny. These rules vary: some allow only a single term, some permit two, while others enable non-consecutive re-election. Yet several presidents have managed to defy these provisions.
Although the institutional norms and political cultures of these countries differ from those of the U.S., examining how term limits have been dismantled offers valuable insights into how any similar efforts by Trump might unfold.
How presidents have overstayed their term
The most common tactic is for presidents to first ensure their political party in the legislature is fully subservient to them, and then leverage a loyal majority to amend the constitution — a move that has already been initiated in the U.S.
Ortega and Correa successfully used their legislative majorities to pass constitutional amendments that eliminated term limits in Nicaragua and Ecuador.
Some presidents have turned to plebiscites to legitimize constitutional tampering by appealing directly to the electorate and framing the move as a democratic exercise. Chávez employed this strategy in Venezuela, winning a 2009 referendum to abolish term limits.
The absence of a national referendum mechanism in the U.S. — where popular consultations are organized at the sub-national (state) level — limits the options available to a president seeking to remove term limits through this type of populist ploy.
Related to this, populist presidents who have successfully circumvented term limits have typically done so while enjoying extraordinarily high levels of public support.
In contrast, Trump’s approval ratings have consistently remained far lower. Currently, his favourability sits in the low 40s, making any attempt to claim a broad popular mandate for a third term both dubious and precarious.
Rooted in Cold War-era national security ideologies, this orientation casts domestic dissenters (“socialists,” Indigenous movements, unionists) as internal enemies, legitimizing repression as a patriotic duty.
In some countries, military oaths reflect this politicization. In both Nicaragua and Venezuela, these oaths increasingly emphasize loyalty to the president or ruling party and their revolutionary legacy, undermining institutional neutrality.
The absence of a tradition of using soldiers against American citizens and an institutional culture of constitutional loyalty and political neutrality may, at least in principle, provide some protection against the authoritarian overreach that has allowed certain Latin American presidents to remain in power indefinitely.
But a substantial portion of the U.S. armed forces leans politically to the right, like their counterparts in Latin America, raising concerns that partisan sympathies within the military could influence its response to a constitutional crisis.
Furthermore, the increasing use of non-military security forces — such as local police and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) — against civilians demonstrates that the state has a range of instruments at its disposal for exercising control.
For much of U.S. history, this confidence may have been justified, but today, it’s not only complacent but dangerous.
The strength of democratic institutions depends on the political will to defend them. Time will tell if the barriers that exist in the U.S. are strong enough to withstand the pressures now being placed upon them. What is clear is that relying on increasingly tenuous institutional resilience or historical exceptionalism is no substitute for vigilance and active defence of democratic norms.
Pascal Lupien does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Murray Leibbrandt, UCT Chair in Poverty and Inequality Research; Director of ARUA’s African Centre of Excellence for Inequality Resaearch with the Southern Africa Labour and Development Research Unit., University of Cape Town
Inequality is a problem that exists in various forms in sub-Saharan Africa.
Inequality is created by, among other factors, where you are born and live. Alongside this, income, assets, and access to education and healthcare differ among and between populations. These inequalities reinforce each other. The result is persistent poverty, lack of social mobility across generations, increased exposure to climate change, and a lack of inclusive economic growth.
Our recently published book Inequalities in Sub-Saharan Africa: Multidimensional Perspectives and Future Challenges presents an overview of the current situation. It identifies the key dimensions, challenges and causes of inequalities in the region. The book also proposes some solutions for equitable and sustainable development. These include progressive taxation and policies that address inequalities at their roots.
The impact of inequality
Migration: On a global scale, the greatest determinant of individual incomes – and thus of inequalities between individuals – is place of birth. More than half of income’s variability is explained by the country of residence and by the given circumstances at birth. These include being born in a rural environment.
In sub-Saharan Africa, especially in low-income countries, internal migration remains the most prevalent migration pattern. Migration is often the chosen route for people seeking to escape poverty. The rural exodus that characterises many countries in sub-Saharan Africa illustrates this well. Young people in Africa, faced with high unemployment rates, often see migration as the only opportunity for social mobility.
The dynamics of international migration are more complex. Given the high costs involved, international migration concerns only 2.5% of the population in sub-Saharan Africa. This is mostly intra-continental.
Labour market: Access to the labour market remains the main
determinant of inequalities in sub-Saharan Africa.
Labour markets in the region are characterised by high proportions of informal employment. Formal sectors are relatively small (about 15% of total employment on the continent). Since the turn of the century, countries like Kenya have seen their share of informal employment increase significantly (from 73% in 2001 to 83% in 2017). At the same time formal wage employment has declined.
This amplifies inequality because the informal sector is characterised by a lack of protection and high vulnerability. But not all informal activities are precarious. Some serve as springboards into formal jobs.
In the formal sector, wage inequality in Africa is among the highest in the world.
In South Africa, workers in high-skilled jobs earn nearly five times more than those in low-skilled jobs.
Young people entering the labour market have much higher unemployment rates and little chance of regular employment.
Gender inequality: Many gender inequalities persist, particularly access to the labour market. Unpaid care work makes women’s work invisible. In many African countries, women and girls spend more time on unpaid care which limits their economic opportunities.
Climate change: Africa is suffering the most severe impacts – droughts, floods and food insecurity – while contributing less than 5% of global carbon emissions.
Skewed economic growth benefits: Economic growth has led to notably lower reductions in poverty in African countries than elsewhere. Unequal distribution of growth and its capture by those at the top of the income distribution ladder are evidence of non-inclusive economic growth. The richest 1% of Africans received 27% of the total revenue from growth on the continent.
What needs to be done
It is vital to give priority to promoting social and economic inclusion in the development strategies of African countries. Importantly, multidimensional inequalities such as income and health persist because they reinforce each other. Tackling them therefore requires coordinated and coherent policies.
Murray Leibbrandt receives funding from the National Research Foundation of South Africa, the Agence Française de Développement, UK Research and Innovation, the World Institute for Development Economics Research and the International Inequalities Institute of the London School of Economics. He is affiliated with the United Nations University’s World Institute for Development Economics Research and the Jackson School of Global Affairs at Yale University.
Anda David, Rawane Yasser, and Vimal Ranchhod do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Childhood overweight and obesity are a growing public health challenge in South Africa. In 2016, 13% of the country’s children were reported to be obese. This is predicted to double by 2030.
This problem has been linked to the regular consumption of calorie-dense foods high in sugar, salt and fat.
South African children are growing up in a food environment that tends to cause obesity.
One of its key features is intense marketing of unhealthy food and beverages, using various channels and appealing strategies. Misleading health and nutrition claims are sometimes made.
Children are considered lucrative consumers because they can sometimes buy food themselves, influence their parents’ food purchases (they have “pester power”, for one thing), and are future consumers.
Marketers use several strategies that children find appealing, such as cartoon characters, brand mascots, bright colours, colourful packages, catchy songs and slogans.
Although there is no specific regulation of marketing to children in South Africa, the Consumer Protection Act 58 of 2008 has important provisions that guide the marketing of goods and services. The law prohibits false, deceptive marketing.
As a researcher into children’s rights and nutrition I coauthored a recent paper examining how the Consumer Protection Act could be used to address the misleading marketing of unhealthy foods and beverages to children.
In our view, the South African consumer protection legal framework has the necessary scope to address misleading forms of marketing of unhealthy foods to children. But there needs to be better enforcement.
A common strategy in food marketing is the use of misleading health or nutrition claims. These are often written (“contains vitamin C”, “high fibre”, “boosts immunity”, “supports brain health”), or implied by images of fruits and vegetables on the packaging of products.
Some studies in South Africa have demonstrated the misleading use of these claims in television and magazine
advertisements and food packages, including products meant for children.
For instance, fruit juices often claim to be rich in vitamin C, but they have a high sugar content. Dairy products typically boast a high calcium content, but are also high in added sugar. Breakfast cereals frequently highlight their fibre content, despite being ultra-processed and containing a high amount of total carbohydrates and added sugar.
Packaged foods often contain nutrition labels, but the printed words are small and usually obscured by the “healthy” claims. Those are positioned more prominently to capture the attention of the consumer.
Health and nutrition claims can strongly influence purchasing decisions, especially in the South African context. Research has shown that many South African consumers do not read nutrition labels on packaged foods.
Secondly, the Consumer Protection Act, in sections 29 and 41, prohibits the marketing of goods in a way that is reasonably likely to imply a false or misleading representation of facts such as their ingredients, benefits and qualities.
Thirdly, the Consumer Protection Act provisions do not require a consumer to show that they were actually misled by the claim or that children’s health was negatively affected by consuming the food product. It is enough that it has been marketed in a manner that is reasonably likely to mislead children or their parents or caregivers into buying the product.
Mandatory front-of-pack labels are needed in South Africa. They should be easy to understand and highlight nutrients of concern – salt, fat, sugar and artificial sweeteners – to reflect the overall nutritional profile of food products. They can also override the misleading “health halo” effect generated by health or nutrition claims.
The act needs to be used more and this requires much greater consumer activism.
Dispute mechanisms could be stronger and the processes could be streamlined to encourage consumer participation.
The government and public interest organisations need to create greater public awareness of consumer rights.
Aisosa Jennifer Omoruyi is a Research Fellow at the Dullah Omar Institute, University of the Western Cape, which receives funding from the Global Center for Legal Innovation on Food Environments at the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law, Georgetown University Law Center, Washington, DC.
Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Glenda Gray, Distinguished Professor, Infectious Disease and Oncology Research Institute, Faculty of Heath Sciences, University of the Witwatersrand, Executive Director Perinatal HIV Research Unit, Chief Scientific Officer, South African Medical Research Council
The loss of research capability means losing an understanding of how to prevent or treat HIV.Photo by sergey mikheev on Unsplash
The Trump administration’s cuts to funding for scientific research have left many scientists reeling and very worried. At the National Institutes of Health in the US, which has an annual budget of US$47 billion to support medical research both in the US and around the world, nearly 800 grants have been terminated. The administration is considering cutting the overall budget of the National Institutes of Health by 40%.
In South Africa, where tensions are running high with the new Trump administration over land reform and other diplomatic fault lines, scientists have had research grants from the National Institutes of Health suspended. Glenda Gray, who has been at the forefront of HIV/Aids scientific research for decades, assesses the impact of these cuts.
How have the cuts affected your research? When did you start worrying?
There was subliminal fear that started to percolate at the end of January. I said to my team, we need to start looking at our grants. We need to start looking at our exposure.
The first institute to go under the Trump administration’s cuts was USAID. The multibillion-dollar agency that fought poverty and hunger around the world was the first to face the chop.
As a result, a USAID-funded US$46 million consortium on HIV vaccine discovery and experimental medicine to evaluate first in Africa or first in human HIV vaccines was terminated.
Then in mid-April, funding for a clinical trial in Soweto near Johannesburg in South Africa was marked as “pending”. The unit was involved in trials for HIV vaccines. On top of that, four global research networks on HIV/Aids prevention and treatment strategies were told by the National Institutes of Health in the US that they could no longer spend any money in South Africa. The Soweto unit was affiliated with those networks.
So basically you can’t start new studies in South Africa?
There is a great deal of uncertainty. I’m sitting on many calls, working out how we survive in the next couple of months.
I’m going from bankrupt to absolutely bankrupt in terms of our ability to do work.
We’ve been doing scenario planning, looking at all our contingencies, but it’s very hard to know exactly what you’re doing until you have the relevant documentation in front of you.
To all intents and purposes for the next period, South Africa is eliminated from the National Institutes of Health networks and its scientific agenda.
How is the South African government responding?
The government doesn’t have the kind of money to replace the substantial amount of finances that we got through the National Institutes of Health competitive processes. However scientists have been working together with the Medical Research Council, Treasury and various government departments to plot the best way forward.
Everyone’s been writing grant proposals, speaking to the Gates Foundation, speaking to the Wellcome Trust, looking at public-private partnerships, talking to other philanthropists. But the bottom line is that funding is never going to be at the kind of level that will replace the research infrastructure that we’ve got.
To get money from the National Institutes of Health we had to compete with all scientists all over the world. This wasn’t just aid being doled out to us.
Where does this leave the future of research in South Africa for HIV vaccine trials?
South Africa has been able to contribute to global guidelines to improve care. The loss of research capability means that you lose the knowledge or the value of understanding HIV prevention, HIV vaccines or therapeutics.
We in South Africa have the infrastructure, we have the burden of disease, the sciences, the regulator and ethical environment and the ability to answer these questions. And so it’s going to take the world a lot longer to answer these questions without South Africa.
If we slow down research, we slow down HIV vaccine research, we slow down cures and we slow down other HIV prevention methodologies.
And so basically you slow down the process of knowledge generation.
What does it feel like to be a scientist right now in South Africa?
South African scientists are resilient. We’ve had to weather many storms, from the explosion of HIV to Aids denialism … watching people die, getting people onto treatment, having vaccine trials that have failed.
You have to be resilient to be a scientist in this field.
It’s going to be very hard to bring the fight against HIV/Aids back to the current level again.
It feels now like we are deer in the headlights because we don’t know how to pivot.
This is an edited transcript of an interview with Professor Gray aired in a podcast produced by The Conversation UK. You can listen to the full podcast here.
Glenda Gray receives funding from US-NIH which is currently being evaluated. .
Like many other members of his right-wing coalition, Netanyahu appeared delighted at the election of Trump as U.S. president in November, believing that the Republican’s Middle East policies would undoubtedly favor Israeli interests and be coordinated closely with Netanyahu himself.
But it hasn’t quite played out that way. Of course, Washington remains – certainly in official communications – Israel’s strongest global ally and chief supplier of arms. But Trump is promoting a Middle East policy that is, at times, distinctly at odds with the interests of Netanyahu and his government.
As a historian of Israel and the broader Middle East, I recognize that in key ways Trump’s agenda in Riyadh represents a continuation of the U.S. policies, notably in pursuing security relationships with Arab Gulf monarchies – something Israel has long accepted if not openly supported. But in the process, the trip could also put significant daylight between Trump and Netanyahu.
Trump’s official agenda
The four-day trip to the Gulf, Trump’s first policy-driven foreign visit since being elected president, is on the surface more about developing economic and security ties between the U.S. and traditional allies in the Persian Gulf.
Trump is expected to cement trade deals worth tens of billions of dollars between the U.S. and Arab Gulf States, including unprecedented arms purchases, Gulf investments in the U.S. and even the floated Qatari gift of a palatial 747 intended for use as Air Force One.
There is also the possibility of a security alliance between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia.
So far, so good for Israel’s government. Prior to the Oct. 7 attacks, Israel was already in the process of forging closer ties to the Gulf states, with deals and diplomatic relations established with the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain through the Abraham Accords that the Trump administration itself facilitated in September 2020. A potential normalization of ties with Saudi Arabia was also in the offing.
Dealing with Tehran
But central to the agenda this week in Riyadh will be issues where Trump and Netanyahu are increasingly not on the same page. And that starts with Iran.
While the country won’t be represented, Iran will feature heavily at Trump’s summit, as it coincides with the U.S. administration’s ongoing diplomatic talks with Tehran over its nuclear program. Those negotiations have now concluded four rounds. And despite clear challenges, American and Iranian delegations continue to project optimism about the possibility of reaching a deal.
The approach marks a change of course for Trump, who in 2018 abandoned a similar deal to the one he is now largely looking to forge. It also suggests the U.S. is currently opposed to the idea of direct armed confrontation with Iran, against Netanayhu’s clear preference.
Diplomacy with Tehran is also favored by Gulf states as a way of containing Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Even Saudi Arabia – Tehran’s long-term regional rival that, like Israel, opposed the Obama-era Iran nuclear diplomacy – is increasingly looking for a more cautious engagement with Iran. In April, the Saudi defense minister visited Tehran ahead of the recent U.S.-Iranian negotiations.
Netanyahu has built his political career on the looming threat from a nuclearized Iran and the necessity to nip this threat in the bud. He unsuccessfully tried to undermine President Barack Obama’s initial efforts to reach an agreement with Iran – resulting in 2015’s Iran nuclear deal. But Netanyahu had more luck with Obama’s successor, helping convince Trump to withdraw from the agreement in 2018.
So Trump’s about-turn on Iran talks has irked Netanyahu – not only because it happened, but because it happened so publicly. In April, the U.S. president called Netanyahu to the White House and openly embarrassed him by stating that Washington is pursuing diplomatic negotiations with Tehran.
Split over Yemen
A clear indication of the potential tension between the Trump administration and the Israeli government can be seen in the ongoing skirmishes involving the U.S., Israel and the Houthis in Yemen.
After the Houthis fired a missile at the Tel Aviv airport on May 4 – leading to its closure and the cancellation of multiple international flights – Israel struck back, devastating an airport and other facilities in Yemen’s capital.
But just a few hours after the Israeli attack, Trump announced that the U.S. would not strike the Houthis anymore, as they had “surrendered” to his demands and agreed not to block passage of U.S. ships in the Red Sea.
It became clear that Israel was not involved in this new understanding between the U.S. and the Houthis. Trump’s statement was also notable in its timing, and could be taken as an effort to calm the region in preparation of his trip to Saudi Arabia. The fact that it might help smooth talks with Iran too – Tehran being the Houthis’ main sponsor – was likely a factor as well.
Timing is also relevant in Israel’s latest attack on Yemeni ports. They took place on May 11 – the eve of Trump setting off for his visit to Saudi Arabia. In so doing, Netanyahu may be sending a signal not only to the Houthis but also to the U.S. and Iran. Continuing to attack the Houthis might make nuclear talks more difficult.
Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warns of the Iran nuclear threat at the United Nations in 2012. Mario Tama/Getty Images
This, many political commentators have argued, is the main reason why Netanyahu backed off from the last stage of the ceasefire agreement with Hamas in March – something which would have required the withdrawal of the Israeli army from the Gaza Strip.
Since the collapse of the ceasefire, Israel’s army has mobilized in preparation for a renewed Gaza assault, scheduled to start after the end of Trump’s trip to the Gulf.
With members of the Netanayhu government openly supporting the permanent occupation of the strip and declaring that bringing back the remaining Israeli hostages is no longer a top priority, it seems clear to me that deescalation is not on Netanyahu’s agenda.
Trump himself has noted recently both the alarming state of the hostages and the grave humanitarian crisis in Gaza. Now, in addition to the release of Israeli-American hostage Edan Alexander, the U.S. is also engaged in negotiations with Hamas over ceasefire and aid – ignoring Netanyahu in the process.
The bottom dollar
Current U.S. policy in the region may all be serving a greater aim for Trump: to secure billions of dollars of Gulf money for the American economy and, some have said, himself. But to achieve that requires a stable Middle East, and continued war in Gaza and Iran inching closer to nuclear capabilities might disrupt that goal.
Of course, a diplomatic agreement over Tehran’s nuclear plans is still some way off. And Trump’s foreign policy is notably prone to abrupt turns. But whether guided by a dealmaker’s instincts to pursue trade and economic deals with wealthy Gulf states, or by a genuine – and related – desire to stabilize the region, his administration is increasingly pursuing policies that go against the interests of the current Israeli government.
Asher Kaufman does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Source: The Conversation – USA – By Amitrajeet A. Batabyal, Distinguished Professor, Arthur J. Gosnell Professor of Economics, & Interim Head, Department of Sustainability, Rochester Institute of Technology
President Donald Trump has long been preoccupied by the trade deficit — the gap between what the U.S. sells to the rest of the world and what it buys from it. He recently declared the issue a national emergency and used trade deficit data to calculate so-called “reciprocal tariffs” targeting nearly 100 countries. Although those specific tariffs are now on pause, Trump’s concern with the trade deficit persists.
As an economist, I know there are two basic ways for a country to reduce a trade deficit: import less or export more. While Trump has focused on the former strategy, a more productive path may lie in the latter – especially by looking at untapped opportunities in rural America.
New research is starting to fill that gap. Economists recently found that urban businesses export significantly more than rural ones – a difference with significant implications for national trade.
The urban-rural export gap
Looking at data from the Census Bureau’s Annual Business Survey as well as trade statistics from 2017 to 2020, researchers used econometric techniques to measure the urban-rural export gap. They also examined two categories of potential causes – “explained” and “unexplained.”
The first is due to differences in what economists call “endowments” – for example, a region’s digital infrastructure, its access to renewable energy and its opportunities for high-tech employment. These endowments can be observed and therefore explained.
The second is due to what economists call “structural advantage.” This refers to attributes of a region that matter for export performance but can’t be observed and, as a result, remain unexplained.
They found that most of the urban-rural export gap is due to explained differences. That means rural businesses could close the export gap if they were provided with similar endowments – meaning comparable access to renewable energy, similar digital infrastructure and analogous opportunities for high-tech employment – to their urban counterparts.
Even more strikingly, the unexplained component was negative – which means rural businesses outperform expectations given their characteristics. That suggests rural regions have significant untapped export potential.
Several factors collectively account for the urban export advantage. First, urban regions have a greater concentration of highly educated science and technology workers. Urban businesses also tend to be larger and more tech-savvy, and because they have better access to broadband, they use cloud technology more frequently. Urban areas also have more foreign-born business owners who may leverage their international networks.
However, many of these differences suggest possible policy solutions. For instance, since cloud adoption depends on broadband availability, it follows that investing in digital infrastructure could boost rural exports. Also, rural manufacturers, especially in sectors like metals manufacturing, show comparable or higher export intensity per worker than their urban counterparts. So encouraging rural manufacturing would be one way to reduce the urban-rural export gap.
Rethinking trade and rural development
I think this research has important policy implications.
First, it shifts some of the focus away from other countries as the root cause of the trade deficit. And second, it bolsters the case for what economists call “place-based policies” targeting specific geographic areas – as opposed to “people-based policies,” which provide support directly to individuals.
The 2022 CHIPS and Science Act had special significance to rural areas.
During the Biden administration, three major laws – the Inflation Reduction Act, the CHIPS and Science Act and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act – directed significant federal funds to rural areas. About 43% of funds from those laws – or US$440 billion – was designated as either “rural relevant” or as “rural stipulated,” meaning the funds were either geographically targeted or designed to address disproportionately rural challenges.
Such massive investments in rural regions have led researchers and policymakers to question whether rural export underperformance stems from differences in observable endowments – in other words, things like access to broadband – or from inherent disadvantages that are much harder to deal with.
In my view, this research provides compelling evidence that much of the urban-rural export gap is due to unequal distribution of productive assets, rather than inherent rural disadvantages. With appropriate investments in digital infrastructure, human capital and support for export-capable industries, America’s rural regions could play a much larger role in global trade. These findings also suggest the value of continued federal support for rural development efforts.
In other words, if the U.S. wants to shrink its trade deficit, one answer could be more innovation in rural manufacturing.
Amitrajeet A. Batabyal does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Smartwatches and other wearable devices can feel almost magical. Strap on a Fitbit, Apple Watch or Samsung Gear and you’re suddenly presented with a stream of data generated by – and about – your body: step counts, heart rate, blood oxygen level, calories burned and more.
Wearables offer tools that help people monitor and understand their bodies and, so the promise goes, improve their lives. Apple CEO Tim Cook has even said the technology company aspires to save your life.
Wearables rely on complicated sets of sensors and computer systems to create data for each user. As these devices become more common – and more complex – I worry that people may be tempted to think less about how they work. As a result, they might accept data at face value without considering how it was generated, whether it’s accurate, or even if it could put them at risk.
So to get the maximum value from wearable technologies, it’s worth reflecting on the differences between what these devices seem to do and what’s actually happening behind the screen. Here are a few key points to remember.
1. Steps aren’t really steps
Wearable fitness trackers gained popularity in the early 2010s for their ability to count steps and measure things such as distance, calories burned and flights of stairs climbed. While it’s tempting to think so-called step counts reflect the number of times a wearer’s feet have completed the action of taking a step, that is not the case.
In reality, a combination of sensors and algorithms work together to produce a data point called “a step.” In most instances, something called an accelerometer measures change in the wearable’s velocity. This is checked against an algorithm, which provides an automatic assessment of whether enough velocity has been reached to count as a step. These components measure how much the wearable moves, not the person. Shaking one’s wrist very quickly can sometimes create a “step,” while walking in place might not count steps.
2. Some skin tones don’t ‘work’ as well as others
Blood oxygen sensors have become incorporated into many smartwatches. They use a process called photoplethysmography, which uses tiny green LED lights on the underside of a smartwatch to track how blood flows through your wrist.
There’s an entire industry made up of people called data brokers who buy large datasets from technology companies and then sell them to advertisers, market analysts or other groups that may be interested in acquiring them.
It’s important to check all settings for options to reduce or eliminate data sharing. Otherwise, your private information might not remain private for long. In 2018, for example, the exercise app Strava released a “heat map” showing the running and cycling routes of all its users through the location data it had collected – and accidentally disclosed the location of multiple secret military bases around the world.
Most devices include boilerplate language about how the data they provide the wearer should be used recreationally and not replace formal diagnostics from doctors. Even though Apple has received FDA clearance for some of its health testing features and they may be quite useful for monitoring purposes, if you’re relying on data for health purposes, it’s important to consult a doctor.
5. Wearables can’t predict the future
OK, maybe this seems like it should be obvious. But it’s not.
These technologies use sensors such as heart rate monitors and thermometers to detect changes in a wearer’s baseline. While these sickness forecasts may be helpful, they’re like weather reports for the body, detecting changes in the body’s internal atmosphere using available sensors and algorithms. Any claim to predict the future is based on looking for patterns in information from the past.
While wearable tech can offer powerful insights, understanding how devices work is crucial for making sense of the data they produce. A little skepticism goes a long way: It can challenge inflated promises and protect users. In the end, wearables are best understood as interesting but imperfect tools − not magic wands.
James Gilmore does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Ken G. Drouillard, Professor, Great Lakes Institute for Environmental Research and Director of the School of the Environment, University of Windsor
A country’s population is affected by, and in turn affects, environmental and economic issues.(Shutterstock)
These two facets of population crises — explosions and declines — are occurring in different parts of the world, and have a global impact on the environment and on economies. Discussions about achieving economic and environmental sustainability must consider population changes, technology and the environment, given these concepts are closely interwoven.
Population explosions and declines are related to both environmental and economic instability; some countries make reactionary choices that trade off short-term domestic economic progress over the environment.
Like Malthus, Ehrlich was criticized for a crisis “that never happened” because human ingenuity, a byproduct of population, overcomes the worst fears of environmentalists. This counter-argument relies on technological advances making more efficient use of resources while lowering the environmental impacts.
Technological progress positively contributes to national economies over the long term. However, early adoption of green technology often relies on finance and government incentives that may imply short-term economic burdens. Yet when green technology is implemented and coupled to slowing population growth, it leads to decreasing national environmental footprints that pave a way towards joint environmental and economic sustainability.
The crisis of population declines
Declining populations cause inverted age pyramids with larger numbers of elderly people. These shifting demographics cause economic instability. They also constrain technological progress and social security.
The global population is predicted to peak between the mid-2060s to 2100, stabilizing at 10.2 billion from its present 8.2 billion.
In their book, Empty Planet, political scientist Darrell Bricker and political commentator John Ibbitson warn that zero population growth will happen even faster. They argue once a country decreases its fertility to below replacement (2.1 children per woman), the social reinforcements of increasing urbanization, costs of raising children and increased empowerment over family planning make it almost impossible to increase the birth rate.
For highly affluent countries, the per capita GDP is decreasing as the proportion of elderly in the population increases. Although this pattern doesn’t hold when less affluent countries are added, the figure demonstrates tangible economic impacts for countries grappling with aging populations.
A graph showing the percentage of elderly people in a country’s population, correlated with GDP and adjusted for inflation. (K. Drouillard), CC BY
Simultaneous explosions and declines
Affluent nations facing decline can react to economic instability in ways that counter global economic and environmental sustainability.
In the past, affluent nations were the drivers of green technology. However, economic instability from population declines can cause reluctance to invest, adopt and share green technology crucial for mitigating environmental damage at the global scale.
The issue is compounded by the fact that many countries overlook how their own decline in population growth contributes to economic instability. They instead focus on short-term solutions to their economic situation that may include unsustainable resource use.
Left unaddressed, the real issue of population decline becomes unresolved, allowing social anxieties against immigration and global trade to grow. This can exacerbate the issue halting technology sharing, slowing economic growth and increasing economic inequality and environmental damage.
Our research indicates that Canada and other affluent nations need to establish longer-term solutions to economic instabilities that mitigate environmental damage while promoting sustainable national and global economies.
The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals offer pathways for economic, social and environmental sustainability. However, realizing these goals requires society to fully acknowledge the intertwined relationships between population growth, economy, environment and international technology-sharing in ways that transcend short-term national interests and reactionary policies.
Ken G. Drouillard receives funding from Natural Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), Canadian Water Agency, Environment and Climate Change Canada, St. Clair River Conservation Authority and North Shore of Lake Superior Remedial Action Plans.
Claudio N. Verani receives/has received funding from the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), U.S. Department of Energy (DoE), Petroleum Research Fund (ACS-PRF), and the Natural Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC).
Marcelo Arbex has received funding from University of Windsor UW-SSHRC Explore.
Colossal’s so-called dire wolf is not a resurrected species. It’s a genetically modified grey wolf. Its creation is a publicity stunt designed to generate profit, with serious consequences.
TIME reports on claims that Colossal Biosciences has brought back the dire wolf.
Jenga approach to conservation
Conservation aims to safeguard ecosystems by preserving the networks of interaction between animals and their environment. Human activity has caused widespread habitat loss, driving extinction rates to levels estimated to be about 1,000 times higher than the natural background rate. We are living through a biodiversity crisis, and conservation remains our only real defence against further declines.
Colossal proposes de-extinction to combat this crisis, using a Jenga-block metaphor to explain their approach. The ecosystem is a Jenga tower, with each species representing a block — and losing a species weakens the structure, pushing it closer to collapse. Colossal Biosciences proposes that inserting a de-extinct species where a block was lost could help restore ecosystem stability and prevent collapse.
The premise isn’t entirely flawed; in some cases, introducing an animal into an unstable ecosystem to fill a lost ecological role can help restore balance. This is similar to reintroducing a species to an area where it once lived, which is a well-established conservation strategy.
Conservation and cloning
Likewise, cloning technology has the potential to aid in meaningful conservation projects. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has successfully used the technology to help restore the black-footed ferret, a species once considered extinct.
The flaw in Colossal’s plan is that the animals they focus on — Ice Age megafauna like the mammoth and dire wolf — no longer belong to any modern ecosystem. Most of the species they once interacted with disappeared, along with their habitats, roughly 10,000 years ago.
These synthetic animals are the wrong shape for our unstable Jenga tower. Forcing them into the gap might make the ecosystem more likely to collapse.
‘Frankensheep’: A cautionary tale
A warning tale of misused cloning technology comes from Montana rancher Arthur Schubarth, who illegally cloned hybrid bighorn sheep — “Frankensheep” — for trophy hunting. His operation not only exploited endangered species for profit, but also triggered outbreaks of infectious disease, demonstrating the risks that unchecked cloning technology poses to wildlife and ecosystems.
One of the most damaging aspects of Colossal’s announcement is the perpetuation of a decades-old myth that technology will save us. It would be comforting to believe we can genetically engineer our way out of the current biodiversity crisis, but that is not our reality.
Introducing Ice Age animals would have unpredictable and potentially damaging consequences. And even if we focused on more suitable animals — those whose ecosystems still exist and could benefit from de-extinction — we could never keep pace with the current rate of biodiversity loss.
Colossal’s de-extinction project also doesn’t tackle the forces driving extinction like climate change, habitat loss, exploitation, pollution and invasive species.
The Toronto Zoo and the Association of Zoos and Aquariums have issued warnings against participating in the development or display of de-extinct animals. Still, some zoos may jump at the opportunity to boost ticket sales by offering the public a glimpse of this sci-fi spectacle.
As Colossal profits from marketing its greenwashed construct and hints at the creation of “Pleistocene Parks,” it is still unclear what this technology really means for the future of conservation.
Proposed changes to the act would give industrial activities greater freedom to destroy the habitats endangered species depend on — at a time when habitat loss remains the leading threat to species. A project marketed to rescue biodiversity could, instead, help speed up its decay.
We are deeply concerned about the implications of Colossal’s announcement, but we hope this moment drives more public interest and funding toward the difficult and less glamorous work that needs to be done to protect habitat and conserve biodiversity. The fanfare around Colossal’s genetic engineering feat should not distract from the global biodiversity crisis, which remains truly dire.
David Coltman receives funding from NSERC, Genome Canada and Ontario Genomics.
Carson Mitchell, Liam Alastair Wayde Carter, and Tommy Galfano do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Craters in the lunar surface are visible in this photo taken during the Apollo 11 mission. NASA via AP
April 2025 was a busy month for space.
Pop icon Katy Perry joined five other civilian women on a quick jaunt to the edge of space, making headlines. Meanwhile, another group of people at the United Nations was contemplating a critical issue for the future of space exploration: the discovery, extraction and utilization of natural resources on the Moon.
As a space lawyer and co-founder of For All Moonkind, a nonprofit dedicated to protecting human heritage in outer space, I know that the Moon could be the proving ground for humanity’s evolution into a species that lives and thrives on more than one planet. However, this new frontier raises complex legal questions.
Space, legally
Outer space – including the Moon – from a legal perspective, is a unique domain without direct terrestrial equivalent. It is not, like the high seas, the “common heritage of humankind,” nor is it an area, like Antarctica, where commercial mining is prohibited.
Instead, the 1967 Outer Space Treaty – signed by more than 115 nations, including China, Russia and the United States – establishes that the exploration and use of space are the “province of all humankind.” That means no country may claim territory in outer space, and all have the right to access all areas of the Moon and other celestial bodies freely.
The fact that, pursuant to Article II of the treaty, a country cannot claim territory in outer space, known as the nonappropriation principle, suggests to some that property ownership in space is forbidden.
Can this be true? If your grandchildren move to Mars, will they never own a home? How can a company protect its investment in a lunar mine if it must be freely accessible by all? What happens, as it inevitably will, when two rovers race to a particular area on the lunar surface known to host valuable water ice? Does the winner take all?
As it turns out, the Outer Space Treaty does offer some wiggle room. Article IX requires countries to show “due regard” for the corresponding interests of others. It is a legally vague standard, although the Permanent Court of Arbitration has suggested that due regard means simply paying attention to what’s reasonable under the circumstances.
First mover advantage – it’s a race
The treaty’s broad language encourages a race to the Moon. The first entity to any spot will have a unilateral opportunity to determine what’s legally “reasonable.” For example, creating an overly large buffer zone around equipment might be justified to mitigate potential damage from lunar dust.
On top of that, Article XII of the Outer Space Treaty assumes that there will be installations, like bases or mining operations, on the Moon. Contrary to the free access principle, the treaty suggests that access to these may be blocked unless the owner grants permission to enter.
Both of these paths within the treaty would allow the first person to make it to their desired spot on the Moon to keep others out. The U.N. principles in their current form don’t address these loopholes.
The draft U.N. principles released in April mirror, and are confined by, the language of the Outer Space Treaty. This tension between free access and the need to protect – most easily by forbidding access – remains unresolved. And the clock is ticking.
The Moon’s vulnerable legacy
The U.S. Artemis program aims to return humans to the Moon by 2028, China has plans for human return by 2030, and in the intervening years, more than 100 robotic missions are planned by countries and private industry alike. For the most part, these missions are all headed to the same sweet spot: the lunar south pole. Here, peaks of eternal light and deep craters containing water ice promise the best mining, science and research opportunities.
Regions of the lunar south pole, left, and north pole, right, contain water in the form of ice (blue), which could be useful for space agencies hoping to set up lunar bases. NASA
In this excitement, it’s easy to forget that humans already have a deep history of lunar exploration. Scattered on the lunar surface are artifacts displaying humanity’s technological progress.
More recently, in 2019, China’s Chang’e 4 achieved the first soft landing on the Moon’s far side. And in 2023, India’s Chandrayaan-3 became the first to land successfully near the lunar south pole.
These sites memorialize humanity’s baby steps off our home planet and easily meet the United Nations definition of terrestrial heritage, as they are so “exceptional as to transcend national boundaries and to be of common importance for present and future generations of all humanity.”
The international community works to protect such sites on Earth, but those protection protocols do not extend to outer space.
Astronaut footprints are still intact on the lunar surface because the Moon doesn’t have weather. But nearby spacecraft or rovers could kick up dust and cover them. AP Photo
The more than 115 other sites on the Moon that bear evidence of human activity are frozen in time without degradation from weather, animal or human activity. But this could change. A single errant spacecraft or rover could kick up abrasive lunar dust, erasing bootprints or damaging artifacts.
Protection and the Outer Space Treaty
In 2011, NASA recommended establishing buffer, or safety zones, of up to 1.2 miles (2 kilometers) to protect certain sites with U.S. artifacts.
Because it understood that outright exclusion violates the Outer Space Treaty, NASA issued these recommendations as voluntary guidelines. Nevertheless, the safety zone concept, essentially managing access to and activities around specific areas, could be a practical tool for protecting heritage sites. They could act as a starting point to find a balance between protection and access.
Building on this agreement, the international community could require specific access protocols — such as a permitting process, activity restrictions, shared access rules, monitoring and other controls — for heritage sites on the Moon. If accepted, these protective measures for heritage sites could also work as a template for scientific and operational sites. This would create a consistent framework that avoids the perception of claiming territory.
At this time, the draft U.N. principles released in April 2025 do not directly address the opposing concepts of access and protection. Instead, they defer to Article I of the Outer Space Treaty and reaffirm that everyone has free access to all areas of the Moon and other celestial bodies.
As more countries and companies compete to reach the Moon, a clear lunar legal framework can guide them to avoid conflicts and preserve historical sites. The draft U.N. principles show that the international community is ready to explore what this framework could look like.
Michelle L.D. Hanlon is affiliated with For All Moonkind, a not-for-profit organization committed to protecting human cultural heritage in outer space starting with the Apollo lunar landing sites.
Knowing the calorie content of foods does not help people understand which foods are healthier, according to a study I recently co-authored in the Journal of Retailing. When study participants considered calorie information, they rated unhealthy food as less unhealthy and healthy food as less healthy. They were also less sure in their judgments.
In other words, calorie labeling didn’t help participants judge foods more accurately. It made them second-guess themselves.
Across nine experiments with over 2,000 participants, my colleague and I tested how people use calorie information to evaluate food. For example, participants viewed food items that are generally deemed healthier, such as a salad, or ones that tend to be less healthy, such as a cheeseburger, and were asked to rate how healthy each item was. When people did not consider calorie information, participants correctly saw a big gap between the healthy and unhealthy foods. But when they considered calorie information, those judgments became more moderate.
In another experiment in the study, we found that asking people to estimate the calorie content of food items reduced self-reported confidence in their ability to judge how healthy those foods were − and that drop in confidence is what led them to rate these food items more moderately. We observed this effect for calories but not for other nutrition metrics such as fat or carbohydrates, which consumers tend to view as less familiar.
This pattern repeated across our experiments. Instead of helping people sharpen their evaluations, calorie information seemed to create what researchers call metacognitive uncertainty, or a feeling of “I thought I understood this, but now I’m not so sure.” When people aren’t confident in their understanding, they tend to avoid extreme judgments.
People’s calorie needs vary widely.
Because people see calorie information so often, they believe they know how to use it effectively. But these findings suggest that the very familiarity of calorie counts can backfire, creating a false sense of understanding that leads to more confusion, not less. My co-author and I call this the illusion of calorie fluency. When people are asked to judge how healthy a food item is based on calorie data, that confidence quickly unravels and their healthiness judgments become less accurate.
Why it matters
These findings have important implications for public health and for the businesses that are investing in calorie transparency. Public health policies assume that providing calorie information will drive more informed choices. But our research suggests that visibility isn’t enough – and that calorie information alone may not help. In some cases, it might even lead people to make less healthy choices.
This does not mean that calorie information should be removed. Rather, it needs to be supported with more context and clarity. One possible approach is pairing calorie numbers with decision aids such as a traffic light indicator or an overall nutrition score, which both exist in some European countries. Alternatively, calorie information about an item could be accompanied by clear reference points explaining how much of a person’s recommended daily calories it contains – though this may be challenging because of how widely daily calorie needs vary.
Our study highlights a broader issue in health communication: Just because information is available doesn’t mean it’s useful. Realizing that calorie information can seem easier to understand than it actually is can help consumers make more informed, confident decisions about what they eat.
What still isn’t known
In our studies, we found that calorie information is especially prone to creating an illusion of understanding. But key questions remain.
For example, researchers don’t yet know how this illusion interacts with the growing use of health and wellness apps, personalized nutrition tools or AI-based food recommendations. Future research could look at whether these tools actually help people feel more sure of their choices – or just make them feel confident without truly understanding the information.
The Research Brief is a short take on interesting academic work.
Deidre Popovich does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Jimmie Christian Duncan learned in April 2025 that a Louisiana judge had dismissed his capital murder conviction and he would no longer face the prospect of execution. In 1998, a jury convicted Duncan of murdering his girlfriend’s 23-month-old daughter, and he had been on death row ever since.
But the Bayou State is not the only death penalty state with a wrongful conviction problem. Death row exonerations – when someone is released after being sentenced – have become more common in the United States. More than 200 people have been freed in the past half-century.
DNA evidence has been involved in only a handful of those cases, but not Duncan’s. Most of the others have happened when defense lawyers discovered new evidence of faulty eyewitness identification, or when prosecutorial misconduct cast doubt on the legality of the conviction.
Duncan’s case stands out because it was the first successful use of Louisiana’s 2021 factual innocence statute. Under that law, reconsideration of convictions can be based on new facts rather than just constitutional or legal violations of a defendant’s rights.
As Louisiana District Judge Alvin Sharp explained in his April 2025 opinion in Duncan’s case, “To possibly be successful on a ‘factual innocence’ claim, a Petitioner shall present new, reliable, and non-cumulative evidence that would be legally admissible at trial and that was not known or discoverable at or prior to trial…”
In overturning Duncan’s conviction, Sharp highlighted new understandings about the unreliability of so-called bite mark analysis that played a key role in Duncan’s case. He also cited the testimony of “a very compelling witness” who testified that the child’s death was “accidental drowning,” not homicide.
It might seem odd that it took the factual innocence statute in 2021 to make what Sharp did possible. But as a death penalty scholar, I believe it’s the latest reminder that, even in capital cases, the quest for justice has not always been the United States’ highest value.
The shadow of Herrera v. Collins
States such as Louisiana have enacted factual innocence statutes because there is no nationwide, constitutional bar to executing people who are factually innocent. More than three decades ago, the U.S. Supreme Court turned back a challenge to the constitutionality of executing people who might not have committed the crime for which they were sentenced to death.
In February 1992, 10 years after his conviction, Leonel Herrera filed a writ of habeas corpus – a legal action used to challenge the legality of a person’s imprisonment. Herrera said he had new evidence showing he had not committed the murder for which he had been sentenced to death.
Herrera’s lawyers argued that executing a factually innocent person would violate the Eighth Amendment, prohibiting cruel and unusual punishment. He also said it would violate the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of due process of law.
Herrera wanted the courts to consider affidavits given long after Herrera’s conviction. Those affidavits claimed that Raul Herrera, Leonel Herrera’s brother, had said before he died that he, not Leonel, was guilty of the killing for which Leonel had been convicted.
But the Supreme Court refused to consider that evidence.
A 6–3 majority concluded that evidence of actual innocence was “not relevant … absent some other constitutional violation.” This ruling means that so long as applicable legal procedures are followed, it doesn’t matter whether the outcome is correct.
In 1992, the Supreme Court rejected a challenge to the constitutionality of executing people who might not have committed the crime for which they were sentenced to death. AP Photo/Alex Brandon
The court allowed prisoners who can show proof of innocence to file a habeas petition even after the normal time limit for filing one. But it did not say that executing the innocent would violate the Constitution.
States have responded to this by enacting laws that allow people convicted of crimes to bring actual innocence claims, based on newly discovered DNA evidence.
In 2012, Massachusetts passed a law allowing prisoners to seek “forensic or scientific analysis” of evidence in support of a claim of “factual innocence of the crime for which the person has been convicted.”
Five other states – Louisiana, Maryland, Texas, Virginia and Utah – have passed laws allowing post-conviction actual innocence claims, even without DNA evidence.
Under the Louisiana statute that Duncan invoked, “A petitioner who has been convicted of an offense may seek post-conviction relief on the grounds that he is factually innocent of the offense for which he was convicted.”
In Louisiana, new evidence can be “scientific, forensic, physical, or nontestimonial documentary evidence.” Under some conditions, testimonial evidence is also admissible to prove innocence in post-conviction cases.
Someone seeking such relief must prove “by clear and convincing evidence that, had the new evidence been presented at trial, no rational juror would have found the petitioner guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.”
A prison warden discusses the gurney used for lethal injections at the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola in September 2009. AP Photo/Judi Bottoni
Opposition to actual innocence
Many people oppose allowing convicted criminals to reopen their cases, even if they are, like Duncan, on death row.
In the Herrera case, for example, Chief Justice William Rehnquist said that doing so would have a “very disruptive effect … on the need for finality in capital cases.”
It looks like Louisiana will again be weighing the value of finality and justice in capital cases.
Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry wants to see its actual innocence law repealed, calling it a “woke, hug-a-thug policy” and arguing that “once a verdict has been finalized, there are no more ‘get out of jail free’ cards.”
A bill in the Louisiana Legislature to change the law has been introduced in the 2025 legislative session.
The stakes could not be higher.
As former Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun wrote in his Herrera dissent, “Just as an execution without adequate safeguards is unacceptable, so too is an execution when the condemned prisoner can prove that he is innocent. The execution of a person who can show that he is innocent comes perilously close to simple murder.”
Louisiana will soon have to decide how close it is willing to come to producing that tragic result.
Austin Sarat does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Source: The Conversation – USA – By Jacob Mchangama, Research Professor of Political Science and Executive Director of The Future of Free Speech, Vanderbilt University
Support among young people for allowing controversial or offensive speech has dropped sharply.J Studios/Getty Images
For much of the 20th century, young Americans were seen as free speech’s fiercest defenders. But now, young Americans are growing more skeptical of free speech.
According to a March 2025 report by The Future of Free Speech, a nonpartisan think tank where I am executive director, support among 18- to 34-year-olds for allowing controversial or offensive speech has dropped sharply in recent years.
In 2021, 71% of young Americans said people should be allowed to insult the U.S. flag, which is a key indicator of support for free speech, no matter how distasteful. By 2024, that number had fallen to just 43% – a 28-point drop. Support for pro‑LGBTQ+ speech declined by 20 percentage points, and tolerance for speech that offends religious beliefs fell by 14 points.
This drop contributed to the U.S. having the third-largest decline in free speech support among the 33 countries that The Future of Free Speech surveyed – behind only Japan and Israel.
Why has this support diminished so dramatically?
Shift from past generations
In the 1960s, college students led what was called the free speech movement, demanding the right to speak freely about political matters on campus, often clashing with older, more censorious generations.
Sociologist Jean Twenge has tracked changes in attitudes using data from the General Social Survey, a biennial survey conducted by the University of Chicago’s National Opinion Research Center.
Since the 1970s, this survey has asked Americans whether controversial figures – racists, communists and anti-religionists – should be allowed to speak. Support for such rights generally increased from the Greatest Generation, born between 1900-1924, to Gen X, born between 1965-1979.
But Gen Z, those born between 1995-2004, has reversed that trend. Despite the fact that the Cold War, which pitted the communist Soviet Union and its allies against the democratic West, ended more than three decades ago, even support for the free speech rights of communists has declined.
Political drift and cultural realignment
At the same time, some data suggests that young Americans may be drifting rightward politically.
A Harvard Institute of Politics poll in late 2024 found that men ages 18–24 now identify as slightly more conservative than those ages 25–29. Another Gallup survey showed that Gen Z teens are twice as likely as millennials to describe themselves as more conservative than their parents were at the same age.
This shift may help explain changes in speech attitudes.
Today’s young Americans may be less likely to instinctively defend speech aligned with liberal or progressive causes. For example, support among 18- to 29-year-olds for same-sex marriage, generally considered a liberal or progressive cause, fell from 79% in 2018 to 71% in 2022, according to Pew Research.
Attitudes toward hate speech
The Future of Free Speech study found that younger Americans are especially hesitant to defend speech that offends minority groups.
Only 47% of those ages 18 to 34 said such speech should be allowed, compared with 70% of those over 55.
Similarly, tolerance for religiously offensive speech was 57% among younger respondents, down from 71% in 2021.
This concern over harmful or bigoted speech is not new. A 2015 Pew survey found that 40% of millennials believed the government should be able to prevent offensive speech about minorities.
More recently, a 2024 report by the nonpartisan free speech advocacy group FIRE found that 70% of U.S. college students supported disinviting speakers perceived as bigoted. Over a quarter said violence could be acceptable to stop campus speech in some cases.
Broader implications
Why does this matter?
The First Amendment protects unpopular speech. It does not just shield offensive ideas, but it safeguards movements that once seemed fringe. Whether it’s civil rights, LGBTQ+ rights or anti-war protests, history shows that ideas seen as dangerous or radical in one era often become widely accepted in another.
Today’s younger Americans will soon shape policies in universities, media, government, tech and the public square. If a growing share believes speech should be regulated to prevent offense, that could signal a shift in how free speech is interpreted and enforced in American institutions.
To be sure, support for free speech in principle remains strong. The Future of Free Speech report found that 89% of Americans said people should be allowed to criticize government policy. But tolerance for more provocative or offensive speech appears to be eroding, especially among young people.
This raises questions about whether these changes reflect a life-stage effect − will today’s young people become more speech-tolerant as they age? Or are we seeing a deeper generational shift?
The data suggests Americans across all generations still value free speech. But for younger Americans, especially, that support seems increasingly conditional.
Jacob Mchangama receives funding from The John Templeton Foundation. He is affiliated with the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.
Craters in the lunar surface are visible in this photo taken during the Apollo 11 mission. NASA via AP
April 2025 was a busy month for space.
Pop icon Katy Perry joined five other civilian women on a quick jaunt to the edge of space, making headlines. Meanwhile, another group of people at the United Nations was contemplating a critical issue for the future of space exploration: the discovery, extraction and utilization of natural resources on the Moon.
As a space lawyer and co-founder of For All Moonkind, a nonprofit dedicated to protecting human heritage in outer space, I know that the Moon could be the proving ground for humanity’s evolution into a species that lives and thrives on more than one planet. However, this new frontier raises complex legal questions.
Space, legally
Outer space – including the Moon – from a legal perspective, is a unique domain without direct terrestrial equivalent. It is not, like the high seas, the “common heritage of humankind,” nor is it an area, like Antarctica, where commercial mining is prohibited.
Instead, the 1967 Outer Space Treaty – signed by more than 115 nations, including China, Russia and the United States – establishes that the exploration and use of space are the “province of all humankind.” That means no country may claim territory in outer space, and all have the right to access all areas of the Moon and other celestial bodies freely.
The fact that, pursuant to Article II of the treaty, a country cannot claim territory in outer space, known as the nonappropriation principle, suggests to some that property ownership in space is forbidden.
Can this be true? If your grandchildren move to Mars, will they never own a home? How can a company protect its investment in a lunar mine if it must be freely accessible by all? What happens, as it inevitably will, when two rovers race to a particular area on the lunar surface known to host valuable water ice? Does the winner take all?
As it turns out, the Outer Space Treaty does offer some wiggle room. Article IX requires countries to show “due regard” for the corresponding interests of others. It is a legally vague standard, although the Permanent Court of Arbitration has suggested that due regard means simply paying attention to what’s reasonable under the circumstances.
First mover advantage – it’s a race
The treaty’s broad language encourages a race to the Moon. The first entity to any spot will have a unilateral opportunity to determine what’s legally “reasonable.” For example, creating an overly large buffer zone around equipment might be justified to mitigate potential damage from lunar dust.
On top of that, Article XII of the Outer Space Treaty assumes that there will be installations, like bases or mining operations, on the Moon. Contrary to the free access principle, the treaty suggests that access to these may be blocked unless the owner grants permission to enter.
Both of these paths within the treaty would allow the first person to make it to their desired spot on the Moon to keep others out. The U.N. principles in their current form don’t address these loopholes.
The draft U.N. principles released in April mirror, and are confined by, the language of the Outer Space Treaty. This tension between free access and the need to protect – most easily by forbidding access – remains unresolved. And the clock is ticking.
The Moon’s vulnerable legacy
The U.S. Artemis program aims to return humans to the Moon by 2028, China has plans for human return by 2030, and in the intervening years, more than 100 robotic missions are planned by countries and private industry alike. For the most part, these missions are all headed to the same sweet spot: the lunar south pole. Here, peaks of eternal light and deep craters containing water ice promise the best mining, science and research opportunities.
Regions of the lunar south pole, left, and north pole, right, contain water in the form of ice (blue), which could be useful for space agencies hoping to set up lunar bases. NASA
In this excitement, it’s easy to forget that humans already have a deep history of lunar exploration. Scattered on the lunar surface are artifacts displaying humanity’s technological progress.
More recently, in 2019, China’s Chang’e 4 achieved the first soft landing on the Moon’s far side. And in 2023, India’s Chandrayaan-3 became the first to land successfully near the lunar south pole.
These sites memorialize humanity’s baby steps off our home planet and easily meet the United Nations definition of terrestrial heritage, as they are so “exceptional as to transcend national boundaries and to be of common importance for present and future generations of all humanity.”
The international community works to protect such sites on Earth, but those protection protocols do not extend to outer space.
Astronaut footprints are still intact on the lunar surface because the Moon doesn’t have weather. But nearby spacecraft or rovers could kick up dust and cover them. AP Photo
The more than 115 other sites on the Moon that bear evidence of human activity are frozen in time without degradation from weather, animal or human activity. But this could change. A single errant spacecraft or rover could kick up abrasive lunar dust, erasing bootprints or damaging artifacts.
Protection and the Outer Space Treaty
In 2011, NASA recommended establishing buffer, or safety zones, of up to 1.2 miles (2 kilometers) to protect certain sites with U.S. artifacts.
Because it understood that outright exclusion violates the Outer Space Treaty, NASA issued these recommendations as voluntary guidelines. Nevertheless, the safety zone concept, essentially managing access to and activities around specific areas, could be a practical tool for protecting heritage sites. They could act as a starting point to find a balance between protection and access.
Building on this agreement, the international community could require specific access protocols — such as a permitting process, activity restrictions, shared access rules, monitoring and other controls — for heritage sites on the Moon. If accepted, these protective measures for heritage sites could also work as a template for scientific and operational sites. This would create a consistent framework that avoids the perception of claiming territory.
At this time, the draft U.N. principles released in April 2025 do not directly address the opposing concepts of access and protection. Instead, they defer to Article I of the Outer Space Treaty and reaffirm that everyone has free access to all areas of the Moon and other celestial bodies.
As more countries and companies compete to reach the Moon, a clear lunar legal framework can guide them to avoid conflicts and preserve historical sites. The draft U.N. principles show that the international community is ready to explore what this framework could look like.
Michelle L.D. Hanlon is affiliated with For All Moonkind, a not-for-profit organization committed to protecting human cultural heritage in outer space starting with the Apollo lunar landing sites.
As researchers and directors of regional Climate Adaptation Science Centers, funded by the U.S. Geological Survey since 2011, we have seen firsthand the work these programs do to protect the nation’s natural resources and their successes in helping states and tribes build resilience to climate risks.
Here are a few examples of the ways federally funded climate adaptation science conducted by university and federal researchers helps the nation weather the effects of climate change.
Protecting communities against wildfire risk
Wildfires have increasingly threatened communities and ecosystems across the U.S., exacerbated by worsening heat waves and drought.
In the Southwest, researchers with the Climate Adaptation Science Centers are developing forecasting models to identify locations at greatest risk of wildfire at different times of year.
Knowing where and when fire risks are highest allows communities to take steps to protect themselves, whether by carrying out controlled burns to remove dry vegetation, creating fire breaks to protect homes, managing invasive species that can leave forests more prone to devastating fires, or other measures.
The solutions are created with forest and wildland managers to ensure projects are viable, effective and tailored to each area. The research is then integrated into best practices for managing wildfires. The researchers also help city planners find the most effective methods to reduce fire risks in wildlands near homes.
Wildland firefighters and communities have limited resources. They need to know where the greatest risks exist to take preventive measures. Ethan Swope/Getty Images
In Hawaii and the other Pacific islands, adaptation researchers have similarly worked to identify how drought, invasive species and land-use changes contribute to fire risk there. They use these results to create maps of high-risk fire zones to help communities take steps to reduce dry and dead undergrowth that could fuel fires and also plan for recovery after fires.
Protecting shorelines and fisheries
In the Northeast, salt marshes line large parts of the coast, providing natural buffers against storms by damping powerful ocean waves that would otherwise erode the shoreline. Their shallow, grassy waters also serve as important breeding grounds for valuable fish.
However, these marshes are at risk of drowning as sea level rises faster than the sediment can build up.
As greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels and from other human activities accumulate in the atmosphere, they trap extra heat near Earth’s surface and in the oceans, raising temperatures. The rising temperatures melt glaciers and also cause thermal expansion of the oceans. Together, those processes are raising global sea level by about 1.3 inches per decade.
Adaptation researchers with the Climate Adaptation Science Centers have been developing local flood projections for the regions’ unique oceanographic and geophysical conditions to help protect them. Those projections are essential to help natural resource managers and municipalities plan effectively for the future.
In the Northwest and Alaska, salmon are struggling as temperatures rise in the streams they return to for spawning each year. Warm water can make them sluggish, putting them at greater risk from predators. When temperatures get too high, they can’t survive. Even in large rivers such as the Columbia, salmon are becoming heat stressed more often.
Adaptation researchers in both regions have been evaluating the effectiveness of fish rescues – temporarily moving salmon into captivity as seasonal streams overheat or dry up due to drought.
In Alaska, adaptation scientists have built broad partnerships with tribes, nonprofit organizations and government agencies to improve temperature measurements of remote streams, creating an early warning system for fisheries so managers can take steps to help salmon survive.
Researchers in the Northeast and Southeast Climate Adaptation Science Centers have been working to identify and prioritize the risks from invasive species that are expanding their ranges. That helps state managers eradicate these emerging threats before they become a problem. These regional invasive species networks have become the go-to source of climate-related scientific information for thousands of invasive species managers.
The rise in the number of invasive species projected by 2050 is substantial in the Northeast and upper Midwest. Federally funded scientists develop these risk maps and work with local communities to head off invasive species damage. Regional Invasive Species and Climate Change Network
The Northeast is a hot spot for invasive species, particularly for plants that can outcompete native wetland and grassland species and host pathogens that can harm native species.
Without proactive assessments, invasive species management becomes more difficult. Once the damage has begun, managing invasive species becomes more expensive and less effective.
Losing the nation’s ability to adapt wisely
A key part of these projects is the strong working relationships built between scientists and the natural resource managers in state, community, tribal and government agencies who can put this knowledge into practice.
With climate extremes likely to increase in the coming years, losing adaptation science will leave the United States even more vulnerable to future climate hazards.
Bethany Bradley receives funding from the US Geological Survey as the University Director of the Northeast Climate Adaptation Science Center.
Jia Hu has receives funding from the US Geological Survey as the University Director of the Southwest Climate Adaptation Science Center.
Meade Krosby receives funding from the US Geological Survey as the University Director of the Northwest Climate Adaptation Science Center.
When does a kid become an adult? – Avery, age 8, Los Angeles
Not everyone grows up at the same pace, even though U.S. law holds that you reach adulthood when you turn 18. This is the age where you are treated like an adult in terms of criminal responsibility. However, states differ on the “civil age of majority,” which means that you don’t necessarily get all the rights and privileges reserved for grown-ups at that point.
Even physical signs of maturity don’t provide an easy answer to this question. Puberty brings about physical changes associated with adulthood like facial hair or breast development. It also marks the onset of sexual maturity – being able to have children.
Those changes don’t happen at the same time for everyone.
For example, girls typically start going through puberty and beginning to look like adults at an earlier age than boys. Some people don’t look like grown-ups until they’re well into their 20s.
In my view, as a professor of developmental psychology, what really matters in terms of becoming an adult is how people feel and behave, and the responsibilities they handle.
Even if you’ve developed a sophisticated palate by the time you turn 18, you still aren’t necessarily a full-fledged adult. nedomacki/Getty Images
Age at milestones may vary
Because everybody is unique, there’s no standard timeline for growing up. Some people learn how to control their emotions, develop the judgment to make good decisions and manage to earn enough to support themselves by the age of 18.
Others take longer.
Coming of age also varies due to cultural differences. In some families, it’s expected that you’ll remain financially dependent on your parents until your mid-20s as you get a college education or job training.
Even within one family, your personality, experiences, career path and specific circumstances can influence how soon you’d be expected to shoulder adult responsibilities.
Drew Barrymore attends a movie premiere at the age of 15 – one year after a judge declared her to be an adult in the eyes of the law through emancipation. Ron Galella, Ltd. via GettyImages
Some young people technically enter adulthood before they turn 18 through a process called “emancipation” – a legal status indicating that a young person is responsible for their own financial affairs and medical obligations.
Economic independence is hard to attain for young teens, however, because child labor is restricted and regulated in the U.S. by federal law, with states setting some of these rules. States also determine how old you have to be to get married. In most states, that’s 18 years old. But some states allow marriage at any age.
Differentiating between kids and adults
Understanding the differences between how children and adults think can help explain when a kid becomes an adult.
What’s more, children, especially little ones, tend to have more trouble controlling their emotions. They’re more prone to crying or screaming when they are frustrated or upset than adults.
One reason why being fully grown up by the time you turn 18 or even 21 might not be possible is because of our brains. The prefrontal cortex, which is a part of the brain that plays a crucial role in planning and weighing risks, doesn’t fully develop in most people before their 25th birthday.
Making choices that have lifelong consequences
The delay in the brain’s maturity can make it hard for young adults to fully consider the real-world consequences of their actions and choices. This mismatch may explain why adolescents and people in their early 20s often engage in risky or even reckless behavior – such as driving too fast, not wearing a seatbelt, using dangerous drugs, binge drinking or stealing things.
These still-developing parts of the brain also help explain why children are more susceptible to peer pressure. For instance, adolescents are more prone to confess to crimes they didn’t commit under police interrogation, partly because they can’t properly weigh the long-term consequences of their decisions.
In North America, some young people who by many standards are adults – in that they are over 20 years old, own a car and have a job – may not feel like they’re grown-ups regardless of what the law has to say about it. The psychologist Jeffrey Arnett coined the term “emerging adults” to describe Americans who are 21-25 years old but don’t yet feel like they’re grown-ups.
When someone becomes an adult, regardless of what the law says, really depends on the person.
There are 25-year-olds with full-time jobs and their own children who may still not feel like adults and still rely on their parents for a lot of things grown-ups typically handle. There are 17-year-olds who make all of their own doctor’s appointments, take care of their younger siblings or grandparents, and do all the grocery shopping, meal planning and laundry for their household. They probably see themselves as adults.
Growing up is about gaining experiences, making mistakes and learning from them, while also taking responsibility for your own actions. As there’s no single definition of adulthood, everyone has to decide for themselves whether or not they’ve turned into a grown-up yet.
Hello, curious kids! Do you have a question you’d like an expert to answer? Ask an adult to send your question to CuriousKidsUS@theconversation.com. Please tell us your name, age and the city where you live.
And since curiosity has no age limit – adults, let us know what you’re wondering, too. We won’t be able to answer every question, but we will do our best.
Jonathan B. Santo does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Amitrajeet A. Batabyal, Distinguished Professor, Arthur J. Gosnell Professor of Economics, & Interim Head, Department of Sustainability, Rochester Institute of Technology
President Donald Trump has long been preoccupied by the trade deficit — the gap between what the U.S. sells to the rest of the world and what it buys from it. He recently declared the issue a national emergency and used trade deficit data to calculate so-called “reciprocal tariffs” targeting nearly 100 countries. Although those specific tariffs are now on pause, Trump’s concern with the trade deficit persists.
As an economist, I know there are two basic ways for a country to reduce a trade deficit: import less or export more. While Trump has focused on the former strategy, a more productive path may lie in the latter – especially by looking at untapped opportunities in rural America.
New research is starting to fill that gap. Economists recently found that urban businesses export significantly more than rural ones – a difference with significant implications for national trade.
The urban-rural export gap
Looking at data from the Census Bureau’s Annual Business Survey as well as trade statistics from 2017 to 2020, researchers used econometric techniques to measure the urban-rural export gap. They also examined two categories of potential causes – “explained” and “unexplained.”
The first is due to differences in what economists call “endowments” – for example, a region’s digital infrastructure, its access to renewable energy and its opportunities for high-tech employment. These endowments can be observed and therefore explained.
The second is due to what economists call “structural advantage.” This refers to attributes of a region that matter for export performance but can’t be observed and, as a result, remain unexplained.
They found that most of the urban-rural export gap is due to explained differences. That means rural businesses could close the export gap if they were provided with similar endowments – meaning comparable access to renewable energy, similar digital infrastructure and analogous opportunities for high-tech employment – to their urban counterparts.
Even more strikingly, the unexplained component was negative – which means rural businesses outperform expectations given their characteristics. That suggests rural regions have significant untapped export potential.
Several factors collectively account for the urban export advantage. First, urban regions have a greater concentration of highly educated science and technology workers. Urban businesses also tend to be larger and more tech-savvy, and because they have better access to broadband, they use cloud technology more frequently. Urban areas also have more foreign-born business owners who may leverage their international networks.
However, many of these differences suggest possible policy solutions. For instance, since cloud adoption depends on broadband availability, it follows that investing in digital infrastructure could boost rural exports. Also, rural manufacturers, especially in sectors like metals manufacturing, show comparable or higher export intensity per worker than their urban counterparts. So encouraging rural manufacturing would be one way to reduce the urban-rural export gap.
Rethinking trade and rural development
I think this research has important policy implications.
First, it shifts some of the focus away from other countries as the root cause of the trade deficit. And second, it bolsters the case for what economists call “place-based policies” targeting specific geographic areas – as opposed to “people-based policies,” which provide support directly to individuals.
The 2022 CHIPS and Science Act had special significance to rural areas.
During the Biden administration, three major laws – the Inflation Reduction Act, the CHIPS and Science Act and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act – directed significant federal funds to rural areas. About 43% of funds from those laws – or US$440 billion – was designated as either “rural relevant” or as “rural stipulated,” meaning the funds were either geographically targeted or designed to address disproportionately rural challenges.
Such massive investments in rural regions have led researchers and policymakers to question whether rural export underperformance stems from differences in observable endowments – in other words, things like access to broadband – or from inherent disadvantages that are much harder to deal with.
In my view, this research provides compelling evidence that much of the urban-rural export gap is due to unequal distribution of productive assets, rather than inherent rural disadvantages. With appropriate investments in digital infrastructure, human capital and support for export-capable industries, America’s rural regions could play a much larger role in global trade. These findings also suggest the value of continued federal support for rural development efforts.
In other words, if the U.S. wants to shrink its trade deficit, one answer could be more innovation in rural manufacturing.
Amitrajeet A. Batabyal does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Source: The Conversation – UK – By Julie M. Norman, Senior Associate Fellow on the Middle East at RUSI; Associate Professor in Politics & International Relations, UCL
Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, declared on May 5 that his government intends to intensify military operations and indefinitely reoccupy Gaza. The announcement has dashed hopes for a permanent ceasefire and the release of the remaining hostages held by Hamas.
The plan, which was unanimously approved by Israel’s security cabinet, includes displacing Gaza’s 2.1 million inhabitants to a single “humanitarian area” on less than a quarter of Gaza’s territory. This will result in Palestinians leaving “in great numbers to third countries”, said Israel’s far-right finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich.
It is tempting to view the plan as another move by Netanyahu to placate the hard-right members of his coalition. It can also be viewed as a pressure tactic on Hamas – a threat to force the militant group to agree to a short-term ceasefire ahead of the visit of the US president, Donald Trump, to the Middle East from May 13.
However, Netanyahu’s announcement is much more than rhetorical sabre-rattling. Israel’s recent operations in Gaza indicate that the plan should be taken literally and seriously. Since March, when the war in Gaza resumed following a temporary ceasefire, Israel has declared about 70% of the enclave either a military “red zone” or under evacuation.
The new plan affirms what many have long feared: that expanding territorial control is not merely a short-term military tactic but a long-term occupation. In my view, this will only bring more suffering for Palestinians, less security for Israel, and more instability to the region.
The humanitarian crisis in Gaza cannot be overstated. Many observers have described the current situation as the worst of any time during the past 18 months.
The flow of humanitarian aid to Gaza has been politicised and widely criticised throughout the war, often slowing to a trickle. However, at least some aid trucks were allowed to pass into the Strip from late October 2023, shortly after the war began. This was followed by a surge of aid during the ceasefire in January and February 2025.
But no food, fuel or medicines have entered Gaza since early March. This has led to near-famine conditions and the breakdown of the few remaining healthcare services.
Israel’s proposed plan would forcibly move Gazans, nearly all of whom have already been displaced multiple times, into militarised “sterile zones” in the south. Humanitarian aid would be managed there by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and private US companies.
Deteriorating humanitarian conditions, combined with further displacement, will only create more security challenges for Israel. Entrenched occupation fuels armed resistance and further mobilises insurgency.
The US saw this following its 2003 invasion of Iraq, which resulted in over 8,000 US military personnel and contractors being killed. Israel has repeatedly faced the rise of armed militant groups in response to prolonged military occupations in Lebanon, Gaza and the West Bank.
Hamas has already dismissed further ceasefire talks in the wake of the new plan, and the group is seemingly having no trouble recruiting new members to its military wing. This has ensured a costly deployment for IDF ground troops.
It goes without saying that Hamas should release all of the remaining hostages – and should have done so long ago. But Hamas now sees little incentive to do so when Israeli ministers are calling for what appears to be the complete destruction of Gaza, with or without a hostage release.
A renewed occupation of Gaza will also further complicate regional dynamics. Arab states that have promised billions of dollars for Gaza’s reconstruction, alongside a credible plan for a two-state solution, will balk at subsidising Israeli military control.
The stalled US-backed normalisation deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia, which has long been sought both by the Trump and Biden administrations, will probably be pushed even further back. It may even be abandoned entirely if Israel retrenches in Gaza.
And any US involvement in Israel’s new Gaza plan could complicate negotiations between the US and Iran over Tehran’s nuclear programme. The Iranian foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, has already accused Netanyahu of dragging the US into a “disaster” in the Middle East by “attempting to brazenly dictate” what Trump can and cannot do in his diplomacy with Iran.
But perhaps most importantly, the reoccupation of Gaza – coupled with incursions, annexations and settlement expansion in the West Bank – communicates in no uncertain terms that the Israeli government is torpedoing any pathway to a two-state solution.
This has long been clear to Palestinians and many onlookers. Most realists accepted that any moves towards Palestinian self-determination would be non-starters in the aftermath of the October 7 attacks on southern Israel.
However, Israel’s friends in the international community, especially in Europe, have been holding on to the hope that Israel would eventually come back to the two-state framework. This latest plan calls their bluff.
France and the UK are already in discussion about possibly recognising Palestine as a state at a conference in June. The UK has long preferred recognition as part of a peace process towards two states, rather than a symbolic gesture.
But a retrenched “capture” of Gaza, combined with another massive civilian displacement, may speed up serious consideration of this recognition – while there is still Palestinian territory left to recognise.
Julie M. Norman does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
From sleep aids and stress relief to vitamins and energy boosts, wellness patches are surging in popularity. These stick-on supplements promise to deliver nutrients and plant-based compounds directly through your skin and into your bloodstream – no pills, no needles, no fuss.
Inspired by medical patches that deliver hormones or nicotine, they certainly sound scientific. But do they work?
The short answer is: sometimes, but often not in the way they suggest. While the idea of nutrient delivery through the skin is firmly rooted in science, the reality of wellness patches is more complicated.
The skin, after all, is an excellent barrier. Its outermost layer, the stratum corneum, is like a brick wall. The “bricks” are dead skin cells and the “mortar” is a waxy mix of fats. This structure is incredibly good at blocking water, bacteria and most drugs.
Only a few types of molecules can easily sneak through this barrier. These tend to be small, fat-soluble molecules, such as nicotine, oestradiol (used in HRT) or certain painkillers – hence their established successful use.
Layers of the skin explained.
As a rule of thumb, small fatty molecules can cross, anything water soluble cannot. Vitamins are generally water soluble and therefore fail at the waterproof barrier.
Vitamin B12, magnesium and iron – all available in patch form – are typically too large or water-soluble to cross the skin in meaningful amounts. If nutrients need to be injected or taken in high oral doses to be effective, the likelihood of a patch delivering enough through the skin becomes very slim.
Spotting guff
Still, some wellness patches may hold more promise than others. So how can you tell the difference between a product with potential and one that’s mostly marketing?
First, look closely at the active ingredients. If the patch contains small, lipophilic (fat-loving) molecules – like melatonin, caffeine or certain cannabinoids – there’s at least a theoretical chance of absorption.
Larger or charged molecules like B12 or magnesium salts are far less likely to make it through the skin barrier without special assistance.
Second, check for transparent dosing. A trustworthy patch will state the amount of active ingredient it contains (in milligrams or micrograms), the duration of delivery, and ideally, the rate at which the compound is released. If it just says “infused with essential oils” and doesn’t tell you how much or how it works, take it with a pinch of salt.
Third, examine the delivery technology. Medical-grade patches use either a matrix system, where the active ingredient is distributed evenly throughout the patch, or a reservoir system, which controls release from a central chamber.
Some also use chemical enhancers to help increase absorption. Nicotine patches offer an excellent example of this enhanced delivery.
As ever, the key to delivery is overcoming the stratum corneum. Nicotine is small, lipophilic and uncharged – three features that make it particularly well suited to slip through the skin and into the bloodstream.
Once it diffuses through the stratum corneum, nicotine travels into the viable epidermis and dermis, where it can enter capillaries and circulate in the body.
Modern patches use specially designed adhesives and permeation enhancers – compounds that temporarily loosen the skin’s lipid matrix to improve absorption. A common example is oleic acid, a fatty acid that disrupts the tight lipid packing in the stratum corneum, allowing more nicotine to pass through.
This, combined with a controlled-release design, ensures a steady, low-level delivery of nicotine throughout the day, helping reduce withdrawal symptoms and cravings without the rapid spikes associated with smoking.
The same principle is applied to skin creams that penetrate the epidermis primarily through passive diffusion, moving between the cells of the stratum corneum via the lipid matrix.
Small, lipophilic, and uncharged molecules pass more easily, and formulations often include mild penetration enhancers, such as alcohols or glycols, to temporarily loosen the lipid structure and improve absorption into the viable epidermis. By contrast, if a wellness patch resembles a sticker soaked in oil or offers no explanation of its mechanism, you might want to question its effectiveness.
Finally, consider the evidence behind the claims. Few wellness patches are supported by independent studies or peer-reviewed research. That doesn’t mean they never work but it does mean you should treat them as unproven. If a patch promises to “detox your liver”, “burn fat”, or “cure fatigue overnight”, it’s probably leaning more on placebo than pharmacology.
That said, the placebo effect itself can be powerful. If a patch makes someone feel more in control of their sleep, stress or energy levels – and causes no harm – there may still be a benefit, but it’s important to understand where marketing ends and science begins.
Michelle Spear does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Amsterdam hit its self-imposed limit of 20 million overnight stays in 2023.4kclips/Shutterstock
In the controversial case of expansion at Heathrow airport, the UK government insists that the benefits of economic growth outweigh the environmental and wellbeing costs. But what if focusing on prosperity is a shortsighted approach? The debate about a third runway, placed in the context of exponential growth in travel and tourism, makes the impact on people and the environment clear to see.
Meanwhile, many tourism destinations are struggling to cope with growing numbers of visitors. Residents have protested at the impact of overtourism on their quality of life, with harms including overcrowding, loss of amenities for residents and a skewed property market.
London’s airport development plans (expansion is also mooted at Gatwick and Luton) aim to inject investment into a range of sectors beyond tourism. However, our research suggests that aligning tourism with other sectors and better cooperation of decision-making at different levels of government could lead to increased wellbeing, a healthier environment and greater benefits to the local economy.
This provides options to rethink what tourism could look like when the focus is not just economic growth.
It should be possible to look at new models that take a holistic approach to tourism development. This means putting the wellbeing of the community and the environment first. Falling under the umbrella term of “post-growth”, there are various approaches that all rethink the role of economic growth. They advocate prioritising human wellbeing within planetary boundaries.
“Degrowth” argues that limiting growth is essential for a sustainable future. On the other hand, “doughnut economics” and regenerative approaches are more agnostic about economic growth. They argue that human prosperity and wellbeing should be prioritised regardless of whether GDP is going up or down.
In the context of tourism and travel, these approaches provide a different perspective on the role of the sector and what it can bring to a place, beyond economic growth.
They also go further than most strategies being implemented in popular tourist cities to prioritise residents’ wellbeing, quality of life, and lower-carbon travel.
Taking the heat off tourist hotspots
As part of a net-zero emission pledge, and in an attempt to curb overtourism and the frustration of locals, some cities across Europe are enforcing restrictions on cruise ships. And Greece is applying a climate resilience tax on top of the tourism tax on all overnight stays.
One of the cities that has done the most to curb tourism is Amsterdam. After the start of the COVID pandemic, it adopted a citizen initiative to cap tourism at 20 million overnight stays per year.
This number was reached in 2023, and the city has put forward a wide range of measures since then. These include a tourist tax rate of 12.5%, strict rules on short-term rentals, limits on visitor numbers at large attractions and reducing the number of cruises. The city has also strengthened its environmental regulations.
Copenhagen, on the other hand, chooses not to restrict tourism. Rather, it now rewards visitors who engage in climate-friendly actions, with the “CopenPay” pilot project. Visitors who choose to cycle, use public transport or participate in volunteering are eligible for discounts or free access to 24 attractions.
Visitors to Greece pay a climate charge as well as a tourist tax. ecstk22/Shutterstock
While these initiatives are laudable, there are two reasons why they don’t go far enough.
The first is that the majority of the measures are based on financial disincentives, such as charging entrance fees to destinations and taxing the most polluting transport. They rest on the assumption that we do not need to address the underlying pursuit of growth that led to this unsustainability.
Likewise, arguments in favour of green growth are based on technological advances, such as sustainable aviation fuel (SAF). This underpins claims that air travel can continue to grow. However, both within and beyond the travel sector, it has been argued that green growth is a myth.
In the long run, these measures do not cut the ever-growing number of travellers. Nor do they effectively address climate issues.
Second, cities need support from higher levels of government if they want to encourage travel that is more environmentally friendly and contributes to the wellbeing of residents. In the case of Amsterdam, the ongoing expansion of Schiphol airport can be linked to overtourism, as well as noise and air pollution.
City leaders want to cut the maximum number of flights. But they cannot do much as long as economic growth is the focus of the Dutch government’s plans.
This highlights the deep complexities of controlling visitor numbers. And it also suggests that the economic benefits that come with the growth of London’s airports may come with societal and environmental costs. These will be felt by London and its residents, and cannot be solved with local policies.
Rather than going further and faster with growth, when it comes to travel and tourism we may need to go “closer by and slower”.
That might mean placing greater emphasis on promoting destinations to nearby markets, investment in low-carbon travel options and regenerative tourism activities. A post-growth approach should ensure that the economic benefits do not outweigh long-term ecological and societal growth. After all, these are the things we all need for a resilient society.
The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Source: The Conversation – UK – By Nicola Tempest, Senior Lecturer, Subspecialist in Reproductive Medicine and Consultant Gynaecologist, University of Liverpool
Linzagolix, which is sold under the brand name Yselty, can help manage the pain caused by endometriosis.Prostock-studio/ Shutterstock
A daily pill to treat endometriosis has just been recommended by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (Nice). Once available on the NHS, linzagolix will provide a new treatment option for those who have been unable to manage the condition using other standard treatments.
Endometriosis affects one in ten women of reproductive age. The condition causes the lining of the womb (the endometrium) to grow outside the uterus – most commonly in the pelvis, bladder and bowel. This causes wide and varied symptoms, including heavy, painful periods, pelvic pain between periods, pain when using the toilet, painful sex, tiredness and difficulty getting pregnant. Up to half of women diagnosed with endometriosis experience infertility as a consequence of the condition.
Endometriosis currently has no cure. Available treatments include the use of painkillers, hormonal contraceptives and surgery to remove lesions. However, these treatment options are often inadequate and, in many cases, aren’t suitable for patients for many reasons – including existing medical conditions, pregnancy or because of the risk of side-effects or complications.
Endometrium growth (both inside and outside of the womb) is driven by the reproductive hormone oestrogen. As such, blocking oestrogen can help prevent or slow the growth of the abnormal endometrial tissue and help relieve symptoms in people with endometriosis.
This is what linzagolix aims to do. Linzagolix is a gonadotrophin releasing hormone (GnRH) antagonist, which works by suppressing oestrogen – inducing a “medical menopause”. Medical menopause refers to the cessation of periods as a result of a prescribed medical treatment. Menopausal symptoms are typically reversed as soon as the drug is no longer being used.
The hypothalamic-pituitary-ovarian axis is vital in women. It regulates the hormones involved in the menstrual cycle (including the release of oestrogen). GnRH is produced by a brain region called the hypothalamus. Usually, GnRH would bind to receptors in the pituitary gland (a small, pea-sized gland found at the base of the brain in line with the top of the nose) leading to the release of follicle stimulating hormone (FSH) and luteinising hormone (LH). FSH and LH then stimulate the ovaries to produce oestrogen and progesterone.
But linzagolix works by attaching to the pituitary gland GnRH receptors and preventing the GnRH from attaching. With no GnRH, FSH and LH are rapidly suppressed. This in turn leads to a decrease in oestrogen production from the ovary.
Linzagolix has been shown to cause a statistically significant reduction in painful periods and general pelvic pain in multiple trials. Patients saw the greatest benefits when taking a dose of 75mg or more. Significant relief from pelvic pain was noted by week 12 and maintained or even enhanced by weeks 24 and 52.
The side-effect from linzagolix that is most worrying is loss of bone mineral density due to the suppression of oestrogen. However, this was only really a concern when patients were taking doses of 200mg. In this instance, patients would need to be prescribed add-back hormone replacement therapy (HRT) – low doses of oestrogen and progesterone that help prevent the loss of bone mineral density while on a treatment that induces medical menopause. Add-back HRT can also help treat the crippling menopausal symptoms that women of reproductive age suffer with while in a medical menopause.
Unfortunately, add-back HRT is not suitable for all patients – especially those who have other medical conditions.
Take-at-home treatment
Linzagolix will be prescribed to those that have failed usual hormonal treatments (such as the combined pill, progesterone-only pill or hormonal coil) or surgery.
Linzagolix will be the second take-at-home pill to become available on the NHS for treating endometriosis in those that have failed other treatments.
In March, Nice also approved relugolix. This drug works similar to linzagolix, but has add-back HRT included in the prescription. Since add-back HRT isn’t suitable for everyone, linzagolix has the advantage of being a more tailored treatment option for women with endometriosis.
Linzagolix also offers multiple advantages over GnRH agonists, which are also used to manage endometriosis. GnRH agonists fully suppress the release of oestrogen. This can lead to many side-effects, including hot flushes, loss of libido, vaginal dryness and bone mineral density loss. But because linzagolix is a GnRH antagonist, this means it can be tailored to only partially suppress oestrogen, leading to fewer side effects.
Linzagolix is taken orally, whereas GnRH agonists need an injection every month or three months to work.
Linzagolix is also rapidly reversible, whereas GnRH agonists have unpredictable reversibility, it can take months for ovarian function to return to normal when using GnRH agonists. This is clearly a problem for those wishing to conceive or stop the treatment due to side-effects. Linzagolix has a short half life which means it does not stay in a person’s system for very long.
The most commonly reported side-effect of linzagolix are hot flushes – though this usually only occurs when a patient is taking a higher dose of the drug. Bone mineral density loss can also occur at higher doses, which is why add-back HRT will be needed in these instances.
Endometriosis affects millions of women. Current treatment options are limited – and with no cure in sight, any additional treatments offer new hope for those affected. Linzagolix may soon offer a lifeline to those with endometriosis who haven’t been able to find relief using other treatments.
Nicola Tempest receives funding from the Wellbeing of Women.
It was May 4 1975. The Japanese Women’s Everest Expedition team had been living at a high altitude for six weeks, and were less than a week away from their scheduled bid for the summit of Mount Everest. Exhausted, having established camp five at just below 8,000m on the south side of the mountain, Junko Tabei and the team descended to camp two at 6,300m to rest.
Then – avalanche!
In the early hours, tons of ice and snow engulfed the camp, burying several of the teammates. Crushed by the snow and ice, Tabei was unable to move. It took the strength of four Sherpas, the elite Nepali climbing guides assisting the expedition, to pull her out. Suffering severe bruising, Tabei argued that she did not need to be returned to base camp to recover, and would remain at camp two.
“There was no way I was leaving the mountain,” she later recalled in her memoir.
It had taken five years for this group – the first all-women team – to get to Everest. The pressure on them to succeed was immense, given the limited number of annual international permits to climb Mount Everest issued by the Nepalese government. If they gave up, they might have to wait several years to make another attempt.
Meanwhile, on the Tibetan side of the mountain, Tabei’s team had competition. A 200-strong Chinese team was also working to place a woman on the summit at the same time.
From the late 1950s, Tibetan women were recruited to participate in state-sponsored Chinese mountaineering expeditions. In 1958, Pan Duo had been selected to participate in the successful Chinese 1960 Everest expedition – but was ordered to remain below 6,400 metres because above that height was “a man’s world”. Nonetheless, Pan Duo – referred to as “Mrs Phanthog” in some older accounts – was celebrated in her country and elected deputy captain of the 1975 Chinese Everest Expedition.
Unfortunately, the Chinese team suffered a climbing accident resulting in the death of a team member. They retreated to recover – only to be ordered by the Chinese government to “climb ahead of the Japanese women”.
They were too late. On May 16 1975, the all-women Japanese expedition worked together to place Tabei on the summit of Everest. Two team members – Tabei and Yuriko Watanabe – had been nominated to make the summit attempt. However, other teammates were suffering from altitude sickness, so Watanabe was assigned to help return them to camp two.
The ascent Tabei was making was arduous. Given her injuries, it took great tenacity to muster the strength to continue. But finally, she took her last steps to the summit, becoming the first woman and 40th person, according to the latest official record, to summit the peak. She was part of only the tenth successful Everest expedition, later recalling:
I felt pure joy as my thoughts registered: ‘Here is the summit. I don’t have to climb any more.’
Eleven days later, the Chinese team returned to the high slopes to make another attempt. Using minimal oxygen, Pan Duo was also successful, becoming the second woman to summit Everest – and the first to climb the harder northern side of the mountain.
Prior to these two successful expeditions, only 38 people had summited Everest – all of them men. News of Tabei’s feat travelled fast across Asia, leading to national celebrations in Japan, Nepal and India. But it made little impact in the west.
In my own career as both a mountaineer and researcher of adventure tourism, I had been struck by how few women I encountered on the mountainside. I wanted to understand why this might be, and what women had achieved. It was through this research that I discovered Tabei’s story.
I was astonished both by her achievements – she is also the first woman to complete the “Seven Summits”, climbing the highest peaks on every continent – and by how few prominent mountaineering organisations and mountaineers appeared to know about her.
Tabei’s bravery helped her lead record-setting all-women expeditions and overcome the mountain of sexism in this male-dominated space. Yet very few organisations, even in Japan, have thought to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the first ascent of Everest by a woman.
Breaking the mould
Historically, men have dominated the public record in mountaineering. In the last few years, the 70th anniversary of the first summit of Everest in 1953 by Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay has been marked, along with the centenary of the unsuccessful and fatal attempt by George Mallory and Andrew Irvine in 1924.
During that period, women were excluded from many mountaineering clubs. When they did join, they often faced prejudice, were discouraged and sometimes not permitted to publish records of their adventures. In 1975, women were finally admitted to the Alpine Club, the first and one of the most prestigious climbing institutions.
At a time when Japanese women were expected to remain at home, many members of the Japanese Women’s Everest Expedition, including Tabei, were working, with two of them also raising children. Tabei’s daughter, Noriko, was three at the time of her Everest summit. Tabei later revealed that the expedition encountered significant resistance:
Most of the men in the alpine community opposed our plan, claiming it would be impossible for a women-only expedition to reach Everest.
As a married woman and the assistant expedition leader, Tabei felt torn between motherhood and mountaineering, explaining: “Although I would never forfeit Everest, I felt pulled in the two directions of mountains and motherhood.”
Facing unsympathetic attitudes from team members when childcare conflicts arose, Tabei realised she needed to put in extra effort to prove herself as a leader.
The Insights section is committed to high-quality longform journalism. Our editors work with academics from many different backgrounds who are tackling a wide range of societal and scientific challenges.
Years before the Everest expedition, Tabei and other Japanese women were already logging major climbing achievements across the globe. These included the first ascent of the north face of the Matterhorn by an all-women’s team in 1967, and the first all-women’s Japanese expedition to the Himalayas in 1970 to climb Annapurna III. Tabei was both the first woman and Japanese person to ascend the peak.
This set the scene for the Japanese Women’s Everest Expedition. To locate and train suitable candidates for the expedition, Tabei helped establish the Joshi-Tohan Japanese Ladies Climbing Club, founded on the slogan: “Let’s go on an overseas expedition by ourselves.”
Tabei’s contribution to women’s high-altitude mountaineering was astounding. To reach Everest, she defied mid-20th-century social norms that tied Japanese women to domestic roles, later musing: “I tried to picture myself as a traditional Japanese wife who followed her husband. The idea never sat well with me.”
Throughout her career, Tabei contributed significantly to the emerging culture of women’s climbing and mountaineering expeditions. She felt strongly that climbing with other women was more rewarding because there was greater physical equality.
In 1992, she became the first woman to ascend the highest peaks on all seven continents. Using her celebrity, Tabei was also an activist for environmental change in high-altitude regions, having grown appalled by the degradation of fragile mountain glaciers that was being caused by the mountaineering industry.
Film by 4GTV Nepal.
With her friend and Everest teammate Setsuko Kitamura, Tabei established the first Mount Everest conference in 1995, inviting all 32 women who had by then successfully climbed Everest (not all attended). Under her leadership, this transnational exchange created a space to celebrate women’s mountaineering achievements.
Soon after her Everest achievement, Tabei had been a symbol of social progress and women’s emancipation at the UN International Women’s Year world conference. Yet her status as one of the greatest high-altitude mountaineers has since faded from the public eye. This has much to do with the stories we tell about man – and it’s almost always a man – vs. nature.
Telling her own story
Hillary’s much-lauded autobiography, High Adventure (1955), was published two years after his first successful ascent of Everest. In contrast, it was 42 years after her ascent before Tabei’s memoir, Honouring High Places, was published and translated.
The way Japanese women’s experiences were represented in the media did not, in Tabei’s view, represent the reality of women’s experiences. She was particularly perplexed by the inability of the press to see beyond her gender. She was repeatedly asked how it felt “as a woman” to climb at high altitudes.
Portrayals of Tabei focused on her stature as a small Japanese woman. This only reinforced the perception that women like her did not fit the norm of the heroic white, male mountaineer. She reflected:
When people meet me for the first time, they are surprised by my size. They expect me to be bigger than I am, more strapping, robust, like a wrestler … I was always puzzled by this, by people’s obsession with the physical appearance of a mountaineer.
To counter this narrative, Tabei brought a new approach to writing about Japanese women mountaineers’ achievements – challenging the tendency of traditional Japanese expedition publications to gloss over the harsh realities of expedition life.
Critical of the flowery and vain writing style of these reports, Tabei’s frank accounts reported on the “unkinder side of human behaviour”. Making tough choices was particularly difficult for women, she wrote, because of their social conditioning to be a “good person”:
It was unusual enough to be a female climber in that era of yesteryear, let alone to make a stand in front of your friends that would possibly upset them.
Transcending these social norms had a personal impact. Tabei lamented that, although “I remained strong-willed about Everest, tears of doubt fell down my cheeks at night”.
Her honesty was criticised by some in the established mountaineering community in Japan, particularly in her published account, Annapurna: Women’s Battle, which expressed the raw emotions and feelings experienced on their 1970 expedition. Tabei shared “the feelings of the team members when things failed to go in the direction they had envisioned … We put our honest experiences on paper”.
Reflecting on how she had to overcome social norms to lead the expedition – “In my day, we were strictly advised that being different was abnormal” – Tabei concluded that: “A person must be able to voice her opinion without worrying about criticism.”
A problem of representation
Ever since the late 1850s, women have made a significant yet often-hidden contribution to mountaineering. It retains a powerful legacy of male-dominated clubs and governing institutions founded on masculine norms such as risk-taking. This has often cast mountaineering achievements in a way that privileges men.
Clubs established traditions based on the first ascents of mountains – very few of which were made by women. Their absence from leading mountaineering clubs and lack of representation in published club journals meant their achievements were often attributed to male companions.
In 1872, the American climber Meta Brevoort felt it best, due to social prejudice, to publish her extraordinary first ascents in the European Alps under the name of her nephew, William A.B. Coolidge. Mountaineer and author David Mazel notes that Brevoort’s account was “carefully written to conceal the author’s sex”.
Mountain exploration and climbing have traditionally been framed as heroic endeavours dominated by men. Figures such as Hillary, Mallory and Reinhold Messner are celebrated for their bravery, strength and leadership — traits associated with masculinity.
Early mountaineering narratives often emphasised physical endurance, dominance over nature, and the ability to withstand extreme conditions – reinforcing ideas of masculine heroism. Mountains as towering, imposing and seemingly unconquerable landscapes have been metaphorically linked to power and challenge.
Traditions that have been passed down through generations – from ascent styles to route names – have also been synonymous with masculinity. In the words of mountaineering historian Walt Unsworth, climbing Everest “is the story of Man’s attempts to climb a very special mountain”.
This has had real-world consequences for mountaineering. Today, only 6% of British mountain guides are women, while globally, less than 2% of those registered to the International Federation of Mountain Guide Association (IFMGA) are women. If you don’t see your face reflected, it becomes a daunting prospect to imagine yourself in mountaineering – whether as a mountain guide, or an amateur mountaineer like me.
By 2024, women represented 13% of all Everest summiteers since 1953, yet their stories are seldom told. White, male, able-bodied and middle-class voices dominate representations in published records and popular portrayals of adventure on the world’s highest mountain.
As anthropologist Sherry B. Ortner attests, this is not surprising given mountaineering’s history as a western imperialist and colonising project that aimed to conquer nations and nature, built upon all-male institutions. Yet men and women have the same statistical odds of making a successful summit or dying on Everest.
Julie Rak, in her book False Summit, shows how some accounts can treat women’s achievements with ambivalence, and at worst question their authenticity. It has even been suggested that Tabei was effectively dragged up the mountain by her friend, the male Sherpa Ang Tsering.
Having suffered significant trauma following the avalanche that nearly wiped out their 1975 expedition, Tabei showed enormous courage and resilience to summit Everest just a few days later. She describes the ascent as difficult – and yes, accepted help from Ang Tsering – but this was her achievement, not a “stunt” to be denied by those who were not even present.
Diversity on the mountain
Since Tabei’s Everest summit, mountaineering has undergone changes as a sport, shifting from an elite, exploratory pursuit to a commercialised industry where wealthy clients can hire companies to reach summits with professional support.
From the late 1980s, high-altitude mountaineering became a valuable tourism commodity. Seizing the opportunity to boost tourism, the Nepalese government began to issue more permits, fuelling the growth of commercial companies offering clients the opportunity to be guided up 8,000-metre summits. In 2023, Nepal welcomed over 150,000 high-altitude trekking and mountaineering visitors, with 47 teams attempting to climb Everest.
Yet despite the popularity and commercialisation of the sport, mountaineering remains stubbornly resistant to diversity.
Scholar Jennifer Hargreaves argues that women have been excluded from being represented as the “sporting hero”. What constitutes our cultural identity, meaning and values almost exclusively solidifies heroic masculinity in most forms of sport, including mountaineering.
And much of this is due to the stories that are – not – told.
Delphine Moraldo’s research found that of the mountaineering autobiographies published in Britain and Europe from the late 1830s to 2013, only 6% were written by women.
Historically, literary representations of women mountaineers have often been met with ambivalence, their achievements portrayed as lesser. Women are stereotyped as weaker, bound to domesticity and lacking the hardiness required to be a “good mountaineer”.
These perceptions, coupled with a lack of representation, have reduced women’s opportunities to secure funding for expeditions, or to access female-specific clothing and equipment. Tabei and her team had to make their own expedition clothing because women’s sizes did not exist, a problem that remains today. When raising sponsorship for Everest, she was told: “Raise your children and keep your family tight, rather than do something like this.”
But while there is still a mountain to climb when it comes to attaining equality in adventure sports, there is a growing body of research and media celebrating women’s achievements – from campaigns such as Sport England’s This Girl Can to films charting the lives of some women mountaineers.
A hidden sisterhood
Junko Tabei and Pan Duo’s names may never be as well known as Edmund Hillary’s. But they are just two of many women whose achievements reach far beyond the peaks. I’ve written about many of them in my research.
Polish mountaineer Wanda Rutkiewicz was the third woman and first from Europe to summit Everest. When asked in 1979 by high-altitude record holder Maurice Herzog why she had climbed Everest, Rutkiewicz responded that she did it for “women’s liberation”. By the late 1980s, such activism was harnessed by large sponsors such as Tata Steel, who recruited Indian mountaineer Bachendri Pal, the fifth woman to summit Everest, to lead a women’s adventure programme.
Corporate sponsorship has, however, eluded many leading women mountaineers. Despite all her outstanding achievements – including holding a world-record ten Everest summits by a woman – Lhakpa Sherpa struggled for years to achieve recognition and the status of her male contemporaries. In 2019, writer Megan Mayhew Bergman asked why she didn’t have sponsors.
More recently, however, Lhakpa Sherpa’s mountaineering career was documented in the 2023 Netflix documentary Mountain Queen, which raised her profile and has led to new sponsorship opportunities.
Film by Netflix.
There is also work being done to change the exclusion of women from mountaineering. In Nepal and around the world, charitable organisations have been initiated by women mountaineers to help their fellow women climbers, including Empowering Women Nepal and 3Sisters Adventure Trekking.
My research has shown how women and mountaineers from other marginalised backgrounds can use their successes to become role models for and drivers of social change.
Tabei, for example, was appalled at the degradation mountaineering had caused to Mount Everest, and spoke out about the need for responsible mountaineering and conservation. She led cleanup expeditions and researched the environmental impact of tourism and climate change on both mountain ecosystems and local communities.
Tabei’s efforts helped bring global attention to the need for conservation in high-altitude environments, inspiring climbers to take a more responsible approach to their expeditions.
In research about Asian women’s contribution to climbing Everest, I examined how the struggle for women’s emancipation, empowerment and recognition is a phenomenon that is shared globally. A new generation of Asian women mountaineers such as Dawa Yangzum Sherpa, the first woman to achieve IFMGA status, and Shailee Basnet are defying gender norms and achieving status as internationally recognised mountaineers and mountaineering guides.
Basnet became one of ten women to scale Everest in 2008 as part of Sagarmatha Expedition, which was established to draw attention to climate change and gender equality, and to reclaim the Nepali name for the mountain: Sagarmatha. The expedition brought together ten women from six different religious, caste and ethnic backgrounds. All ten reached the summit, making it the most successful women’s expedition to date.
Following this, in 2014 Basnet led the formation of the first all-women Seven Summits project to climb the highest peak on every continent. Importantly, she harnessed the team’s newfound profile to undertake a large-scale social justice programme, visiting hundreds of schools, leading hikes and giving talks across the Kathmandu Valley. Their mission was to improve educational awareness concerning opportunities for women and girls, and also to protect the environment.
Since the mid-1950s, a hidden sisterhood has forged a route for women to access high-altitude mountaineering. Their impact has reached far beyond the expeditions they led.
Women have used their status as mountaineers to empower and support other women to achieve social, political and environmental justice, and raise awareness about poverty, sex trafficking, religious and ethnic marginalisation, environmental degradation and the impact of mass tourism.
Junko Tabei was a pioneer whose tenacity helped a whole generation of women in mountaineering. By not recognising their achievements, we deny an important part of our cultural heritage – and miss the opportunity to learn and share the inspirational work that women continue to undertake.
Tabei’s memoir is not simply a remarkable mountaineering account, it is, in the words of Julie Rak, a feminist text that challenges what society has always thought it means to be heroic, brave and adventurous.
Tabei died in 2016 at the age of 77. On the 50th anniversary of one of her many achievements, it’s fitting to end with these words from her memoir:
My approach was one of not worrying about the loss of a job or missing out on a promotion. I felt it was important to live a life we would never regret.
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Jenny Hall does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Bindi Irwin has reportedly been rushed to hospital in the United States to undergo emergency surgery for a ruptured appendix.
According to brother Robert Irwin, “she’s going to be OK”, however the 26-year-old was forced to miss an annual gala event honouring her late father Steve Irwin.
So what is the role of the appendix, and in what circumstances can it rupture? Here’s what you need to know about appendicitis.
What is the appendix?
The appendix is a finger-like pouch attached to the large intestine. It can be found on the right of our lower abdomen.
For a long time, there was a theory that the appendix was an evolutionary remnant which may have played a role in our ancestors’ digestion, but wasn’t overly useful for modern humans following contemporary diets.
However emerging research has shown the appendix could play a role in the body’s immune function and microbiome, particularly in the gut. The gut microbiome may be disrupted by infection or antibiotics and the appendix may help the gut flora replenish and recover.
That said, most people who need to have their appendix removed to treat appendicitis do completely fine without it.
What is appendicitis, and what are the symptoms?
Appendicitis is typically a bacterial infection. Most commonly, appendicitis starts with blockage of the appendix, caused for example by a hardened piece of stool or swelling. Once blocked, bacteria in the appendix are not cleared as normal, but build up. In turn this leads to inflammation and infection of the appendix, and in some instances the appendix can burst or rupture.
The more time that elapses before someone with appendicitis is treated, the greater the risk the appendix may rupture.
Rupture is more common in children, accounting for roughly one-quarter of all cases. This is especially so for younger children, who might not have the words to describe their symptoms and might not show the classic signs, both of which can delay diagnosis.
But even in adults, sometimes the symptoms can be hard to discern from other things.
Typically, early symptoms of appendicitis can be vague, and can easily be mistaken for something else, such as viral gastroenteritis. They might include a lack of appetite, vomiting, diarrhoea, low grade fever, together with general tummy pain around the belly button.
Over hours or days the pain increases in severity and becomes localised to the right lower part of the abdomen.
How common is appendicitis?
Across the country, more than 40,000 Australians are hospitalised with appendicitis each year. The condition is responsible for around 180 of every 100,000 hospitalisations.
It’s estimated that about one in 12–15 people will experience appendicitis in their lifetime.
Appendicitis is more common in children and young people. The “peak” age group for appendicitis is between about age 10 and 30, but it can certainly happen in other age groups too.
For the most part the diagnosis of appendicitis is made clinically – in other words, by talking to the patient and examining them. There may be a role for blood tests and scans to help make the diagnosis, but these tests may not be able to distinguish between appendicitis and other causes of abdominal pain.
For most people, appendicitis is treated with a surgery called an appendicectomy (where the appendix is removed) together with intravenous antibiotics.
Some people may be treated only with antibiotics. However research suggests removing the appendix, alongside antibiotics, is more effective.
Nowadays an appendicectomy is generally a keyhole (or laproscopic) surgery, meaning it’s minimally invasive, doesn’t leave a big scar, and sees patients back on their feet sooner.
Some patients will be able to be discharged from hospital the day after surgery, while others will stay a few days. Hospital-in-the-home is a positive alternative which can help patients get home sooner, even many children treated for a ruptured appendix.
An appendicectomy can be performed whether the appendix has burst or not. But the surgery is more complex, and the recovery longer, if the appendix has ruptured.
For a minority of people, appendicitis can have complications, for example infections and scars inside the abdomen or at the site of surgery. Untreated, appendicitis can be life-threatening and even in the setting of well-organised health systems such as ours in Australia, there are instances of death due to appendicitis. This is thankfully rare, with mortality rates as low as 0.02% of appendicetomies performed in Australia.
Fortunately, for most people, a bout of appendicitis and its treatment with surgery does not leave a long-lasting legacy and a return to full health and life is a few quieter weeks away. Hopefully this will be the case for Bindi Irwin, and we join the rest of Australia in wishing her a quick and complete recovery.
Warwick Teague does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
The reshuffle announced by Anthony Albanese is a mix of continuity and change, with those in the government’s top rank staying in their previous ministries, as the prime minister had earlier flagged, but some big movements down the line.
Tanya Plibersek, in the past a left factional rival to Albanese, has received what many see as another hospital pass, moving from environment and water to social services.
But her new portfolio does include domestic violence, a policy passion of hers, and is less tricky in terms of her left-leaning electorate than her previous post.
Plibersek’s former portfolio is taken by Murray Watt, a can-do Queenslander who is likely to speed up development approvals.
His appointment will be welcomed by the development-oriented Western Australian Labor government, which played a key role in frustrating Plibersek’s attempt to get a deal with the crossbench on the “nature positive” legislation.
Watt’s previous post of employment and workplace relations – which he held for less than a year – goes to Amanda Rishworth, formerly in social services.
After the sensational factional removal of Mark Dreyfus, the prized attorney-general position goes to Michelle Rowland, who was communications minister. Rowland was a senior telecommunications lawyer with Gilbert + Tobin, but lacks Dreyfus’ distinguished legal background.
Ed Husic, also the victim of the factional power play in the right, is replaced by Tim Ayres, from the left, in both cabinet and the industry portfolio. Ayres, formerly an assistant minister, is a close confidant of Albanese.
On another front, the Muslim Husic is replaced in cabinet by another Muslim, Anne Aly, promoted from the outer ministry, and taking a grab bag of responsibilities: small business, international development and multicultural affairs.
Aly’s promotion may partially soothe the Muslim voices who have reacted sharply to Husic’s treatment. The Jewish community will be less placated: with the demise of Dreyfus there is no Jew in the ministry. Josh Burns, who is Jewish, has been made a special envoy for social housing and homelessness.
The post of special envoy for social cohesion has been scrapped – Albanese said “we will continue to work as a whole government of social cohesion”.
Sam Rae, a numbers man for Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles, whom Marles shoehorned into the ministry, becomes minister for aged care and seniors, a testing job for a man who made his reputation in running Labor campaigning.
One of the most potentially significant moves is the shift of the National Disability Insurance Scheme to come under Health Minister Mark Butler.
In the last term Bill Shorten, father of the scheme, who was responsible for the NDIS and government services, undertook significant reform of the NDIS, which had become a sink for money.
Albanese told his news conference the NDIS belonged with health. The question is whether Butler will continue to drive the reform process, which still has a significant way to go. The junior minister for the NDIS will be Jenny McAllister, praised by Albanese for her grasp of detail.
Anika Wells, who was put in cabinet in January, continues up the escalator, moving from aged care to communications.
She will still hold sport. She comes from Queensland, which is preparing for the 2032 Brisbane Olympics, and Albanese is anxious for continuity in the role. Responsibility for sport is being moved from the Department of Health to the Department of Infrastructure.
Some sources question the linkage of communications and sport as presenting potential conflicts of interest, given the communications portfolio deals with gambling advertising and broadcast rights.
Tony Burke remains in home affairs but will get responsibility for the Australian Federal Police and ASIO, which came under Dreyfus (originally both were in home affairs under the Liberals).
But the attorney-general will be “cross sworn” into both agencies. Albanese said there had been issues about information-sharing during the so-called caravan incident. This was a reference to the criminal hoax involving a caravan found in Sydney filled with explosives, when there were problems in communications between various state and federal agencies.
Newcomer to the ministry Daniel Mulino, from the Victorian right, who has a PhD in economics from Yale, was an obvious choice for assistant treasurer, in the outer ministry. Andrew Charlton, former economic adviser to Kevin Rudd, has been appointed cabinet secretary and an assistant minister.
Another new minister, Jess Walsh, takes early childhood education and youth, in the outer ministry.
The highly qualified Andrew Leigh continues as an assistant minister. His failure to be promoted is the price for not being in a faction. He will be assistant minister for productivity, competition, charities and treasury – dropping employment but adding productivity.
Given treasurer Chalmers’ current emphasis on productivity, this should give some more scope to Leigh.
One notable new special envoy post is for men’s health, which goes to Dan Repacholi, a champion sporting shooter.
Nationals re-elect leader David Littleproud
Nationals leader David Littleproud has retained the leadership, holding off a challenge from Senator Matt Canavan, who called for a drastic realignment of policy including ditching the 2050 net zero emissions commitment.
Kevin Hogan was elected deputy. A supporter of Littleproud, he replaces Perin Davey, who lost her Senate seat at the election.
The Nationals do not release vote numbers.
Bridget McKenzie remains Senate leader of the party.
Littleproud said the party would review “all our policies”.
A major issue is whether it will hold to the 2050 commitment, about which there is considerable internal scepticism.
Michelle Grattan does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
An interview with Paula and Bridgette Powers – identical twins who witnessed their mother’s carjacking – recently went viral. The way they spoke and gestured in unison has captivatedglobal audiences.
Bridgette and Paula Powers have gained global attention for the way they speak.
Genetically, identical twins are clones. They result from the splitting of an early embryo, meaning they share the same genes.
In contrast, fraternal twins are the result of two eggs being fertilised by two different sperm. On average they share 50% of their genes – the same as any siblings who share both their biological mother and father.
So, when identical twins talk and gesture in unison (known as synchrony), is it down to genes? The answer can be complicated.
Genes aren’t the only influence on looks, language and like-minded thinking. Let’s break down the factors that might lead some twins to speak – and apparently think – in unison.
A close bond in a shared environment
Almost all twins, even “identical” ones, show some differences in physical, mental and emotional traits. They also regard themselves as distinct individuals and typically don’t like being referred to as “the twins”.
Yet we know most people naturally mimic the way those close to them speak and move, even without realising it. This phenomenon is called automatic mimicry and may be part of healthy social development, helping people synchronise behaviours and share emotions.
For identical twins who grow up in the same home, school and community, the effect of a shared environment and close bond may be particularly intense.
Paula and Bridgette Powers, for example, have shared an environment: not only the same parents, home and upbringing, but also the same job, running a bird rescue charity.
Twins may know each other so well they can intuitively sense what the other twin is about to say — and may feel like their brains are in sync. The Powers sisters have explained:
our brains must think alike at the same time.
In contrast, twins who grow up apart share many personality traits, but without years of shared interaction they are less likely to develop synchronised speech or mirrored behaviours. However, they do display many of the same unusual habits and idiosyncrasies.
What about genetics?
Studying identical and fraternal twins separated at birth can help us unravel how much of our behaviours – intelligence, personality and temperament – are influenced by genes and environment.
Even when identical twins grow up apart, they tend to closely resemble one another – not only physically, but in their personality, interests and behaviours. Fraternal twins, in general, are much less alike. This tells us genes matter.
One of us (Nancy) was a researcher with the Minnesota Study of Twins Raised Apart, which lasted from 1979 to 1999 and looked at more than 100 sets of twins (and triplets) separated at birth and raised apart. Twins were separated for various reasons, such as the stigma of single motherhood, inadequate family resources and maternal death.
The study comprehensively examined factors affecting a wide range of psychological, physical and medical traits. Researchers wanted to understand the impact of differences in their life histories on both identical and fraternal twins, reared apart and how they affected the current similarities and differences between them.
A striking finding was identical twins raised apart are as similar in personality as identical twins raised together. For example, the Minnesota researchers found little difference in traits such as wellbeing and aggression, whether identical twins were raised together or apart.
This shows genes play an important role in shaping our personality. Genes also affect the way we process speech and language.
Sharing identical genes may mean identical twins also respond to situations in similar ways. This is because their brains lead them to behave in comparable ways. This genetic closeness, which underlies their behavioural resemblance, explains why they may independently say or do the same thing, without any need for a mystical explanation.
The Minnesota study also found when identical twins were reunited they formed closer relationships with each other than reunited fraternal twins did. This suggests perceptions of similarity in behaviour might draw people together and help keep them connected.
We now know genes and environment each account for half the person-to-person differences in personality. However, the life events we individually experience remain the most important factor shaping how our unique traits are expressed and who we ultimately become.
What about a secret ‘twin language’?
Parents of identical twins may be left baffled as their children, even as toddlers, seem to communicate through babbles and gestures that no one else can understand.
Parents may observe young twins communicating without words.
Each twin pair has their own way of communicating. Twins’ private speech, also called idioglossia, cryptophasia or a “secret language”, refers to verbal and nonverbal exchanges most other people don’t understand. This is different to synchronised speech.
Private speech is displayed by about 40% of twins. However, estimates vary wildly – ranging from as low as 2% to as high as 47%. That’s mainly because researchers define and measure it differently.
Private speech usually fades as children age, at about three years of age. But some twins continue to use it into early childhood.
Why are we so fascinated by twins?
Twins continue to fascinate us. That is clear in the wealth of media attention they receive, their popularity in scientific studies, and their presence in myths and legends across all continents.
Perhaps it is because when we see identical twins who look and act so much alike, it challenges our belief that we are all unique.
But even identical twins are not exact replicas of one another. Genetic changes, events in the womb, and/or life experiences can conspire to create differences between them.
Nevertheless, most identical twins are more alike and socially closer than any other pair of people on the planet.
Bridgette and Paula Powers appear in an episode of Australian Story airing on Monday on ABCTV and ABC iview.
Jeffrey Craig has received funding from the National Health and Medical Research Council. He is the Patron of the Australian Multiple Birth Organisation, and a Member of the International Society of Twin Studies.
Nancy Segal does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
