If you’ve ever picked up your child from childcare and wondered if they’re living a double life, you’re not alone.
Parents often receive rave reports from educators about kids’ adventurous eating habits, only to face a different reality at home, when the child who devoured a veggie-packed curry at lunchtime morphs into a fussy eater refusing anything but dinosaur-shaped chicken nuggets.
While this confusing behaviour is frustrating, it’s completely normal.
Genetics. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors developed physiological responses for survival that are embedded in our genes and influence taste preferences from birth. These include developing “food fussiness” – a natural aversion to unfamiliar foods and bitter flavours to avoid ingesting toxins – and learning to seek palatable foods rich in natural sugars, fat and protein to avoid starvation.
Eating environment. As kids grow, their surroundings at mealtimes – namely carers’ eating habits, feeding practices, routines and social cues conveyed – shape what they actually eat and enjoy.
The interaction between these two factors drives how fussy kids will be, their likes and dislikes and how open they are to new foods.
Why eating behaviour differs between childcare and home
The simple reason kids may eat differently at childcare comes down to the eating environment. Here’s what typically makes childcare different to home:
1. Childcare has strict routines
Childcare runs to a strict schedule, teaching kids to expect meals and snacks at set times and places. Meals are also planned to ensure kids sit down to eat when they’re hungry, and food is offered for a limited time – factors that help kids focus on eating.
When mealtimes are less structured at home, it often leads to kids snacking, reducing their appetite at dinnertime. Distractions, like screens, also take kids’ attention away from eating.
2. Kids are exposed to peer influence and different role models
Kids are natural copycats, so seeing friends enjoying healthy food makes them more willing to try it. This behaviour is supported by a study showing that seating a preschooler who dislikes a vegetable next to a peer who enjoys it can gradually shift their preference, leading them to eat the previously disliked vegetable.
Additionally, the social nature of eating in a group setting encourages kids to try new foods and eat more.
Research also shows carers – who are trained to model enthusiasm for nutritious foods – shape healthy eating habits and help kids learn other valuable behaviours like table manners.
At home, time constraints and limited knowledge can make it harder for parents to model these same behaviours.
3. Childcare regularly exposes kids to new foods
At childcare, meals are carefully planned according to Australian Dietary Guidelines and are focused on exposing kids to new foods regularly and repeatedly to get them comfortable with different tastes and textures.
At home, busy family lives often lead to repetitive meal routines.
4. Kids are offered limited choices
At childcare, meals are planned with military precision and served without negotiation, teaching kids to try to eat what’s provided.
At home, mealtimes can involve high-stakes negotiations when kids refuse certain foods, leading parents to surrender and offer alternatives – a tactic that only reinforces fussy eating and teaches kids to hold out for favourite foods.
5. Kids are given some control over what they eat
Kids have very little control over their daily lives – we’re constantly telling them what to do and when they’ll do it.
However, one way kids assert control is by refusing to eat certain foods at home.
Childcare cleverly gives kids the control they seek, encouraging them to serve themselves from shared platters, making them more willing to try new foods.
6. Kids experience less attention and pressure
At home, we naturally focus on what our child is eating (and not eating) which makes mealtimes stressful for kids.
At childcare, kids don’t have an audience watching their every bite, so they feel less pressure, eat more freely and are more willing to try different foods.
Serve meals around the same time each day and establish snack times, ensuring they’re two hours before mealtimes so your child sits down hungry and ready to eat. Your routine should include putting devices away so your child’s full attention is on eating.
2. Be a positive role model
Because kids observe and mimic what they see, if you show enthusiasm for trying new foods and healthy eating your child will do the same.
3. Get creative
Take a leaf out of childcare’s book and ensure your child’s plate features different colours, textures and flavours presented in fun ways to capture and hold their interest in new foods.
And just like childcare, do this regularly, as repeated exposure is key – it can take eight to ten exposures before your child will accept eating a new food.
4. Limit food choices (but in a fun way)
Offer limited choices but in a way that gives your child some control, like serving platter-style meals where they can choose what they want.
Don’t give into food demands. While it’s tempting to offer alternatives when meals are refused, this creates more problems than it solves, reinforcing food fussiness and narrowing their diet.
5. Encourage independence
Actively involve your child in meal preparation, asking them to pick healthy recipes, help you shop and complete simple tasks like washing veggies and mixing ingredients. This can make them curious to taste the meal they’ve helped prepare.
6. Make mealtimes stress-free
Prioritise sitting down to eat as a family and ensure mealtimes are relaxed and fun – especially when you’re introducing new foods – to create positive associations with healthy eating.
Nick Fuller is the author of Healthy Parents, Healthy Kids – a clinically proven blueprint to overcoming food fussiness.
A/Professor Nick Fuller works for the University of Sydney and RPA Hospital and has received external funding for projects relating to the treatment of overweight and obesity. He is the author and founder of the Interval Weight Loss program, and the author of Healthy Parents, Healthy Kids with Penguin Books.
This year’s Alliance Française French Film Festival showcases a diverse selection of films from blockbusters and biopics to comedies and gripping thrillers for Australian audiences.
I’ve written before about how this annual event, now in its 36th edition, is, in terms of tickets sold and films screened, the largest film festival dedicated to contemporary French cinema outside of France.
The 2025 program once more shines a spotlight on the established icons and rising stars of French cinema.
In the this year’s festival, 30% of the films are directed by women and thorny issues such as slavery, consent and caregiving are presented sensitively and provocatively.
But from a competitive bunch, here are the best five films I saw this year.
How To Make A Killing
It’s Christmas in the Jura, France’s picturesque eastern region full of mountains, snow and pine trees. When Michel (Frank Dubosc) accidentally crashes his truck into a car, killing its driver and passenger, his wife Cathy (Laure Calamy) tells him he may have left fingerprints at the crime scene.
They return – and discover two million euros in the car boot, and a loaded gun in the glove box.
From this point on, How To Make A Killing features one improbable but amusingly nerve-wracking twist after another. There’s a local policeman in over his head and drug lords and contract killers who want their money back.
Oh, and a black bear is on the loose.
Writer-director Dubosc pays homage to the Coen brothers and sprinkles in a typically Gallic dose of black humour. What really gives the film zip and pizzazz is the fabulous Calamy. She has risen to the apex of contemporary French stardom and her performance is a delight.
The Divine Sarah Bernhardt
Sarah Bernhardt can lay claim to being the first film celebrity. Born in Paris in 1844, Bernhardt was first a legendary stage actress, performing Shakespeare and Racine across the world (including Melbourne and Sydney in 1891) before gravitating to silent cinema.
Known for her extraordinary talent and intense stage presence (hence “divine”), she refused to play just female roles, famously playing Hamlet. Her eccentricity was equally renowned: she often travelled with an extensive menagerie of exotic pets.
Guillaume Nicloux’s sumptuous biopic unfolds in a radical way. Rather than tracing Bernhardt’s career in the fairly bog-standard biopic way, Nicloux jumps around, focusing on key events from her life – the amputation of a leg, her death, her bisexuality, her hedonistic lifestyle.
Through this bold achronological prism comes another daring choice: we never see Bernhardt act on stage or film. Her stardom emerges through the extraordinary effect she has on people who enter her orbit.
At the centre is a remarkable performance by Sandrine Kiberlain. She captures Bernhardt’s glamour and narcissism but also taps into her vulnerability to reveal her gradual hollowing out as the vagaries of fame take their toll.
It’s a cautionary tale that speaks to our current ambivalence towards stage-managed celebrity and “stardom at all costs”.
My Brother’s Band
Ever since its Cannes debut last May, Emmanuel Courcol’s My Brother’s Band has received rave reviews. It is sure to be an instant classic.
Two brothers are separated at birth and are only reunited decades later when Thibaut (Benjamin Lavernhe) needs a bone marrow transplant. The only suitable donor is long-lost Jimmy (rising star Pierre Lottin).
All that bonds the two is a shared love of music. Thibaut is an esteemed orchestra conductor while Jimmy plays the trombone in a local brass band.
Lavernhe’s and Lottin’s scenes together are wonderfully wry and tender as the two brothers learn to appreciate each other’s lifestyles and ways of seeing the world. We also see how music can bind communities together during times of personal and collective crisis.
Courcol shuttles between the stuffy, cathedral-like spaces of a Paris conservatorium and the cramped parish halls of northern France. Think Brassed Off meets Tár. My Brother’s Band brings the feel-good to the festival.
When Fall is Coming
When Fall is Coming, the latest work by prolific auteur François Ozon, is a broody family drama set in Burgundy.
Behind the autumnal landscapes and off-the-beaten-track villages lies hidden trauma. Michelle (the outstanding Hélène Vincent, now 81) nervously awaits the arrival of her grandson and the daughter from whom she is long estranged (for reasons we don’t understand until much later).
An innocuous first night meal turns to tragedy, and kickstarts a deeply engrossing, often menacing film. Pierre Lottin features again, this time as an ex-con slowly drawn into this unsettling web of secrets and lies.
The “fall” in the title can be read any number of ways. Suffice to say, this slow-burner reminds us of Ozon’s knack in withholding plot points and revealing them gradually. With its blend of spiteful intimacy and startling revelations, When Fall is Coming quietly chills. You’ll not look at mushrooms in the same way again.
Lucky Winners
French filmgoers love to laugh. The top ten grossing French films in history are all comedies.
Lucky Winners is a jet-black comedy about four different winners of France’s national lottery. Each becomes a millionaire overnight – but that’s when their troubles begin. Romain Choay and Maxime Govare’s witty film features a fine ensemble cast and a healthy dose of cruelty and squabbling.
The dream sours. Money does not bring happiness, only guilt, revenge and greed. Feel-good quickly descends into feel-bad. I imagine Hollywood will be remaking this very soon.
The Alliance Française French Film Festival is in cinemas around Australia on various dates until April 27.
Ben McCann 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.
You’ve got a new brown spot on your face, but is it a freckle or a sunspot? Or perhaps you’ve found a spot on your back that looks like a mole but is flatter than your other ones – is it a mole or a dark freckle?
Here’s how to tell the difference between freckles, sunspots and moles – and when you need to get a spot checked to see if it’s skin cancer.
Freckles
Freckles, known as ephelides, are small, flat, light brown spots that appear on people with fair skin, or red or light-coloured hair.
These people are more likely to have the MC1R gene, which leads to freckles forming.
Freckles are caused by sun exposure and are more noticeable in summer. When sunlight hits the skin, cells called melanocytes produce melanin, the pigment that gives skin its colour.
In people prone to freckles, the melanin doesn’t spread evenly. Instead, it clumps together, creating freckles.
Freckles generally appear in childhood and may fade with age, especially if sun exposure reduces. As we age we produce less melanin, or it can break down or disperse, resulting in lighter or fewer freckles.
Using sunscreen and wearing protective clothing can help prevent new freckles from developing, especially on the face and arms.
Sunspots are also called age spots or actinic keratoses (or liver spots, but they have nothing to do with the liver). They are larger than freckles: sometimes the size of a small coin, and appear as flat brown spots.
Sunspots develop over time due to long-term sun exposure, which leads to excessive melanin production. They tend to appear on skin with greater sun exposure, such as the face, hands, shoulders and arms.
Unlike freckles, which tend to get lighter with less sun exposure, sunspots will not fade with time, and may further darken with continued sun exposure.
While sunspots are not dangerous, they do increase your risk of other skin cancers in that area.
It’s also important to monitor them, as slow-growing melanomas may initially look like sunspots. If you see the spot changes in size, shape or colour, see your doctor to rule out skin cancer.
Moles
Moles are often dark, raised or flat skin growths that can appear anywhere on your body.
Although moles can exist from birth, they typically grow during childhood, adolescence and early adulthood (including during pregnancy, when hormones are changing), until around the age of around 40. Moles can increase in size, and new ones can also appear.
Most adults have between ten and 40 moles on their body. A person with a high mole count has 50 or more, while someone with a very high mole count has 100 or more.
Moles form when melanocytes grow in clusters instead of spreading evenly throughout the skin.
Moles can either be raised or flat, depending upon their type, depth and age.
Raised moles, referred to as compound nevi, have both flat and raised portions and typically have pigment that is deeper in the skin.
Dermal nevi are skin-coloured or light brown moles that are also raised.
Most moles are harmless. Some may have hair growing from them and some may disappear, whereas other moles may darken or alter with age or hormonal changes.
While freckles and sunspots are completely harmless, moles do require more attention, especially if they change in size, shape, colour or texture.
If a mole shows any of the following warning signs, see your doctor, who will use the ABCDE rule to detect if a lesion is a skin cancer:
asymmetry: if one half of the mole looks different from the other half
border: if your mole is shaped irregularly, jagged or has poorly defined edges
colour: varied shades or sudden changes in colour of the mole
diameter: if it is larger than 6 millimeters (about the size of a pencil eraser)
evolving: if your mole has any changes in its size, shape, colour, or sensation such as itching or bleeding for more than a few weeks.
Our research shows only 21.7% of people can correctly identify melanoma on their own, so professional checks are essential.
How to prevent skin damage
Since freckles, sunspots and some moles are influenced by exposure to the sun, you can protect your skin by:
avoiding the sun when ultraviolet rays are strongest
wearing sunscreen with SPF 50 every day, even when it’s cloudy. Apply it 20 minutes before going outside and reapply every two hours
wearing protective clothing, including a wide-brimmed hat to cover your face, neck and ears, and long-sleeved shirts and pants to protect your arms and legs.
Mike Climstein received funding from Johnson & Johnson
Jeremy Hudson receives funding from Agaibey Enterprises Ltd.
Michael Stapelberg receives funding from Johnson & Johnson.
Nedeljka Rosic received research funding from Johnson & Johnson
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Carolyn Nickson, Associate Professor, Melbourne School of Population and Global Health, University of Melbourne; Adjunct Associate Professor, Sydney School of Public Health, University of Sydney
Australia’s BreastScreen program offers women regular mammograms (breast X-rays) based on their age. And this screening for breast cancer saves lives.
But much has changed since the program was introduced in the early 90s. Technology has developed, as has our knowledge of which groups of women might be at higher risk of breast cancer. So how we screen women for breast cancer needs to adapt.
In a recent paper, we’ve proposed a fundamental shift away from an age-based approach to a screening program that takes into account women’s risk of breast cancer.
We argue we could save more lives if screening tests and schedules were personalised based on someone’s risk.
We don’t yet know exactly how this might work in practice. We need to consult with all parties involved, including health professionals, government and women, and we need to begin Australian trials.
But here’s why we need to rethink how we screen for breast cancer in Australia.
Why does breast screening need to change?
Australia’s BreastScreen program was introduced in 1991 and offers women regular mammograms based on their age. Women aged 50–74 are targeted, but screening is available from the age of 40.
The program is key to Australia’s efforts to reduce the burden of breast cancer, providing more than a million screens each year.
Women who attend BreastScreen reduce their risk of dying from breast cancer by 49% on average.
Breast screening saves lives because it makes a big difference to find breast cancers early, before they spread to other parts of the body.
Despite this, around 75,000 Australian women are expected to die from breast cancer over the next 20 years if we continue with current approaches to breast cancer screening and management.
Who’s at high risk, and how best to target them?
International evidence confirms it is possible to identify groups of women at higher risk of breast cancer. These include:
women with denser breasts (where there’s more glandular and fibrous tissue than fatty tissue in the breasts) are more likely to develop breast cancer, and their cancers are harder to find on standard mammograms
women whose mother, sisters, grandmother or aunts have had breast or ovarian cancer, especially if there are multiple relatives and the cancers occurred at young ages
women who have been found to carry genetic mutations that lead to a higher risk of breast cancer (including women with multiple moderate risk mutations, as indicated by what’s known as a polygenic risk score).
Women in these and other high-risk groups might warrant a different form of screening. This could include screening from a younger age, screening more frequently, and offering more sensitive tests such as digital breast tomosynthesis (a 3D version of mammography), MRI or contrast-enhanced mammography (a type of mammography that uses a dye to highlight cancerous lesions).
But we don’t yet know:
how to best identify women at higher risk
which screening tests should be offered, how often and to whom
how to staff and run a risk-based screening program
how to deliver this in a cost-effective and equitable way.
The road ahead
This is what we have been working on, for Cancer Council Australia, as part of the ROSA Breast project.
This federally funded project has estimated and compared the expected outcomes and costs for a range of screening scenarios.
For each scenario we estimated the benefits (saving lives or less intense treatment) and harms (overdiagnosis and rates of investigations in women recalled for further investigation after a screening test who are found to not have breast cancer).
Of 160 potential screening scenarios we modelled, we shortlisted 19 which produced the best outcomes for women and were the most cost effective. The shortlisted scenarios tended to involve either targeted screening technologies for higher-risk women or screening technologies other than mammography for all screened women.
For example, in our estimates, making no change to the target age range or screening intervals but offering a more sensitive screening test to the 20% of women deemed to be at highest risk would save 113 lives over ten years.
Alternatively, commencing targeted screening from age 40 and offering a more sensitive screening test annually to the 20% of women at highest risk, and three-yearly screening (of the current kind) to the 30% of women at lowest risk, would save 849 lives over ten years.
However, less frequent screening of the lower risk group was expected to lead to small increases in breast cancer deaths in that group.
How do we best assess women for their risk of breast cancer? At this stage, there’s no one answer. Tint Media/Shutterstock
We also outlined 25 recommendations to put into action, and set out a five-year roadmap of how to get there. This includes:
a large scale trial to find out what is feasible, effective and affordable in Australia
making sure women at higher risk in different parts of Australia are offered suitable options regardless of where they live and who they see
testing how we assess women for their risk of breast cancer, including whether these assessments work as intended and make sense to women from a range of backgrounds
clinical studies of screening technologies to determine the best delivery models and associated costs
ongoing engagement with groups including women, health professionals and government.
Breast cancer screening review out soon
Federal health minister Mark Butler said a review of the BreastScreen program would consider our recommendations. The results of this review are expected soon.
We’ve provided an evidence-based roadmap towards better screening for breast cancer. Now is the time to commit to this journey.
We acknowledge Louiza Velentzis from the Daffodil Centre, and Paul Grogan and Deborah Bateson from the University of Sydney, who co-authored the paper mentioned in this article.
Carolyn Nickson led the ROSA Project for Cancer Council Australia. She receives funding from the Australian government Department of Health and Aged Care, the Medical Research Future Fund, the National Health and Medical Research Council and Melbourne Health.
Bruce Mann works as a surgeon at Northwestern BreastScreen in Melbourne. He was a board member of the Breast Cancer Network Australia, which has improved screening as a key strategic objective. He is director of research at Breast Cancer Trials. If trials are done in this space, Breast Cancer Trials may be involved. He was a member of the ROSA Project coordination group and jointly chaired the project advisory groups.
Karen Canfell was executive lead for the ROSA Project discussed in this article. She has received grants from the Australian government’s Department of Health and Aged Care and the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, the National Health and Medical Research Council and Medical Research Future Fund, the US National Cancer Institute and CDC, Cancer Research UK, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and government agencies in several countries. She co-leads an investigator-initiated trial of cervical screening, Compass, run by the Australian Centre for Prevention of Cervical Cancer (ACPCC), which is a government-funded not-for-profit charity. Compass receives infrastructure support from the Australian government and the ACPCC has received equipment and a funding contribution from Roche Molecular Diagnostics, USA. She also co-leads an implementation program Elimination of Cervical Cancer in the Indo-Pacific which has received support from the Australian government and the Minderoo Foundation, and equipment donations from Cepheid and Microbix.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Sam Whiting, Vice-Chancellor’s Senior Research Fellow in Music Industries and Cultural Economy, RMIT University
The Australian Music Venue Foundation launched this month to advocate for and potentially administer an arena ticket levy to support grassroots live music venues. Funds would be raised through a small levy, approximately A$1 per ticket, on the price of tickets to large music events, over 5,000 capacity.
The foundation is partly modelled on the United Kingdom’s Music Venue Trust, a charity and advocacy body founded in 2014 that has advocated for a big ticket levy.
While the proposed levy would certainly help to level the playing field between grassroots music venues and the big end of touring, the Music Venue Trust was founded on much more radical principles and ambitions than simple redistribution.
Socialising live music
Although the Music Venue Trust has moved into advocacy and policy work, such as vocal support for the big ticket levy, the trust’s original and continuing mission is to socialise grassroots music venues. This means they work to help venues transition away from for-profit models and towards alternative ownership structures.
The trust’s “Own Our Venues” campaign spawned Music Venue Properties, a charitable landlord funded by the broader music community. The scheme has now purchased five grassroots venues around the UK, leased on the condition they continue to run as live music venues.
The goal is to take the profit motive out of running a venue. Surplus is reinvested into venue spaces, ensuring their long-term sustainability.
As the trust’s founder and CEO Mark Davyd states, “[the community] is the best person to own a venue”.
We don’t want money going to private landlords, we want it in the cultural economy because that’s the way we generate more great artists and give more people the opportunity to be involved in music.
Acknowledging that such radical ambitions require funding, the trust have been long term advocates for a big ticket levy. However, this advocacy has always accompanied their greater goal of socialising live music venues.
The trust have helped to change the broader cultural understanding of grassroots venues in the UK. Between 2014 and 2022, the proportion of music venues in the country run as not-for-profit ventures increased from 3% to 26%.
The Australian context
Melbourne’s Gasometer Hotel and Brisbane’s The Bearded Lady are the latest small, but culturally significant, live music venues to face closure. The number of venues licensed for live music in Australia is falling, with the greatest reductions in the small-to-medium range.
The recent parliamentary inquiry into the live music industry found costs like insurance and rent have risen sharply in the last five years. Meanwhile, income from alcohol sales – a core revenue source for smaller venues – has dropped in connection with changing youth culture, the cost-of-living crisis, and excises hitched to inflation.
Costs to run music venues have increased, while income from avenues like alcohol sales have fallen. Frankie Cordoba/Unsplash
Surveys of young people and other groups affirm that Australians value live music, and most people would like to attend more. The most commonly cited barrier is cost, followed by distance from appropriate venues, especially in regional areas.
An arena ticket levy was a key recommendation of the inquiry, with the committee recommending government agency Music Australia should manage the funds.
capital improvements to venues, such as sound-proofing or disability access
festivals promoting regional, all-ages, First Nations and community participation.
Neither the Labor government nor the opposition have indicated a position on this recommendation, which would require legislation.
The industry proposal
The Australian Music Venue Foundation is asking big music businesses to opt in to an industry-managed ticket levy to fund grassroots live music.
While there has been advocacy for such a voluntary arrangement in the UK, this is yet to come to fruition. The UK government’s deadline for the arrangement of a voluntary scheme by the end of March is approaching, opening up the alternative scenario of a legislated mandatory levy.
Australian advocates believe they may have the relationships to create a different outcome, arguing all industry players have a stake in a healthy music ecosystem.
In the proposed Australian scheme, the recipients and use of funding would be decided by a board of industry professionals. This raises questions around potential conflicts of interest. The foundation has applied for charity status, which requires transparency around operations and finances. However, there are broader questions about priorities.
The foundation argues all levels of the industry have a stake in their being a healthy ecosystem of venues. Austin/Unsplash
If the scheme gets up, the foundation will need to consider whether to restrict its support to Australian-owned, independent venues of a certain size. Alternatively, funds may be available to venues that are part-owned by the same major, for-profit, international companies paying into the scheme.
To replace the proposed government levy, the foundation would also need to find ways of supporting access to live music for regional, all-ages, First Nations, and other disadvantaged communities, as recommended by the inquiry’s report.
The foundation could promote social objectives such as performer diversity, patron safety, and environmental sustainability, but there are no guarantees of this under an industry-led scheme.
These examples demonstrate the issues that can arise when economic redistribution is managed within an industry, rather than by government.
Lofty ambitions
The Music Venue Trust has successfully argued for grassroots music venues as a public good, worthy of longterm community and public investment as well as a structural approach to support.
Through their work, they have provided a new narrative for live music in the UK, supporting innovative ownership and operating models that go beyond the default of a commercially-leased space run as a for-profit small business.
Ambition and innovation has made the trust much more than another industry association advocating for the interests of a particular group of businesses. The Australian Music Venue Foundation should aspire to similar heights if it is to have the same level of influence and impact.
Sam Whiting receives funding from RMIT University and the Winston Churchill Trust.
Ben Green receives funding from the Australian Research Council.
In December 2024, the editorial board of the Journal of Human Evolution resigned en masse following disagreements with the journal’s publisher, Elsevier. The board’s grievances included claims of inadequate copyediting, misuse of artificial intelligence (AI), and the high fees charged to make research articles publicly available.
The previous year, more than 40 scientists who made up the entire academic board of a leading journal for brain imaging also walked off the job. The journal in question, Neuroimage, is also published by Elsevier, which the former board members accused of being “too greedy”.
Mass resignations of journal editors are becoming more frequent. They highlight the tension between running a for-profit publishing business and upholding research integrity.
For a long time, academic journals were a niche branch of publishing. They were run by and for research communities. But this started to change from the second world war onwards.
The expansion of research, combined with an influx of commercial publishing players and the rise of the internet in the 1990s, have transformed journal publishing into a highly concentrated and competitive media business.
Along with Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley, SAGE, and Taylor & Francis make up what are known as the “big five” in academic publishing. Collectively, these publishers are responsible for roughly 50% of all research output.
A key factor in their profitability is volunteer labour provided by researchers. Traditional models of peer review are a good example of this. Academics provide publishers with content, in the form of journal articles. They also review their peers’ work for free. University libraries then pay for access to the final published journal on behalf of their research community.
Alongside the pressure on academics to publish, the push to “speed up science” through these systems of peer-review only contribute to issues of trust in research.
In 2023, academic publisher Elsevier recorded a profit of roughly $3.6 billion. T.Schneider/Shutterstock
Profit at the expense of research integrity
The increasing frequency of editorial board resignations reflects the tension between researchers trying to uphold scientific and research integrity, and publishers trying to run a for-profit business answerable to shareholders.
Research is most often built on spending taxpayers’ money.
Yet there is often little alignment between the profit imperatives of large, multinational publishers and the expectations of the communities and funding bodies that pay for the costs of research.
For example, for-profit publishing models mean the results of research often end up locked behind paywalls. This has implications for the dissemination of research findings. It also means the public may not be able to access information they need most, such as medical research.
The business of academic publishing also doesn’t always sit comfortably with the values and motives of scholarly inquiry and researchers.
As Arash Abizadeh, a former editor of Philosophy & Public Affairs – a leading political philosophy journal – wrote in The Guardian in July 2024:
Commercial publishers are incentivised to try to publish as many articles and journals as possible, because each additional article brings in more profit. This has led to a proliferation of junk journals that publish fake research, and has increased the pressure on rigorous journals to weaken their quality controls.
What could alternative academic publishing practices that safeguard the integrity of research look like?
The “publish-review-curate” model is one example.
This model has been adopted by community research
initiative MetaROR. It involves authors publishing their work as “preprints” which are immediately accessible to the community.
The work then goes through an open peer review process. Finally, an assessment report is produced based on the reviews.
This model aims to accelerate the dissemination of knowledge. It also aims to encourage a more transparent, collaborative, and constructive review process.
Another important advantage of preprints is that they are not locked behind paywalls. This makes it faster and easier for research communities to share new findings with other researchers quickly.
There are some drawbacks to this model. For example, preprints can cause confusion if they are publicised by the media too early.
The question of who should pay for and maintain online preprint servers, on which global research communities depend, is also a subject of continuing debate.
As the academic ecosystem continues to evolve, we will need publishing models that can adapt to the changes and needs of the research community and beyond.
Lucy Montgomery is part of the Curtin Open Knowledge Initiative, and serves on Advisory Boards for several not-for-profit organisations involved in scholarly publishing and open access. She is a member of the UWA Press Board; as well as Chair of the Scientific Committee for the Directory of Open Access Books. She has received funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Arcadia Fund, and has previously consulted to both commercial and non-commercial scholarly presses.
Emilia Bell receives funding from an Australian Government Research Training Program (RTP) Scholarship for their doctoral research. They are a non-executive director of the Australian Library and Information Association (ALIA) and Manager, Research and Digital Services at Murdoch University Library. Emilia is also affiliated with several organisations in the wider not-for-profit, higher education, and library sectors.
Karl Huang is affiliated with the Curtin Open Knowledge Initiative (COKI) project, which receives or has received funding from Curtin University, Mellon Foundation, and Arcadia Fund. COKI also works closely with non-profit partners internationally and in Australia. Karl is also affiliated with the Centre for Culture and Technology, as its current Director, at Curtin University.
Stomata – the breathing ‘mouths’ of leaves – under the microscope.Barbol / Shutterstock
Plant behaviour may seem rather boring compared with the frenetic excesses of animals. Yet the lives of our vegetable friends, who tirelessly feed the entire biosphere (including us), are full of exciting action. It just requires a little more effort to appreciate.
One such behaviour is the dynamic opening and closing of millions of tiny mouths (called stomata) located on each leaf, through which plants “breathe”. In this process they let out water extracted from the soil in exchange for precious carbon dioxide from the air, which they need to produce sugar in the sunlight-powered process of photosynthesis.
Opening the stomata at the wrong time can waste valuable water and risk a catastrophic drying-out of the plant’s vascular system. Almost all land plants control their stomata very precisely in response to light and humidity to optimise growth while minimising the damage risk.
How plants evolved this extraordinary balancing act has been the subject of considerable debate among scientists. In a new paper published in PNAS we used lasers to find out how the earliest stomata may have operated.
Tiny valves, global consequences
Much depends on the way stomata behave: plant productivity, sensitivity to drought, and indeed the pace of the global carbon and water cycles.
However, they are difficult to observe in action. Each stomata is like a tiny, pressure-operated valve. They have “guard cells” surrounding an opening or pore which lets water vapour out and carbon dioxide in.
When pressure increases in stomata guard cells, the pore opens – and vice versa. Artemide / Shutterstock
When fluid pressure increases inside the stomata’s guard cells, they swell up to open the pore. When pressure drops, the cells deflate and the pore closes. To understand stomata behaviour, we wanted to be able to measure the pressure in the guard cells – but it’s not easy.
Lasers, bubbles and evolution
Enter Craig Brodersen of Yale University with a newly developed microscope-guided laser. It can create microscopic bubbles inside the individual cells that operate the stomatal pore.
When Brodersen spent a sabbatical at the University of Tasmania (where I am based), we found we could determine the pressure inside stomatal cells by tracking the size of these bubbles and how quickly they collapsed. This involved theoretical calculations guided by bubble expert Philippe Marmottant, of the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) in Grenoble.
This new tool gave us the perfect opportunity to explore how the behaviour of stomata is different among major plant groups. The aim was to test our hypothesis that the evolution of stomatal behaviour follows a predictable trajectory through the history of plant evolution.
We argue it began with a relatively simple ancestral passive control state, currently represented in living ferns and lycophytes, and developed to a more active hormonal control mechanism seen in modern conifers and flowering plants.
Against this hypothesis, some researchers have previously reported complex behaviours in some of the most ancient of stomata-bearing plants, the bryophytes. We wanted to test this finding using our newly developed laser instrument.
400 million years of development
What we found was firstly that our laser pressure probe technique worked extremely well. We made nearly 500 measurements of stomatal pressure dynamics in the space of a few months. This was a marked improvement on the past 45 years, in which fewer than 30 similar measurements had been made.
Secondly, we found that the stomata of our representative bryophytes (hornworts and mosses) lacked even the most basic responses to light found in all other land plants.
This result supported our earlier hypothesis that the first stomata found in ancestors of the modern bryophytes 450 million years ago should have been very simple valves. They would have lacked the complex behaviours seen in modern flowering plants.
Our results suggest that stomatal behaviour has changed substantially through the process of evolution, highlighting critical changes in functionality that are preserved in the different major land plant groups that currently inhabit the Earth.
How plants will survive the future
We can now say with confidence that stomata in mosses, ferns, conifers and flowering plants all behave in very different ways. This has an important corollary: they will all respond differently to the heaving changes in atmospheric temperature and water availability that they face now and into the near future. Predicting stomatal behaviour in the future will help us to predict these impacts and highlight plant vulnerability.
In terms of agricultural benefit, our new laser method should be fast and sensitive enough to reveal even small differences in the the behaviour of closely related plants. This may help to identify crop variants that use water in a more efficient or productive way, which will assist plant breeders to find varieties that better translate increasingly unpredictable soil water supplies into food.
So next time you look upon a leaf, consider the frantic pace of dynamic calculation and adjustment of millions of little mouths, reacting as your breath falls upon them. Realise that our own fate, tied to the performance of forests and crops in future climates, hangs on the behaviour of the stomata of different species. A good reason for us to understand these unassuming little valves.
Tim Brodribb receives funding from the Australian Research Council.
United States President Donald Trump recently argued “he who saves his country does not violate any Law” as he ignores Congress and the courts, governs by executive order and threatens international laws and treaties.
Republican leaders moved dramatically to the right, and the primary system allowed the choice of an extremist. Republican voters then aligned their opinions with his. Trump’s disdain for democratic fundamentals spread quickly. Partisans defending their team slid away from democratic values.
Canada’s more centrist ideological spectrum is not foolproof against this type of extremism. Public opinion can be moved when our leaders take us there.
Decline can start slowly and then accelerate. America’s democratic backsliding in the first weeks of Trump’s second presidency follows the erosion of democratic norms over decades. Republican attacks on institutions, the opposition, the media and higher education corrosively undermined public faith in the truth, including election results.
Trust in government is holding steady in Canada, however. That provides an important guardrail for Canadian democracy.
The dangers of courting the far right
There are also lessons for our political parties. To maximize their seats, Republicans accepted extremists like Marjorie Taylor Greene, but soon needed those types of politicians for key votes.
The so-called Freedom Caucus, made up of MAGA adherents, forced the choice of a new, more extreme, leader of the House of Representatives. This provides a clear lesson that history has shown many times: it is dangerous for the party on the political right to accommodate the far right, which can quickly take control.
Once established within the ruling party, extremists can hold their party hostage.
Austria recently avoided the inclusion of the far right in its new coalition, and now Germany is working to do the same. As Canada’s Conservatives look for every vote, courting far-right voters and candidates risks destabilizing the system.
They clearly did not imagine party loyalty negating the safeguards that protect democracy from an authoritarian-minded president. The Constitution gives Congress the power to legislate and impeach, limits the executive’s power to spend and make appointments, gives the judiciary power to hold an executive accountable and contains the 25th amendment allowing cabinet to remove a president.
But when one party controls the legislative and executive branches during a time of hyper-partisanship, these mechanisms may not constrain an authoritarian. Today, Republican loyalty has eroded these checks and balances and American courts are struggling to step up to their heightened role.
Although counter-intuitive, parliamentary systems like Canada’s are usually less susceptible to authoritarianism than presidential ones because the cabinet or the House of Commons can turn against a lawless leader.
Still, if popular, authoritarian leaders can still retain their party’s support — and then things can slide quickly. The rightward pull of extremists seen in the U.S. House would be more dangerous here since the Canadian House of Commons includes our executive.
Guarding against xenophobia
Lastly, Canada should be wary of xenophobic rhetoric.
“America First” is not simply shopping advice. It began as an isolationist slogan during the First World War but was soon adopted by pro-fascists, American Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan. These entities questioned who is really American and wanted not only isolationism, but racist policies, immigration restrictions and eugenics.
Trump did not revive the phrase accidentally. It’s a call to America’s fringes. Alienating domestic groups is a sure sign of democratic decline.
“Canada First” mimics that century-long dark theme in America. In combination with contempt for the opposition, it questions the right of other parties to legitimately hold power if used as a message by one party.
Also, asserting that “Canada is broken” — as Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre often does — mimics Trump’s talk of American carnage, language and imagery he uses to justify extraordinary presidential authority.
Such language erodes citizens’ trust in democratic institutions and primes voters to support undemocratic practices in the name of patriotism. Canadian parties and politicians should exit that road.
Ultimately, institutions alone do not protect a country from the rise of authoritarianism. Democracy can be fragile. As a federal election approaches in Canada, it’s important to know the warning signs of extremism and anti-democratic practices that are creeping into our politics.
Matthew Lebo 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 – Canada – By Michael R. King, Associate Professor, Gustavson School of Business and Lansdowne Chair in Finance, University of Victoria
An Ontario court has approved the liquidation of nearly all Hudson’s Bay Company’s stores, marking the end of Canada’s oldest company, which has been in operation for 355 years. The liquidation is set to begin March 24, and will continue until June 15, leaving only six stores in operation.
The court’s decision came shortly after Hudson’s Bay filed for creditor protection, signalling the company’s struggle to manage its mounting debt.
With widespread layoffs sure to follow, this corporate collapse is both shocking and distressing. But the court documents suggest it was not unexpected. Hudson’s Bay lost $329.7 million in the 12 months leading up to Jan. 31, 2025. As of that date, Hudson’s Bay had only $3.3 million in cash and owed more than $2 billion in debt and leases.
The final straw appears to have been trade tensions between Canada and the U.S., with the increased geopolitical and economic uncertainty leading lenders to shun Hudson’s Bay as it sought more financing, according to court documents.
What bankruptcy looks like
The downfall of a major company like Hudson’s Bay brings with it a wave of financial jargon. Understanding the differences between insolvency, bankruptcy, restructuring and liquidation is crucial to fully grasp the situation.
Insolvency occurs when a business runs out of cash and cannot pay its bills. At the start of March, it was $5 million behind on rent and supplier payments, and within days of missing payroll.
Bankruptcy is a legal process under Canada’s Companies’ Creditors Arrangement Act where a company files for protection from its creditors. The goal is to avoid the social and economic costs of liquidation, preserve jobs and protect the interests of affected stakeholders. If granted, the judge sets a “stay period” where the company works out a restructuring plan with its creditors.
Hudson’s Bay has more than 2,000 creditors, including $430 million in secured term loans, $724 million in mortgages and $512 million to unsecured creditors, mostly owed to suppliers. Hudson’s Bay also owes payroll remittances, federal sales taxes and over $60 million in customer gift cards and loyalty points. Gift cards are good until April 6.
A restructuring wipes out the equity holders and allows a company to negotiate a reduction in its debts. The business continues to operate under the supervision of a court-appointed monitor, using interim financing to pay bills. If successful, the company re-emerges from bankruptcy and continues to do business.
If restructuring is not successful, the company asks the court for permission to liquidate. Liquidation means a “fire sale” of all assets such as inventory, shelving, real estate, leases and trademarks. Items are sold at a deep discount, leading to potential bargains.
The Ontario Superior Court denied the initial request to liquidate on March 14, telling Hudson’s Bay and its creditors to “lower the temperature” and work on a deal. With only limited progress and some concessions made to support Hudson’s Bay’s joint venture with RioCan REIT, the court gave permission for the liquidation on March 21.
Many will lose, some will win
The collapse of Hudson’s Bay will leave many facing financial losses, while a select few stand to gain.
Secured creditors, some suppliers and Hudson’s Bay pensioners are expected to be protected by the courts. However, many others, including thousands of customers and more than 1,800 unsecured creditors, will suffer a financial hit.
The hardest impact will be felt by the more than 9,300 employees losing their jobs. Employees will lose their income, health and disability benefits, and life insurance, significantly impacting families across the country.
However, employees will not lose their pension benefits. The company’s pension plan is fully funded and in surplus position. This was not the case for Sears Canada when it went bankrupt in 2018. A surplus means the value of investments is greater than the promised benefits and is good news for retirees.
Mall landlords will also lose out. Hudson’s Bay drove foot traffic in malls across the country where it was the anchor-tenant. There will likely be painful ripple effects for smaller Hudson’s Bay store owners, including falling sales, defaults on mortgages and business failures.
When a company is liquidated, the proceeds from selling its assets are used to repay claimants based on their priority in bankruptcy. This is sometimes referred to as the waterfall of “who gets what.” Think of it as a queue with people lining up to get paid.
Interim DIP financing is paid off first, together with legal and accounting fees related to the bankruptcy. Essential operating costs during the restructuring are also paid, including employee wages.
Next come secured creditors. These lenders provided funding backed by specific assets, known as collateral. Collateral may include inventory and real estate. A similar process happens on a personal residence; if a homeowner defaults on their mortgage payments, the bank may take possession of the house.
Third in line are debts granted priority by the courts. Employees receive unpaid wages up to a certain cap, just under $9,000, under the federal Wage Earner Protection Program. Pension benefits are paid out and outstanding payroll and sales tax remittances are paid.
As the pool of assets gets smaller, unsecured creditors are paid off next including suppliers, landlords and employees owed additional wages or termination benefits.
Last in the queue from the wind-up are equity holders — the residual claimants — who control the company through their common and preferred shares.
In 2020, Hudson’s Bay’s CEO Richard Baker and a group of investors took the company private, meaning it was no longer publicly traded on the Toronto Stock Exchange, buying out shareholders for approximately $2 billion. This stake is now wiped out.
Disappointing, but not surprising
Hudson’s Bay’s current financial situation is disappointing, but not surprising. The COVID-19 pandemic made times tough for brick-and-mortar retailers. On top of this, under-investment and a failed e-commerce strategy left the company struggling to compete in an increasingly digital retail landscape.
In the end, Hudson’s Bay backed itself into a corner, arguably waiting too long to secure funding and ultimately losing control of its own destiny. Its bankruptcy is a major blow to Canadian retail, marking the end of a era for a company that lasted more than three-and-a-half centuries.
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.
Critics have long accused the agency – and its affiliated outlets such as Voice of America, Radio Free Europe and Radio Free Asia – of being a propaganda arm of US foreign policy.
But to the current president, the USAGM has become a promoter of anti-American ideas and agendas – including allegedly suppressing stories critical of Iran, sympathetically covering the issue of “white privilege” and bowing to pressure from China.
Propaganda is clearly in the eye of the beholder. The Moscow Times reported Russian officials were elated by the demise of the “purely propagandistic” outlets, while China’s Global Times celebrated the closure of a “lie factory”.
Meanwhile, the European Commission hailed USAGM outlets as a “beacon of truth, democracy and hope”. All of which might have left the average person understandably confused: Voice of America? Wasn’t that the US propaganda outlet from World War II?
Well, yes. But the reality of USAGM and similar state-sponsored global media outlets is more complex – as are the implications of the US agency’s demise.
Public service or state propaganda?
The USAGM is one of several international public service media outlets based in western democracies. Others include Australia’s ABC International, the BBC World Service, CBC/Radio-Canada, France Médias Monde, NHK-World Japan, Deutsche Welle in Germany and SRG SSR in Switzerland.
Part of the Public Media Alliance, they are similar to national public service media, largely funded by taxpayers to uphold democratic ideals of universal access to news and information.
Unlike national public media, however, they might not be consumed – or even known – by domestic audiences. Rather, they typically provide news to countries without reliable independent media due to censorship or state-run media monopolies.
On the other hand, the independence of USAGM outlets has been questioned often, particularly as they are required to share government-mandated editorials.
Ultimately, these global media outlets wouldn’t exist if there weren’t benefits for the governments that fund them. Sharing stories and perspectives that support or promote certain values and policies is an effective form of “public diplomacy”.
Yet these international media outlets differ from state-controlled media models because of editorial systems that protect them from government interference.
The Voice of America’s “firewall”, for instance, “prohibits interference by any US government official in the objective, independent reporting of news”. Such protections allow journalists to report on their own governments more objectively.
In contrast, outlets such as China Media Group (CMG), RT from Russia, and PressTV from Iran also reach a global audience in a range of languages. But they do this through direct government involvement. CMG subsidiary CCTV+, for example, states it is “committed to telling China’s story to the rest of the world”.
Though RT states it is an autonomous media outlet, research has found the Russian government oversees hiring editors, imposing narrative angles, and rejecting stories.
A Voice of America staffer protests outside the Washington DC offices on March 17 2025, after employees were placed on administrative leave. Getty Images
Other voices get louder
The biggest concern for western democracies is that these other state-run media outlets will fill the void the USAGM leaves behind – including in the Pacific.
Worryingly, the differences between outlets such as Voice of America and more overtly state-run outlets aren’t immediately clear to audiences, as government ownership isn’t advertised.
An Australian senator even had to apologise recently after speaking with PressTV, saying she didn’t know the news outlet was affiliated with the Iranian government, or that it had been sanctioned in Australia.
Switched off
Trump’s move to dismantle the USAGM doesn’t come as a complete surprise, however. As the authors of Capturing News, Capturing Democracy: Trump and the Voice of America described, the first Trump administration failed in its attempts to remove the firewall and install loyalists.
This perhaps explains why Trump has resorted to more drastic measures this time. And, as with many of the current administration’s legally dubious actions, there has been resistance.
But for many of the agency’s journalists, contractors, broadcasting partners and audiences, it may be too late. Last week the New York Times reported some Voice of America broadcasts had already been replaced by music.
Valerie A. Cooper 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 – Canada – By James Kwateng-Yeboah, Assistant Professor, Department for the Study of Religion, Saint Mary’s University
Aspirations transform migration from mere physical movement into a deeply personal conviction, reshaping how individuals see themselves and their futures. (NEOM/Unsplash)
When governments, policymakers or the news media discuss migration, the focus is almost exclusively on those who physically cross borders, seek asylum or arrive at ports of entry. But migration does not begin at at the moment of departure or upon arrival. It starts much earlier, as an aspiration.
In the United States, that figure has hit a record 21 per cent. These figures challenge the common assumption that Canada and the U.S. are simply migration destinations. Increasingly, they are also places people aspire to leave. But what fuels migration desire?
As a scholar of religion and migration, my recently published research focuses on aspiring migrants: those who dream and plan for a future elsewhere, even if they never leave.
While studies have shown how religion might aid or hinder a person’s integration into new societies, I explore how religion shapes who wants to migrate in the first place and why.
Not everyone who wants to migrate will ultimately do so, but their aspirations matter. Migration aspirations influence education, career choices, family formation and even political engagement. Yet, the forces behind these aspirations remain largely understudied.
Migration aspirations influence education, career choices, family formation and even political engagement. (Evangeline Shaw/Unsplash)
Who wants to migrate?
My interviews with young Ghanaians between the ages of 20 and 35 reveal that migration is not just about where people go. It’s also about who they believe they are meant to be.
Analyzing 565 surveys and 25 in-depth interviews, I found that the aspiraton to migrate was widespread, with nearly 78 per cent of those surveyed expressing a desire to migrate. However, aspirations were not evenly distributed.
University students were the most eager to migrate, often viewing higher education abroad as a stepping stone. Family history also shaped migration aspirations. Those with relatives abroad and no prior travel experience were significantly more likely to want to leave, suggesting the influence of migrant social networks.
Yet the strongest predictors of migration aspirations among participants were experiences like dreams, prophecies and intuitions that were considered religiously significant.
Individuals who reported having migration-related dreams were more than twice as likely to express a strong desire to migrate, while those who believed migration was part of a divine plan were more than three times as likely. These findings challenge the traditional idea that migration is purely an economic decision, highlighting the role of religion and spirituality.
Spiritual experiences and migration
Dreams, prophecies and intuitions do more than inspire migration desires. They shape how people perceive and legitimize migration. These experiences transform migration from mere physical movement into a deeply personal conviction, reshaping how they see themselves and their futures.
Participants in my study who had migratory dreams described them as vivid, immersive experiences in which they found themselves leaving their homeland, boarding airplanes or settling in foreign countries.
These dreams transported them into sensory encounters with airports, unfamiliar climates like snowfall and racially diverse communities. Such dreams made migration feel imminent, influencing behaviours such as preparing travel documents and expanding social networks.
Prophecy in many religious traditions are declarations made by spiritual leaders, often perceived as divine revelations about an individual’s life, future or destiny. In the context of migration, these prophecies foretell a person’s foreseeable journey abroad, shaping their understanding of the future.
Dreams, prophecies and intuitions do more than inspire migration desires. They shape how individuals perceive and legitimize migration. (Adedotun Adegborioye/Unsplash)
Migratory prophecies are often delivered in Pentecostal-Charismatic churches, through sermons, prayer sessions or direct pronouncements from pastors. Their significance lies not in predictive accuracy, but in their ability to inspire, shape emotions, and guide behaviours regarding migration.
These prophecies legitimize a person’s migration aspirations as part of a divine plan, enhancing the aspiring migrant’s self-perception as one destined for success. They foster an internalized identity of a successful migrant even before the individual embarks on their journey, highlighting their potential to elevate social status and bring honour to their families and communities.
Intuitions attributed to divine prompting also generate an inner certainty about migration. People feel an inexplicable but profound conviction that they must migrate, leading them to align their life decisions with what they perceive as a higher plan.
By reinforcing deeply held aspirations, spiritual experiences do not just shape the desire to migrate; they construct the migrant’s very sense of self, embedding migration into their personal identity long before they ever set foot on foreign soil.
Informing policy
Most migration policies focus on border control, but rarely consider the social and cultural dynamics that shape migration. Dreams, prophecies and intuitions act as indicators of unmet aspirations.
Understanding these experiences can help migration policymakers create strategies that are cross-culturally sensitive and context-specific. These strategies should move beyond the economics of migration to address the full spectrum of human motivations.
Additionally, governments and news media must confront idealized narratives of migration destinations portrayed as utopias of opportunity. When such expectations clash with the stark realities of labour exploitation, cultural alienation and systemic racism, the resulting disillusionment can profoundly affect the well-being of individuals and communities.
A responsible approach to migration must present a balanced view, acknowledging both opportunities and challenges, while preparing aspiring migrants for the complexities of their journeys and recognizing their aspirations as integral to their personhood.
James Kwateng-Yeboah 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 – Canada – By Matthew S Miller, Executive Director, Global Nexus and M.G. DeGroote Institute for Infectious Disease Research, McMaster University
If the H5N1 avian flu virus learns to spread efficiently from person to person, it could pose an imminent threat to humanity.(CDC and NIAID), CC BY
Infectious disease outbreaks have a bad habit of piling on at the worst possible times.
The 1918 flu pandemic, also known as the Spanish flu, caught the world by surprise just as the First World War was coming to an end. It was responsible for killing three to five per cent of the world’s population (50-100 million people, equivalent to about 400 million today).
Now, as we reflect on five years since the declaration of the COVID-19 pandemic and face economic uncertainty imposed by the United States administration — as well as lingering conflicts in places such as the Middle East and Ukraine — it’s the steady march of avian influenza, or “bird flu,” that poses an imminent threat to humanity.
Walter Reed hospital flu ward in Washington, D.C. during the flu epidemic of 1918-19, which killed three to five per cent of the world’s population. (Shutterstock)
Bird flu has been causing a flurry of human infections, especially in U.S. cattle workers. If the virus learns to spread effectively from human to human, it could change the course of history. Even though our weary world already feels maxed out, we have to make room to avert yet another crisis.
The question is whether we will act in time to head off a bird flu pandemic. The Spanish Flu was the first of five influenza pandemics since the end of the First World War.
A sixth is inevitable without co-ordinated global action. Otherwise, the only questions are when it will it come and how bad it will be.
Infectious diseases constitute a permanent threat to society, especially as vaccine hesitancy and misinformation grow. Fighting pandemics needs to be a full-time, ongoing priority for governments everywhere.
Canada needs to establish permanent capacity to prevent and respond to health emergencies. Government agencies specifically dedicated to supporting the development of medical countermeasures for pathogens that pose a pandemic risk, like the recently established Health Emergencies Readiness Canada (HERC), are a step in the right direction.
However, we must also re-prioritize investments in the fundamental research that is the birthplace of new medical and non-medical solutions to pandemic preparedness — where we currently lag far behind essentially all of our G7 counterparts. This has never been more important than in the current global political context.
The world needs to adopt a collective mentality that we are “all in” on prevention if we want to maximize our chances of avoiding the next pandemic. We cannot sit on our hands and hope we get lucky. That strategy has failed us in the past and will doom us in the future.
But the effort to stop or at least slow avian influenza needs to include all countries and to engage everyday people, especially those who work directly with birds, cattle and other wild and domestic animals.
Targeted interventions
The best tactics to stave off a pandemic, at least at this point, are relatively unintrusive, targeted interventions. It’s critical that farm workers, veterinarians and others who work with animals follow careful protocols such as wearing masks and goggles, sanitizing equipment and continuing to cull poultry flocks where exposure is identified.
We also need to educate hunters about protective measures to lower their risk of exposure.
Most mitigation measures are entirely non-medical — though offering vaccines to those at high risk of exposure, as Finland has done, would be prudent. It’s much easier to target vaccination programs to high-risk groups than to organize a global vaccine campaign after a pandemic has begun.
We need to encourage these groups to take every possible action to protect themselves — and therefore the world — and to provide financial supports that enable them to comply without cost.
If avian flu becomes established among humans, which could happen rapidly and with very little warning, COVID-19 has shown that only a swift, decisive and truly global approach can fend off disaster.
A significant lesson from COVID-19 is that we have to support pandemic prevention and response efforts for people in every corner of the world, however remote they may be, and that we must reach vulnerable populations within wealthy countries, such as elderly, frail and marginalized people, and those affected by poverty. These are the people always impacted most by infectious diseases.
A selective distribution of resources among the planet’s wealthiest populations will not provide the protection the world needs and will only enlarge and extend the reach of a new pandemic.
We must remember what it was like to close down schools, workplaces and public gatherings and to have hospitals overflowing with patients as clinicians risked their lives to care for them.
We could have saved so many people and so much money by taking the threat more seriously from the outset, including providing better public education about evidence-based measures such as masking and vaccines.
It’s past time we made pandemic prevention and response a permanent priority, no matter what else is happening in the world.
Matthew S Miller is co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer of AeroImmune Inc. He has received compensation from Seqirus, Sanofi, GSK, Roche, Grifols, and Aramis Biotechnologies for participating on advisory boards and for supporting educational activities. He has received research funding from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the Canadian Foundation for Innovation, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, the Canada Research Chairs Program, the Federal Economic Development Agency for Southern Ontario, Ontario Centre of Innovation, Bay Area Health Trust, Providence Therapeutics, JN Nova Pharma, Lactiga, and Zentek. He is a member of the National Advisory Committee on Immunization COVID-19 Working Group and H5N1 Influenza Working Group. He is also a member of the Ontario Immunization Advisory Committee and the Public Health Agency of Canada Expert Panel on Avian Influenza A(H5Nx).
Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Sylvain Senecal, Professor of Marketing and RBC Financial Group Chair of E-Commerce, HEC Montréal
AI Overviews offers Google users AI-generated answers by sourcing and summarizing information from different websites.(Shutterstock)
Google announced the launch of AI Overviews, its generative artificial intelligence-fuelled search feature, in May 2023. Initially named Search Generative Experience, AI Overviews offers Google users AI-generated answers by sourcing and summarizing information from different websites.
These AI responses are positioned at the top of the page for immediate visibility. The aim is to improve user experience by providing an alternative and more straightforward way to access information while enhancing the relevance of search results.
This feature has slowly been offered to the public, having initially been made available exclusively in the United States. AI Overviews is available worldwide and has been rolled out to more than 100 additional countries, including Canada.
AI Overviews represents a key effort by Google to capitalize on the rapid emergence of generative AI technology amid fierce competition between AI-enabled search engines in the market. It’s a direct response to Open AI’s SearchGPT and Microsoft Bing’s Deep Search, which is powered by OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
At the same time, conversational AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Microsoft’s Copilot and Google’s Gemini continue to resonate with users worldwide. Google’s investment in AI is critical to its ability to stay in the AI race among the other tech giants.
Concerns about AI-assisted search
The implementation of AI Overviews, however, has raised concerns among businesses, website managers and online advertisers.
AI Overviews represents a key effort by Google to capitalize on the rapid emergence of generative AI technology. (Shutterstock)
Critics worry this feature could decrease traffic to their websites if users were to rely too heavily on AI Overviews and ignore the links to websites displayed in the search results.
Paid advertisements and sponsored content play a pivotal role in the revenue streams of companies and website operators. If traffic to websites diminishes, the incentive for these companies to invest in these advertising formats could decline, potentially disrupting the multi-billion-dollar online advertising industry.
To better understand this, we conducted a study at HEC Montréal’s Tech3Lab to investigate the potential impact of search generative AI features like AI Overviews on user perceptions and behaviours compared to those associated with regular online search queries.
User search behaviour and perceptions
We developed a set of four Google search scenarios, either AI-assisted or non-AI-assisted. The two AI-assisted scenarios included an AI-generated overview at the top of the search results, while the two non-AI-assisted scenarios consisted of a regular Google search experience.
We used pupillometry — measuring pupil size and reactivity — and analyzed screen recordings to track these metrics. After completing each task, participants shared their perceptions through questionnaires.
Through this experimental approach, we were able to achieve two goals. First, we determined whether AI-generated overviews in search results significantly impact user perceptions of the relevance, usefulness and satisfaction with search results.
Second, we observed whether such generative AI summaries significantly impacted user behaviour in terms of the number of clicks on links appearing in the search results. This provided insight into the potential impact generative AI summaries might have on organic search traffic.
What did we find?
The results of our study suggest that the presence of AI-generated overviews has no significant impact on user perceptions of relevance, usefulness and satisfaction with search results. There was also no significant impact on the clickthrough rate — the ratio of clicks on a link — on links in the search results.
The presence of AI Overviews did not significantly reduce the users’ interaction with Google’s classic list of suggested pages. While this finding indicates AI Overviews might not lead to an immediate or significant shift in website traffic, it’s important to note that user interactions could evolve over time as people become more familiar with this new feature.
As such, the competition among the market leaders operating in the online search space will likely continue to intensify. For example, earlier this month, Google rolled out a new feature called AI mode that delivers additional AI-generated results for some users.
Tech giants like Google and Microsoft will continue to vie for dominance in the market, aiming to create more engaging, higher-value search experiences for their online users.
Co-researchers Alexander J. Karran, Thadde Rolon-Merette, Eugene Yuzan Guo, Fabien Poivré and Mehdi Benbousta co-authored this article.
Sylvain Senecal receives funding from Ivado, Prompt, and Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.
Constantinos K. Coursaris receives funding from Ivado, Prompt, and Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.
Pierre-Majorique Léger receives funding from IVADO, Prompt, and Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.
Sylvain Amoros 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.
More children are being permanently excluded from their school in England. In the 2023-24 autumn term, over 1,000 more pupils were excluded than in the autumn term the previous year. Rates of permanent exclusion have risen rapidly since the pandemic, with no sign of slowing down.
What is perhaps unexpected is that the rate of permanent exclusionsis rising much faster among girls than boys. Girls are also more at risk of “hidden” or “grey” exclusions – when a pupil stops going to school but isn’t formally excluded. But partly because schools are seen as environments in which girls are more likely to thrive than boys, the issues girls face may be overlooked.
In my research I interviewed 12 girls at risk of permanent exclusion aged between 12 and 16 in two different secondary schools and one pupil referral unit. I found that they struggled with being heard.
Girls in my study were unanimous that they wanted teachers to listen and take time for them, but felt this did not happen. They resorted to shouting before they could be shouted at. “When they shout it doesn’t mean we’re going to listen, we’re going to shout back,” one said.
Girls reported teachers did not know them, listen or allow them to explain and so responded with aggression: “Why should I bother about them when they ain’t bothered about me?”
Consequences of exclusion
Research from Agenda Alliance, a charity, has found that 74% of girls in youth custody were previously permanently excluded, compared to 63% of boys. After permanent exclusion, girls (unlike boys) are more likely to suffer significant mental health issues.
There has been very little progress in managing girls’ behaviour over the last two decades. Research has found consistent reports of girls being sidelined in education as far back as the 1970s.
Research also suggests that girls using their voice in ways that do not fit gender stereotypes – such as being loud and shouting at teachers – was particularly problematic. This damaged relationships with teachers.
In my research, girls believed both male and female teachers were sexist, singling them out for behaviour ignored in boys. This resulted in a deeply held sense of unfairness, particularly when teachers simply linked behaviour to their hormones. “Certain teachers overlook the girls, they pin it on your hormones,” one said.
This results in girls feeling they have no voice, and avoiding some lessons, teachers or situations by truanting – inside school or not attending at all – or by trying to “get in before they [teachers] do” and behaving aggressively.
These two extremes mean girls either end up using their voice in ways schools cannot manage, or remain systematically silenced: not present at school at all. Neither helps them to address the problems they are experiencing and the resulting behaviour.
Appearance and behaviour
I also found that girls struggled with how visible they were at school. Many girls in my study talked about facing sanctions over their uniform. They argued that teachers punished them for minor infringements, and that there was a double standard: teachers could wear two pairs of earrings, for instance, but they could not. One said that staff “don’t care about education it’s about earrings and that”.
Girls felt singled out in ways boys were not, suggesting teachers were sexist and only interested in them looking right.
However, girls told me that modifying their uniform was central to fitting in with peers and not being bullied. This results in girls treading a fine line between not standing out too much to other girls and not attracting the censure of staff.
Girls reported being too visible in other ways. They told me that trips to the toilet were policed by staff standing outside. Girls also felt too visible in class, with significant anxiety expressed in my research about being picked on in class. “My face goes all blotchy and I start shaking, it’s hard to breathe,” one said.
This fear was so significant girls chose to walk out of lessons rather than face embarrassment in front of their peers. “If a teacher picks on me to answer a question I just won’t come to the next lesson,” one girl said. They chose this despite risking being put in isolation – working in seclusion away from the rest of the school and their peers, where they once again became invisible. “It’s like a prison, they boarded up the windows and don’t listen to you.”
With some schools shifting to zero-tolerance approaches, permanent exclusion – once a last resort – may now be perceived as a reasonable response to school improvement drives.
Striking the balance between being appropriately seen and heard is a challenge for many girls in school, even those who appear to manage it successfully. But for those who struggle, the current and widespread problems in schools make it less likely that teachers will “take more notice of how you behave, [because] there might be something behind it”. Without significant and widespread change in schools, more girls will either disappear from the system or be silenced by it.
Emma Clarke received funding in a one off grant from British Educational Research Association. She is a member of Universities and Colleges Union.
Eating undercooked meat is never a good idea – it can give you a nasty case of food poisoning within 24 hours. And there are other, longer-term risks to be wary of too.
Spare a thought for the patient who attended a Florida hospital to be X-rayed following a fall – only to discover he was riddled with parasitic eggs that had turned into thousands of cysts inside his body.
Sam Ghali, an urgent care doctor from the University of Florida, recently shared an image of the X-ray on social media, explaining that the patient had developed the condition after eating undercooked pork infected with tapeworm larvae.
Pork can carry taenia solium larvae, a parasitic tapeworm. After eating infected pork, the larvae get into body tissues where they form cysts – a condition called cysticercosis. The larvae can travel anywhere in the body including muscles, liver, lungs and kidneys before decaying, which can lead to infections.
While in many tissues the larvae may develop undetected, in the skin or muscles noticeable bulges may appear.
Cysticercosis can be diagnosed through a variety of tests, including imaging, blood tests and potentially a lumbar puncture to look at cerebrospinal fluid.
In the final stage of the disease, the cysts degenerate and die, leaving a small calcified scar behind. This remnant often invokes an immune response in the body which can further increase calcification – the buildup of calcium deposits in body tissues. Calcified brain scars can contribute to symptoms including seizures long after the cyst has degenerated.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr’s claim in his 2012 divorce deposition that previous health issues were “caused by a worm that got into my brain and ate a portion of it and then died” is a now notorious example of possible neurocysticercosis.
RFK Jr. also described the effects of the parasite in his deposition: “I have cognitive problems, clearly. I have short-term memory loss, and I have longer-term memory loss that affects me.”
Intestinal infection by an adult tapeworm is called taeniasis. In humans, although the tapeworm can cause an upset stomach, it can also be asymptomatic – apart from rice grain-sized eggs in the faeces.
There are three tapeworms that can lead to taeniasis: taenia saginata, taenia solium and taenia asiatica. Taenia saginata is transmitted by cattle whereas taenia solium and taenia asiatica are transmitted by pigs. Once in the intestines, these tapeworms continue to grow. After approximately four months, they release hundreds of proglottids (fertilised eggs) into the host’s gastrointestinal tract. These proglottids are expelled from body in faeces but are instantly infectious.
Anthelmintic drugs, including praziquantel and niclosamide, either kill or paralyse the tapeworm, making it easier for the body to expel it through faeces.
But some studies report that approximately 38% of cysts calcify after taking anthelmintic drugs, worsening symptoms. Anti-inflammatory drugs may be used to treat neurocysticercosis cases, to prevent additional calcification occurring as part of the inflammatory response.
In developing regions of the world, or where some of these drugs are not licensed or less accessible, more traditional remedies may be used to kill tapeworms or expel them from the body, while preventing infectious proglottids from being released. Studies show that eating a combination of pumpkin seeds and areca nuts allowed almost 80% of people with intestinal tapeworms to pass them whole.
To avoid contracting a tapeworm or cysticercosis, observe basic hygiene measures such as regular hand washing. Also wash and peel your vegetables in clean water before eating them.
If seeing the effects of cysticercosis hasn’t put you off pork for good, avoid the risk of infection by ensuring your pork is properly cooked to at least 80°C for ten minutes to kill all tapeworm eggs. Lower temperatures work too, but require longer cooking times. Of course, cooking meat thoroughly like this should also help you avoid any nasty cases of food poisoning.
Adam Taylor 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.
How did Muhammad Ali Jinnah go from being a secular young man appalled by Indian interference in the Ottoman Caliphate crisis to the moving spirit behind the demand for Pakistan – a new Islamic nation which, he claimed, would be capable of defending Muslims abroad?
These are the kinds of questions that kept me awake at night for years. The result of that insomnia is my new book, East of Empire: Egypt, India, and the World Between the Wars.
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These partitions took place barely six months apart, between 1947 and 1948. They remain at the heart of horrific state violence on both continents, not to mention intergenerational trauma and rancorous historical debate.
For much of the period my book deals with, from 1919 until the mid-1930s, the division of territory between religious or ethnic blocs would have been difficult for most people living in the Middle East and South Asia to fathom. There were no obvious frontiers that could be drawn between local communities. Particularly in cities and towns, neighbours of different ethnicities and faiths lived cheek by jowl.
In fact, it was precisely during this time, between the first and second world wars, that Egyptians and Indians came to think of their movements for self-determination as shared across communal divides.
Artists, politicians, activists and intellectuals described a thick and flexible web of interconnections – some spiritual or linguistic, others cultural and geopolitical – which together made up something called the sharq, orient, or “east”. This was said to transcend all kinds of barriers, depending on who you asked – creed, language, ethnicity, nation, gender and class, for starters.
Many historians writing about this period have picked up this “easternism” for closer inspection – only to swiftly place it back down again. They argue it is too vague, amorphous and internally contradictory to be of much use as an analytical category. They are not wrong. Between the 1920s and ’40s, there were many (perhaps even countless) visions of the east in circulation.
There was the east of orientalists – foreign, exotic and “other”. There was the anti-colonial east, a geography of allies in the battle against foreign domination. Then there was the spiritual east, often contrasted with the materialist west. There was the Islamic east, a region populated largely (though never exclusively) by Muslims. There was also the cosmopolitan east, a rich tapestry of cultures bound together by commerce and exchange of ideas. Finally, there was the strategic east, a geopolitical bloc or bulwark that might counter other constellations of power.
It is important to underscore that none of these concepts were mutually exclusive. Instead, proponents of easternism tended to connect several “kinds” of eastern ideas together into a personally appealing hybrid.
Thus in his memoir, Sultan Mahomed Shah, Aga Khan III, revisited his long-cherished dream of an eastern bloc of Muslim nations, serving as both a moral compass to the world and a healthy check on the power of Europe and the United States.
For the Egyptian feminist Huda Shaarawi, the east was unapologetically anticolonial. In the pages of her magazine, l’Egyptienne, it was frequently ancient and exotic – but also, crucially, a stage upon which women from many cultural, ethnic and religious backgrounds would together forge the future in their own image.
Given the dizzying array of potential easts, it was never what academics would call a coherent ideology. But this did not prevent it from being a highly prominent feature of both political debate and action in Egypt, India and the broader Arab-Asian region throughout the interwar period.
Beginning in the 1920s and deep into the ’30s, various eastern visions flowed in and out of alignment with one another as headlines changed, alliances evolved, and priorities shifted. With the onset of war in Europe in 1939, however, the stakes of these ideological differences began to spike.
Subjected to the unrelenting pressure of war, the many strands of easternism began to splinter, putting paid to the more fluid and open-ended possibilities that had animated preceding decades.
In their stead emerged postwar ideologies with sharper edges, hardened national frontiers, and – following years of globally cataclysmic violence – little faith in the pacifist and humanist ideals of a bygone era. This almost chemical transformation is the backdrop against which votes affirmed the partitions of India and Palestine in 1947.
Here, then, is the story told in East of Empire: how visions of a transnational, fluid and nonconformist east shaped the interwar politics of India and Egypt, and why these visions gave way to a more rigid, militant nationalism by the end of the second world war.
The book revisits a near-forgotten chapter in the rise of anticolonialism and the end of the British empire across the Middle East and South Asia. And it explains the conditions under which these bold and optimistic visions buckled – unleashing torrents of violence we have yet to staunch, almost 80 years later.
Erin O’Halloran has received funding from the British Academy and UK Research & Innovation.
In 2024, Heathrow was the busiest airport in Europe by passenger numbers and the fourth busiest worldwide. Nearly 84 million passengers passed through its five terminals during the year. These figures highlight the scale of disruption caused by its recent complete closure after a fire at an electricity substation.
Airlines with just a limited number of flights to and from Heathrow are likely to have experienced only minimal disruption – something airlines face regularly as part of standard operations. But the impact on airlines that use Heathrow as a main hub will turn out to be severe. For these airlines, which operate on very slim margins, the associated costs can be so high that they may wipe out several months’ worth of profits.
And this is something airline bosses will have been painfully aware of when news broke of the closure. Their first consideration, however, will have been for safety.
From an operational perspective, the primary objective in a situation like this is to ensure that all flights already in the air can safely complete their journey, either by landing at an alternate airport or returning to their departure airport.
The decision depends on a flight’s position and the amount of fuel the aircraft has left on board. As part of standard procedure all flights have a designated alternate airport – usually chosen based on proximity.
However, in the specific Heathrow case, the sheer volume of diversions quickly saturated the UK’s diversion capacity, forcing many flights to reroute to airports overseas.
This challenge was compounded by the nature of Heathrow’s traffic. As a major hub for long-haul flights operated by wide-body aircraft, these planes can only be diverted to large airports capable of handling their size and requirements. For instance, Heathrow is one of the main hubs for the Airbus A380, the largest passenger aircraft in the world. Due to its size, it can operate at only a limited number of airports.
Although the Heathrow closure came out of the blue, airlines do of course have emergency plans setting out guidelines and procedures for various types of crises, which are regularly updated. Each airline has its own operations control centre, usually within its headquarters, which is responsible for activating and overseeing these plans.
But in the case of a major crisis or disruptive event, such as when a hub like Heathrow shuts down, the company’s top management along with the heads of its operational departments will hold emergency meetings to enable rapid and effective decision-making.
Airlines also have dedicated crisis rooms for this purpose. Throughout the crisis, the situation is continuously monitored and decisions are focused on minimising both operational and financial impact.
Schedules planned months in advance
Of course, when a disruption of the magnitude of the Heathrow shutdown occurs, the entire airline schedule is thrown into disarray.
Planning and scheduling airline operations is a complex, lengthy process that begins up to two months before the day of the flight. It involves numerous operational aspects, including aircraft assignment, crew scheduling and maintenance.
And for legacy air carriers, this process is complicated by the nature of their operations within a global network of often complex connected journeys. These airlines operate a diverse fleet of aircraft with hundreds of connecting flights.
Pilots are qualified to fly only specific aircraft types, and passengers often travel to a hub such as Heathrow to continue their journey to their final destination. These operations are incredibly intricate, so in the event of a major disruption it becomes necessary to restart the process from scratch. This often leads to numerous flight cancellations.
Given the high costs involved – including expenses for passenger rebooking and accommodation – each flight must be analysed individually to determine the most appropriate course of action.
The Heathrow shutdown left hundreds of thousands of passengers stranded or unable to travel. It is a legal priority for the airline to offer them alternative options to reach their destination. Typically, passengers can be rebooked on flights operated by either the same airline or other carriers, or offered hotel accommodation until the next available flight.
In the end, Heathrow was up and running at full capacity again far quicker than many observers anticipated. But a shutdown at such a major global transport hub will leave airlines – and other businesses – counting the costs for some time to come.
Guglielmo Lulli receives funding from Horizon 2020 and Horizon Europe programmes.
Young boys play volleyball at an NGO centre in Zaatari camp, Jordan, in 2016.Melissa Gatter
When news of Bashar al-Assad’s downfall broke on December 8 2024, 13 years after the beginning of the Syrian uprising, Syrians around the world rejoiced.
We rejoiced along with them, having spent the last decade in conversation with Syrians displaced to the neighbouring countries of Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey, where we research humanitarian aid in refugee camps and revolutionaries in exile.
The days and weeks following Assad’s ousting were spent on the phone with the people we have gotten to know since their lives changed drastically in 2011 – hoping that 2025 would be the turning point in a very long and harrowing odyssey. One of us (Charlotte) also travelled to Syria in January 2025 to see what was happening and speak to people trying to navigate the new reality there.
“Syrians everywhere, inside Syria and outside Syria, did not ever imagine we would reach this stage,” said Qasim, 42, speaking from his home in Zaatari camp, the world’s third largest refugee camp, in northern Jordan. “No one ever expected that Assad would fall and leave the country.”
Like the 80,000 others in the desert camp, Qasim has spent the last decade starting his life over again in Jordan. Since fleeing Daraa, in southwest Syria, in 2013, he worked a series of freelance jobs and created a network of clients. He has put food on the table with cash-in-hand work for aid organisations in the camp and offering painting and plastering services outside the camp.
But in Syria, he said, “There’s no home, there’s no work, there’s nothing.”
His family of four grew to 11, and his daughters who left Syria as young children have entered their final years of high school.
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Now, with Assad gone seemingly overnight – and the revolution marking its 14th anniversary in March – the dream of returning home or simply the possibility to end a decade of exile is suddenly within reach. But this dream now comes with existential, practical and legal questions. After a decade in exile, how do you uproot yourself and your family yet again? How do you explain the return to the youngest, who have only known life outside Syria? What kind of life waits on the other side of the border?
Qasim’s family has outgrown the home he left behind. While life in the camp, with its electricity shortages and economic hardships, is nowhere near perfect, Qasim at least manages to get by.
Returning to Syria also comes at a price – for Qasim’s family of 11, it would cost US$550 just to cross the border – and many Syrians in exile have not been afforded sufficient economic stability to prepare for the costs of return. For many, the return to Syria remains a distant dream they must work to save up for.
Syria’s critical condition
What is left of Syria in Assad’s wake will take years of recovery. The International Organization for Migration (IOM) has warned that Syria is not ready to receive returnees. US president Donald Trump imposed a freeze on US-funded foreign aid in January, affecting up to 90% of humanitarian activities in some areas in Syria, according to the UN’s emergency aid coordination office (OCHA). That has created a devastating ripple effect across Syria and neighbouring host countries.
And yet western powers maintain their sanctions against Syria, where 90% of the population is already living below the poverty line and 70% are in dire need of humanitarian assistance.
Meanwhile, the security situation is still precarious in parts of the country. Things in the northwest have improved since the agreement between the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces and Damascus’s provisional government, but March was marked by the killing of over a thousand mainly Alawi civilians in the coastal areas after attacks started from Assad loyalists. Israel has expanded its war against Palestine and Lebanon into parts of Syria, even bombing the capital city, as it looks to take advantage of a power vacuum.
At the start of the new year, 115,000 Syrians had already returned home from Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey. In December, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) expected 1 million Syrians would return by June, but now predicts only 600,000 to return by September.
Unwelcome guests
Jordan, Turkey and Lebanon are not signatories of the 1951 refugee convention which means they are not obliged to recognise the displaced Syrians in their country as refugees with internationally-protected rights. The governments of these countries recognise displaced Syrians only as “guests”, but that does not necessarily mean they are welcome.
“We were not treated as guests in Turkey, people did not want us there,” Umm Ahmad said. She remembered her life in Gaziantep as one of constant humiliation, where she had to beg for assistance and her son was forced to work shifts of over 12-hours at a time in a clothing factory.
As guests, Syrians face social and legal obstacles in accessing services, education, healthcare, housing and jobs. They are often blamed for waning economies and scarce resources and face xenophobic discrimination as a result. Having to work without protected rights or permissions pushes Syrians like Umm Ahmad’s son to the informal labour market, where they are vulnerable to exploitation and abuse.
There are over 3 million Syrian refugees in Turkey and their status is uncertain and or illegal because residency documents are hard to obtain and are not consistently delivered in some areas. “Refugee” status is reserved only for European citizens. If Turkey was long considered the most welcoming host country among Syria’s neighbours for its open-border policy and friendly position towards the Syrian opposition, the situation changed dramatically after the EU-Turkey deal led to the border closure in 2016. Syrians in Turkey have increasingly faced deportation since 2019, and there is no clear path to Turkish citizenship.
Around 1.5 million Syrians live in Lebanon where there is a long history of animosity towards them harking back to Assad’s occupation of Lebanon during the Lebanese civil war. But only 17% of those Syrians have obtained legal residency.
Umm Ayman, who has lived for ten years in Beirut’s Shatila camp, told us: “I can’t wait to go back to Syria. Our life here has been so hard.” But before she returns she wants “to wait to see how the situation evolves and if it’s safe to go back”.
Umm Ayman never managed to obtain legal status, which means having to home-school her children, who could not be admitted to the Lebanese school system – another reason she wants to go back. But she is still worried about the developing political situation that had taken her, as it did most Syrians, by surprise. Not knowing how the caretaker government would rule, and with no close relatives or home to return to in Syria, Umm Ayman is hesitant to commit to a final decision until she can visit her hometown of Homs to see the situation for herself.
In Jordan, where only about 20% of the 1.3 million Syrian refugees are estimated to live in official camps, refugees have felt the decline in international funding directed towards the Syrian crisis in recent years, even before the January US aid freeze. “Recently there’s been scarce aid in the camp,” Qasim said, “so people are only just managing to take care of themselves.” Now, the refugee-run marketplace in Zaatari has grinded to a halt as camp residents save up for the return. As his current job is coming to an end, Qasim is looking for his next one outside Zaatari, “if there is any”.
People driving through Jordan in January, returning to Syria with their belongings piled on the car. Charlotte Al-Khalili
Outside the camps, Syrians toughing it out in Jordanian cities have even less access to aid. And while the 2016 Jordan compact allowed Syrian refugees access to formal employment, it failed to live up to its potential due to the high prices of work permits and social security contributions.
Where is home?
On the other side of the border, however, for millions of people home has been flattened to the ground. So many refugees have nowhere to return to and will need time to save up for rebuilding a house that has been bombed, burned or vandalised.
Only those with the “money and the means”, as Qasim put it, will be able to return. He calculates that reconstructing and expanding his home to accommodate 11 family members will cost around US$5,000. “I don’t have the money to go back, where am I supposed to go, am I supposed to sleep on the street?” he said.
Others like Qasim in Zaatari camp spoke about how much money they have already spent on the upkeep of their caravan shelter (often thousands of dollars) suggesting that they might be able to return if they could sell their caravan or even bring it with them to Syria.
A view of Zaatari camp in Jordan showing how refugees have adapted their ‘caravans’. Melissa Gatter
Maryam, for example, is a schoolteacher living in Zaatari camp with her husband and four-year-old daughter. She explained that the lack of money was the one thing holding them back from the return: “We paid a lot for our caravan, so if someone could take our house in exchange for money, it would help us to go back right away, in a month or less.” But the UNHCR owns the caravans, even those that camp refugees have bought or replaced over years of wear and tear.
Returning to Syria requires transferring temporary ownership of the caravans back to the UNHCR – losing the years of investments they have made to live comfortably in the harsh desert environment. In Azraq camp, southeast of Zaatari, a woman called Shamsa, who has lived in the camp since 2016, believes that access to basic financial assistance in Syria would facilitate the return:
If the UNHCR helped give money for each individual in the family for things like groceries – like they do now in the camp – people say they will return … But they can’t just return us when there’s nothing for us there.
Many people are assessing the state of their homes and hometowns for themselves before committing to a long-term return.
For example, Umm Mohammad, a mother of five in her late fifties currently living in Beirut, plans to send her husband and eldest son first. She wants to ensure that conditions are suitable for the return before giving up what they have fought hard to obtain in the last decade in Lebanon. “If they see that we can all join, we will,” she said.
Work and school
At the front of many Syrians’ minds is the question of work and school. Many of our interviewees noted that critical economic conditions in Syria mean that work is hard to come by, especially for entrepreneurs like Qasim who rely on a steady presence of customers.
While the interim Syrian government has attempted to raise the cap on public sector salaries to stimulate the economy, those we spoke to were not optimistic about their prospects. “The economic situation is on the floor,” Shamsa said from Azraq camp.
Umm Ayman has a low-paying job in Beirut, but her husband, formerly a doctor in Syria, is not allowed to work in Lebanon and can only receive a few patients off the books. Adding to their anticipated costs in Syria is the difficulty of integrating into the job market as her husband approaches retirement age. “He will need to open a practice or find one, and we don’t have this kind of money,” she said.
A plot of empty caravans in Azraq camp’s ‘Village 5’ which has been under security lockdown since 2016 until recently. Melissa Gatter
After the Israeli bombing near their home last October, the family moved into a school sheltering other displaced families in Beirut. Umm Ayman feels that going back to Syria – even with the accompanying price tag – might offer a brighter future.
On the other hand, Rasha, a recent divorcee living in Turkey with her two children, is not ready to take the risk. “I cannot go back now,” she said. “My boys need to finish school first.” Her teenage sons, who are enrolled in Turkish schools, have become fluent in Turkish. Going back to Syria would mean adapting to a new curriculum – and having to learn formal Arabic.
Many Syrians around the age of Rasha’s sons who are enrolled in school also prefer to earn their high school diplomas before making the journey back to Syria. Maryam explained to us that this is not always a straightforward decision for her students because it depends on how many years of schooling remain: “The students are feeling a little lost.”
For Syrian students currently studying the first year of tawjihi (the final two years of high school in Jordan, assessed by exams that determine the direction of a student’s career) they must decide whether to stay in the country for one more year to complete their studies, and if this will be possible. For high school and university students alike, it is unclear how their studies will transfer to the Syrian system.
“But most of my students tell me they don’t want to return at all because they honestly don’t remember anything about Syria,” Maryam said. Like Rasha’s teenagers, Maryam’s students were only toddlers at the start of the war and have spent the majority of their life outside their home country. Maryam wishes for her own daughter to grow up in Syria and receive the same education she and her husband did.
But what kind of future would Syria offer them? A young mother of a toddler explained that there are no nurseries in her hometown of Daraa. As the only woman of her generation from her social circle left in the city, she was struggling to find childcare support and discourages her sister from returning with her children. “At least if she goes to Damascus she will find nurseries and good schools, but here there is nothing.”
Crossing into a ‘void’
For those who do wish to go home, returning to Syria involves committing to a one-way ticket – once you cross the border, there is little possibility of coming back. Host countries have introduced rules that ban re-entry for Syrians without legal status and residency permits (the case for most refugees).
“You exit into a void,” Lina, who returned to Damascus from Beirut, explained. “No one can guarantee you’ll be able to come back.” In December, Syrians returning from Lebanon received only an exit stamp as there was still no one working on the Syrian side of the border.
Ghada, a mother in her mid-30s, fled Shatila camp last October after Israeli bombing in southern Beirut intensified, returning to her village near Aleppo while her husband stayed behind to work in Beirut. She said:
My children are so scared of the jet sound … We left Syria so they would not go through the war there and these horrifying sounds, so I did not want them to live here.
Ghada was among the half a million people who fled Israeli bombing in Lebanon to Syria between October and November. Israel shelled all but one crossing point between Lebanon and Syria. In January, incidents between the Lebanese and newly established authorities in Damascus led to the temporary closing of the border, pushing Syrians to look for other routes back.
By then, Ghada was already planning to come back to Lebanon. She said: “We have a home, my husband works, and the kids have a good school in Beirut.” Life in her Syrian village had been difficult, as access to everyday services was severely limited.
But the Israeli war in Lebanon has not ended, as Israel refuses to respect the ceasefire agreement and parts of the country are still occupied.
In Turkey, crossing the border without the required authorisation to return means losing temporary protection status, as was the case with Umm Ahmad once she left Gaziantep for east Aleppo. She won’t be able to see her daughter, who is as a Turkish passport-holder, for the foreseeable future as she is not allowed entry to Syria.
At the moment, Syrians holding Turkish temporary status (kimlik) or residence permits can enter Syria if they apply for a permit. But the border crossing rules are constantly changing.
Syrians returning from Jordan must pay a US$50 fee and sign an agreement consenting to being banned from re-entry to Jordan for five years. But many in Azraq camp are scared they will be forced to return, even after the UNHCR sent an SMS message to camp residents reassuring them that the decision to return to Syria would continue to be “voluntary, safe, and dignified.”
The full SMS translation reads: “Refugees have the right to return to their homeland when they choose to of their own free will. The return will continue to be voluntary, safe, and dignified. The UNHCR works in cooperation with all concerned parties to address obstacles to refugee return in order to end their displacement.”
SMS message from UNHCR sent to Zaatari residents on December 8. Melissa Gatter
Fear is not a new emotion in Azraq, where a quarter of the camp’s nearly 40,000 residents lived under security lockdown for as many as six of the last ten years while the Jordanian government processed security clearance for each individual, deciding whether to accept or deport them.
Shamsa noted that, while Azraq camp has become less stringent in recent years, “Everyone is still very afraid of forced returns.” Shamsa, who has spent the past eight years trying to find ways out of Azraq, said that staying there would be “more comfortable than it would be to go back right now”.
A dignified return
In January, the town of Darayya, 90% of which had been destroyed by the Assad regime, was alive with people rebuilding their homes. A man perched on the third floor of a very damaged building was putting concrete blocks together, laundry hung to dry on washing lines, and brand new windows sparkled on seemingly uninhabited homes. Lines of cars and minivans packed with bags and furniture entered from the Jordanian border and winded up Syrian roads – Syrians were returning and ready for a fresh start.
Other cities have also seen their inhabitants return. Mohammad, a revolutionary who lived in exile in Turkey until Aleppo’s liberation on December 2, returned looking to reclaim justice and dignity – the core demands of the 2011 revolution. He said:
I can finally seek justice, I can finally look people in the eye, I am going back home with my head held high.
For those who supported the revolution, going back to a free Syria is an immense political and personal victory.
Internally displaced Syrians living in camps in the northwestern region of Idlib have also begun to return to their homes, bringing their tents to live among the rubble as they rebuild. Iman, a woman in her 50s travelling to her home city of Idlib, said that the tents offered more dignified living than the camps: “You have to imagine that in the camps you have no intimacy, you hear everything your neighbours do and say in their tents.”
But even in the relief of Assad’s absence, fear and mistrust is still rampant among refugees living in camps in Jordan. “People are expecting another downfall,” Qasim said, pointing to the number of coups preceding the Assad regime’s nearly 50-year history. What would happen if, upon returning, they must flee again?
“There is still no hope,” Shamsa said wearily over a WhatsApp voice note from Azraq camp. She repeated the words her mother had told her almost ten years ago in their home in northern Syria, encouraging her to try a new life outside: “There’s nothing for us in Syria.”
Drying laundry in the rubble of Darayya in January. Charlotte Al Khalili
Shamsa and her family await a final decision on their resettlement application to the US, which they expect to receive in April, just after the 14th anniversary of the start of the Syrian revolution. Assad’s departure has not changed their plans.
Despite the danger and uncertainty, some people are hopeful about the future of Syria and are taking a leap into the unknown to go back home. Umm Ahmad, a woman in her fifties, had been living in the city of Gaziantep, in southern Turkey, since 2012. She was among the first to go back to Syria. A mother of two martyred and three disappeared sons from the suburbs of Aleppo, Umm Ahmad decided to cross just a day after the fall of the regime, ecstatic to be able to reunite with her siblings who had not left Syria and whom she hadn’t seen for 13 years. With excitement in her voice, she told us:
This is our country, there is no reason to leave it again now that we got rid of Bashar al-Assad. Inshallah [God-willing] we are staying here.
Umm Ahmad’s life in Turkey, where she and her son’s family lived without residence permits, had been laced with hardship and financial insecurity. It did not matter to her that she would not be able to re-enter Turkey – she is happy to be home: “We visited our old flat yesterday. It is damaged but we will work on it with my husband and it should be ready to welcome my son and his family next month.” Back in Syria, Umm Ahmad can begin her quest to find her missing sons.
A few others we spoke to rushed to return to Syria in the same way: revolutionaries who had waited at the border for years to be reunited with family who had stayed behind; relatives of the detained and forcibly disappeared trying to find their loved ones; people with nothing to lose being banned from re-entering a host country who had not given them legal status to begin with.
A new blueprint for the return
Although the figures presented by the UNHCR are high – more than half a million expected to return in six months – the number of returnees from neighbouring countries has reached around 235,000 as of February, with 35,000 coming from Turkey and 22,000 from Jordan, while figures from Lebanon remain unclear.
The decision to return will not be a simple one for most, and the return will probably involve more than a single one-way trip. In many cases, young, single men are making this journey alone to test the waters on behalf of their families.
Syrians abroad have been starting over for the past decade, and an entire generation has grown up in displacement. Kept on a hamster wheel of survival and deprived of the opportunity to prosper in exile, Syrian refugees must be able to make their own informed decisions about making the return – or not – in their own time.
The idea of a “safe, voluntary, and dignified” return must account for the complicated logistical reality that repatriation to a country recovering from 50 years of an oppressive regime will not be a one-way journey for most. Rather than halting refugee programs and attempting to send as many Syrians back as quickly as possible, host countries should grant Syrian refugees freedom of movement to and from Syria.
The return to Syria will ultimately only be possible with international support in rebuilding the country’s infrastructure, services and economy to see a peaceful political transition. Returnees will need financial and material assistance as they re-establish themselves, especially in the fallout of the drastic cuts to US-funded humanitarian aid. Western countries must lift their sanctions and hold Israel to account if they are genuinely interested in the long-term sustainability of Syria and the surrounding region.
This moment is not only an opportunity for exiled Syrians to turn the page on displacement, it is also a rare opportunity for the international community to design a new blueprint for refugee returns in an age of criminalised migration. It is also a rare opportunity, then, for a cautious hope.
“As for me, I’m thinking of getting my PhD from Damascus University,” Maryam said. While living in the camp, she earned a master’s degree at Al Al-Bayt University in the nearby city of Mafraq.
Going back to Syria, her husband could return to his job as an IT engineer, and they could rent a flat while rebuilding their home in Daraa. Her daughter could start first grade in the Syrian school system. She is hopeful.
“We’re seriously considering going back. It’s just a matter of time.”
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Charlotte Al-Khalili receives funding from the Leverhulme Trust
Melissa Gatter 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.
Scientists have long tried to understand the human brain by comparing it to other primates. Researchers are still trying to understand what makes our brain different to our closest relatives. Our recent study may have brought us one step closer by taking a new approach – comparing the way brains are internally connected.
The Victorian palaeontologist Richard Owen incorrectly argued that the human brain was the only brain to contain a small area termed the Hippocampus minor. He claimed that made it unique among the animal kingdom and, he argued, the human brain was therefore clearly unrelated to other species. We’ve learnt a lot since then about the organisation and function of our brain, but there is still much to learn.
Most studies comparing the human brain to that of other species focus on size. This can be the size of the brain, size of the brain relative to the body, or or the size of parts of the brain to the rest of it. However, measures of size don’t tell us anything about the internal organisation of the brain. For instance, although the enormous brain of an elephant contains three times as many neurons as the human brain, these are predominantly located in the cerebellum, not in the neocortex that is commonly associated with human cognitive abilities.
Until recently, studying the brain’s internal organisation was painstaking work. The advent of medical imaging techniques, however, has opened up new possibilities to look inside the brains of animals quickly, in great detail, and without harming the animal.
We used publicly available MRI data of white matter, the fibres connecting parts of the brain’s cortex. Communication between brain cells runs along these fibres. This costs energy and the mammalian brain is therefore relatively sparsely connected, concentrating communications down a few central pathways.
The connections of each brain region tell us a lot about its functions. The set of connections of any brain region is so specific that brain regions have a unique connectivity fingerprint.
In our study, we compared these connectivity fingerprints across the human, chimpanzee and macaque monkey brain. The chimpanzee is, together with the bonobo, our closest living relative. The macaque monkey is the non-human
primate best known to science. Comparing the human brain to both species meant we could not only assess which parts of our brain are unique to us, but also which parts are likely to be shared heritage with our non-human relatives.
Much of the previous research on human brain uniqueness has focused on the prefrontal cortex, a group of areas at the front of our brain linked to complex thought and decision making. We indeed found that aspects of prefrontal cortex had a connectivity fingerprint in the human that we couldn’t find in the other animals, particularly when we compared the human to the macaque monkey.
A higher value means the brains are more different. JNeurosci/Rogier Mars and Katherine Bryant, CC BY-NC-ND
But the main differences we found were not in the prefrontal cortex. They were in the temporal lobe, a large part of cortex located approximately behind the ear. In the primate brain, this area is devoted to deep processing of information from our two main senses: vision and hearing. One of the most dramatic findings was in the middle part of the temporal cortex.
The feature driving this distinction was the arcuate fasciculus, a white matter tract connecting the frontal and temporal cortex and traditionally associated with processing language in humans. Most if not all primates have an arcuate fasciculus but it is much larger in human brains.
However, we found that focusing solely on language may be too narrow. The brain
areas that are connected via the arcuate fasciculus are also involved in other cognitive functions, such as integrating sensory information and processing complex social behaviour. Our study was the first to find the arcuate fasciculus is involved in these functions. This insight underscores the complexity of human brain evolution, suggesting that our advanced cognitive abilities arose not from a single change, as scientists thought, but through several, interrelated changes in brain connectivity.
While the middle temporal arcuate fasciculus is a key player in language processing, we also found differences between the species in a region more at the back of the temporal cortex. This temporoparietal junction area is critical in processing information about others, such as understanding others’ beliefs and intentions, a cornerstone of human social interaction.
In humans, this brain area has much more extensive connections to other parts of
the brain processing complex visual information, such as facial expressions and
behavioural cues. This suggests that our brain is wired to handle more intricate
social processing than those of our primate relatives. Our brain is wired up to be
social.
These findings challenge the idea of a single evolutionary event driving the
emergence of human intelligence. Instead, our study suggests brain evolution happened in steps. Our findings suggest changes in frontal cortex organisation occurred in apes, followed by changes in temporal cortex in the lineage leading to humans.
Richard Owen was right about one thing. Our brains are different from those of other species – to an extent. We have a primate brain, but it’s wired up to make us even more social than other primates, allowing us to communicate through spoken language.
Rogier Mars receives funding from the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) UK and the Medical Research Council (MRC) UK.
Katherine Bryant 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.
On Perranporth beach in Cornwall, UK, a local outdoor swimming group called the Perranporth Bluetits is out in force. This group are determined to make the most of another chilly day as they plunge into the Atlantic for a dip. They emerge smiling. Their camaraderie and collective sense of achievement is clear to see.
Invigorating experiences like these have motivated community groups and the voluntary sector to begin to design “blue care” programmes connecting people with the water, and sometimes even more formalised prescriptions of “bluespace” activities from doctors or health professionals.
I, admittedly, stay drier than the Perranporth Bluetits. But my interest in open water swimming and its health benefits has motivated me and a team of researchers to look into these experiences. Previous research shows that open-water swimming and similar activities can be therapeutic.
But might certain swimming activities be particularly beneficial for mental wellbeing? With an international team of environmental psychologists, I have carried out the biggest survey of open-water swimmers to date, looking at data from across the globe. Our recent study, published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology, outlines the mental wellbeing benefits of wild swimming, and suggests that satisfying psychological needs might underlie this.
As part of the EU-funded BlueHealth project, we surveyed around 20,000 adults in 19 countries across Europe, the US, Hong Kong, Australia and Canada about their interactions with blue spaces (outdoor aquatic environments) and their health and wellbeing. One thousand two hundred of these people reported swimming on their most recent visit to a blue space – some in open-air pools, others in more natural bodies of water such as lakes, rivers and the sea.
Any kind of outdoor swimming was associated with a wellbeing boost. However, wild swimming seemed to deliver significant benefits. Our study suggests that the key to this effect lies in experiencing feelings of autonomy and competence – freedom and mastery over the swimmer’s environment – two factors that are strongly linked to wellbeing.
Surprisingly though, social connection did not play as big a role in these mental wellbeing effects as we had expected, despite the proliferation of community swimming groups like the Perranporth Bluetits. At least in this international sample, personal achievement seemed to be more influential than community bonding.
There was another surprising nuance too. More skilled swimmers, drawn to adventurous and riskier locations, sometimes reported higher anxiety levels. This suggests that while wild swimming can be deeply rewarding, it may also push people into situations that challenge their comfort zones. As other research has noted, such challenging situations can be part of the appeal.
The findings extend previous research on open-water swimming by showing wellbeing benefits across an international sample of adults, the mechanisms by which these benefits come about and the magnitude of difference between natural waters and man-made outdoor pools. So, should we all be jumping in and prescribing such experiences for a mental health lift?
The research does not quite support that yet. We need to be realistic about some of the other challenges our oceans face in providing such experiences. Alongside ever-present risks such as drowning, polluted waters pose infection risks, something that any swimmer has to carefully negotiate to embrace their hobby.
Perhaps the main takeaway though is in how wild swimming delivers its mental wellbeing benefits – essentially through enhanced feelings of freedom. Perhaps, in a world of growing external pressures, this is the reason wild swimming is becoming so popular.
Swimming, sailing, even just building a sandcastle – the ocean benefits our physical and mental wellbeing. Curious about how a strong coastal connection helps drive marine conservation, scientists are diving in to investigate the power of blue health.
This article is part of a series, Vitamin Sea, exploring how the ocean can be enhanced by our interaction with it.
Lewis Elliott received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under Grant Agreement No. 666773.
The UK’s 2015 Modern Slavery Act is ten years old on March 26. When it was passed, it was billed as “world-leading” legislation – the first of its kind to introduce a dedicated legal framework to deal with modern slavery.
But ten years on, the evidence tells a different story. The numbers of people identified as potential victims are higher than they have ever been. Yet very few people have been prosecuted. What went wrong with this “groundbreaking” law?
The Modern Slavery Act was the final piece of legislation under the 2010-15 coalition government. Championed by then home secretary Theresa May, the act was primarily about beefing up the criminal justice approach. While criminal offences like human trafficking, forced labour, slavery and servitude were previously dealt with in different pieces of legislation, the act consolidated them into one place.
The aim was to make it easier to identify and prosecute traffickers (who May referred to as “the slave-drivers”), while offering some protection to their victims.
It also included a role for the private sector through a “transparency” clause. This required bigger businesses to report what they are doing to prevent modern slavery in their supply chains. And, it created an Independent Anti-Slavery Commissioner to “encourage good practice”. Other new measures included a legal defence to victims who had been forced to commit crimes, and giving law enforcement new powers to confiscate assets from traffickers.
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However, the act did little to stop modern slavery happening in the first place. The prevention strategy mainly consisted of poster campaigns in airports and immigration processing centres.
Some argued that the act dodged the big issues around work and immigration. For example, by not addressing weaknesses in labour protections and the additional vulnerabilities migrant workers faced thanks to May’s “hostile environment” migration policies.
As prime minister, May touted the UK’s “world-leading” efforts on modern slavery to the global stage at the UN General Assembly. But a decade later, the impacts have been less than stellar.
What has been its impact?
The act has certainly raised the issue’s profile in the last ten years. Businesses now have to report on what steps they are taking to tackle modern slavery. But there are no penalties if they do not comply, and there has been limited progress on exploitation in supply chains. Recent cases involving McDonald’s and other supermarkets prove that businesses are not spotting the signs or acting effectively to prevent the issue.
The number of people identified as potential victims of modern slavery has increased significantly in the last ten years: 19,125 in 2024, nearly six times as many as in 2015. That’s at least partly because the act has improved awareness among frontline responders (organisations who refer potential victims for support).
But while more people who may have experienced modern slavery are being identified, prosecutions are very low. Only 64 adult offenders were sentenced between 2017-19 for over 22,756 potential victims of modern slavery identified over the same period. There are many reasons for this, but one is that victims may not come forward, fearing they may be detained or deported.
Immigration policies passed by the last Conservative government have also rolled back protections for modern slavery victims. In passing the Nationality and Borders Act and Illegal Migration Act, the government argued that people arriving on small boats were abusing the protections offered through the Modern Slavery Act to evade deportation. Far from world-leading, the UK became non-compliant with international anti-trafficking and human rights laws.
Many of the concerns raised during the drafting of the legislation have proven accurate. Despite repeated commitments to create a unified labour inspectorate, successive governments have dodged reform of labour market regulation.
The UK’s immigration and work visa system has also led to the potential for exploitation. Even legal migration routes and the sponsorship visa scheme have created conditions for people to be exploited. For example, in sectors such as agriculture or social care, where intermediaries sell false promises regarding employment and conditions in the UK.
Added to this, the system of support which recognised victims of modern slavery can access is creaking under pressure. It has expanded beyond what was envisaged in its original design, and there are backlogs in decision-making and questions over how appropriate it is. Thousands have declined formal identification and support because they do not feel it is worthwhile or appropriate for them.
Research has also shown that victims are not necessarily getting the support or legal defence they are entitled to. An unknown number of victims are likely to be in the UK’s prisons, where they may be subject to further exploitation.
Stopping modern slavery
The theory behind the Modern Slavery Act was that if you “get tough” on criminals and improve support for victims, you can reduce exploitation. But that hasn’t worked – modern slavery is still a huge problem in the UK.
Changing this means taking prevention seriously, and addressing the conditions and inequalities that lead to exploitation in the first place. Like other global challenges, modern slavery stems from issues like poverty, inequality and discrimination and gender-based violence.
My colleagues and I at the Modern Slavery and Human Rights Policy and Evidence Centre recently noted in our report on policy priorities that the government has an opportunity to prevent modern slavery through some of its other crime prevention efforts, as well as in forthcoming legislation such as the employment rights bill.
Without a clear and evidence-based strategy, modern slavery in the UK will persist or even grow, and the Modern Slavery Act will remain an innovative, but ultimately ineffective tool in the fight against exploitation.
Alex Balch is Professor of Politics at the University of Liverpool and is Research Director of the Modern Slavery and Human Rights Policy and Evidence Centre (PEC) based at the University of Oxford. The Modern Slavery PEC is supported by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council and funds research to improve understanding of modern slavery and inform better policies to address it.
Turkey is in turmoil after Istanbul’s mayor, Ekrem İmamoğlu, a leading opposition figure and potential challenger to Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, was arrested on March 19 on charges of corruption.
More than 1,000 people who protested against the arrest have also been detained as hundreds of thousands of demonstrators took to the streets in anger at what they say is a major blow against democracy. İmamoğlu, who denies all charges against him, has since been endorsed as the candidate for the 2028 presidential elections for the Republican People’s Party (CHP).
Central to the allegations of corruption is what is known in Turkey as “naylon faturacılık”. This literally means “nylon invoicing” and refers to the issuing of fake invoices. It doesn’t refer to simple clerical errors or accounting mishaps, but deliberate attempts to fabricate transactions, inflate expenses, or obscure real beneficiaries.
Technically illegal, the practice is nonetheless widespread in Turkey. It forms part of what many see as the country’s informal economy.
The informal economy in Turkey spans everything from street vending and informal recycling to complex tax evasion schemes involving registered firms. Naylon faturacılık illustrates how corruption doesn’t always sit outside the system, but often thrives from within it.
It exposes a blurry boundary between formal and informal economic activity, revealing how some formal businesses manipulate legal frameworks to appear compliant while engaging in illicit practices. In September 2024, Turkey’s Ministry of Finance uncovered 3 billion Turkish Lira (£61 million) worth of fake invoices in an investigation targeting around 4,500 large taxpayers.
Over the past four years, I’ve interviewed more than 60 business owners, workers, and entrepreneurs across Turkey – from informal micro-enterprises to firms embedded in formal supply chains. One theme surfaced again and again: naylon faturacılık, or fake invoicing.
People described it not as an exception but as “just part of doing business” in an informal economy. In an economy shaped by patchy enforcement and institutional fragility, this practice has become normalised over the past decade. It’s not legally accepted, but has unfortunately become socially expected.
Under Turkish law, issuing or using fake invoices is a serious offence, punishable by three to eight years in prison. Yet many of my interviewees, especially those operating in or alongside the informal economy, saw fake invoicing as a necessary way of doing business. They described it as a viable response to rising costs, bureaucratic hurdles and a system that often punishes formality.
Opposition leaders, including CHP leader Özgür Özel, argue that İmamoğlu’s arrest is politically motivated – an attempt to discredit their candidate ahead of the presidential election. Özel condemned the operation as a “coup attempt” against Turkey’s democratic future.
In a press conference, he revealed that most of the people detained alongside İmamoğlu are linked to companies that won public contracts from the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality (İBB) under the control of İmamoğlu. Moreover, some of those arrested, he claimed, are students or relatives with no actual involvement in procurement decisions or public bids.
The key accusation is that these companies issued fake invoices – billing for work never done, or for services exaggerated or duplicated. Yet Özel contends that no concrete evidence has been presented thus far and much of the government’s case comprises testimony and vague associations from gizli tanık (secret witnesses).
One such witness reportedly named a communications or media firm that had worked with both İBB and the central government – including on campaigns commissioned by the presidency’s Directorate of Communications that work directly with Erdoğan. When the same activity, individuals or businesses, can be framed as legitimate under one administration and criminal under another, the line between legality and politics becomes dangerously thin.
While opposition mayors in Turkey face swift legal action against corruption, serious corruption allegations against former Ankara mayor Melih Gökçek, which he denies, involving nearly 46 billion Turkish lira in public losses remain uninvestigated. Gökçek was a member of Erdoğan’s government Justice and Development Party (AK).
A total of 97 complaints were filed over alleged misconduct during Gökçek’s tenure as mayor of Ankara until 2017, but nothing was done. Critics say this reflects politically selective justice.
One law for some
This isn’t just a story about fake invoices. It is about contexts where rules are unevenly enforced, where legal grey zones are abundant and where informality becomes a flexible instrument of control. A practice such as naylon faturacılık tolerated in one political moment can become a liability in another. A company can operate legally while it enjoys good relations with the government – and suddenly find itself under suspicion when that changes.
In Turkey today, the question is often not whether an act is legal or illegal. It’s more about who is involved and whose power is being threatened. The lines between formal, informal or illegal is not merely economic – it is profoundly political. That’s why the nylon invoicing issue is so revealing. Far from being a fringe practice, it exposes the everyday intersections of power, legitimacy and corruption.
In a climate of deepening polarisation and eroding institutional trust, many believe that who gets punished for corruption depends less on the act itself and more on which side of the political divide they fall.
Protests in Turkey callling for ‘rights! law! justice!’
Turkey’s democracy and justice system are being tested – not only by corruption, but by how selectively corruption is investigated and enforced. In this uncertain moment, the challenge is not only to hold people accountable, but to rebuild trust in institutions and ensure that justice is applied fairly. The protestors’ slogan“hak, hukuk, adalet” (rights, law, justice) carries a deeper warning: power is temporary, but justice must endure.
As many demonstrators in Turkey are now reminding the Erdoğan government: when the balance shifts, those in power today may find themselves in need of the very fair and independent legal system they are now so determined to undermine.
Tulin Dzhengiz research on the informal economy received funding from Manchester Metropolitan University.
Cannabis legalisation could raise £1.5 billion for the UK economy, according to a recent report from the charity Transform. But aside from this plant’s economic benefits, cannabis also has many ecological advantages.
My research into the potential role of cannabis in shaping a fairer and healthier world never fails to excite me. Cannabis flowers became legally allowed as a medicine in the UK in 2018, but its origins as a medicinal herb in Britain dates back to at least Anglo-Saxon times. Its popularity is evident in the many place names scattered across the country, from Hemel Hempstead in Hertfordshire to Littlehempston in Devon.
Hemp is a colloquial term for the cannabis plant, Cannabis sativa. Hemp often refers to strains of cannabis that have had its main psychoactive chemical, tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), bred out of the female flowers.
Due to the negative associations cannabis has picked up over the past 50 years of prohibition, hemp farmers have distanced themselves from using the term cannabis. In the UK, this association has resulted in strict conditions for growing hemp creating a barrier for farmers.
In recent years, cannabidiol (CBD), the main non psychoactive chemical found in female cannabis flowers, has become popular as a wellness product. CBD is abundant in low-THC hemp flowers, so it’s easy for the lines between hemp and cannabis to become blurred.
It’s all cannabis. This plant has some incredible environmental benefits, from improving soil health to storing carbon. Here are five ways that cannabis plants can contribute to a greener planet:
1. Productive harvests
Hemp stems have a woody core, known as shivs, that can be mixed with lime to make hempcrete, a carbon-neutral alternative to concrete. Concrete production is one of the major sources of global greenhouse gas emissions. Hempcrete could be used to build eco-friendly social housing across the UK.
Hemp is ideally suited to agroecology, but it’s not an easy crop to grow in the UK
because licensing laws make it very difficult for hemp farmers to tap into a global market worth billions.
Farmers at one community farm, Hempen in Oxfordshire, sowed their first hemp crop over an area of 30 acres. In 2019, Hempen were forced to destroy their CBD harvest as their licence wasn’t renewed.
In California, THC strains are allowed. One farming community started producing its own CBD-based medicines on just one acre of land. Others use the plant in other interesting ways, from rehabilitating formally incarcerated people to off-grid market gardens.
Hemp offers potential as a fast-growing crop that enriches soil health. MAR007/Shutterstock
A process known as phytoremediation cleans the soil of these toxic contaminants. Hemp’s deep roots have a high tolerance for absorbing dangerous heavy metals. It is also a great break crop – this is a way for farmers to rotate the types of crops they grow to keep the soil healthy.
Bioplastics made from hemp are biodegradable, composting down into organic matter leaving no microplastics. Hemp bioplastics are already being used by a number of commercial companies from building cars to packaging.
Bioplastics do not offer a complete solution, but with the right infrastructure they could help reduce the need to derive more plastics from fossil fuels.
4. Carbon storage
Trees and other plants remove carbon dioxide from the air through the process of photosynthesis. Hemp is great at this, storing twice as much carbon dioxide than trees.
It’s very difficult to store excess energy from renewable sources for use at a later date when the sun might not be shining or the wind isn’t blowing. Big batteries are one solution but these require mining precious metals.
Another solution are supercapacitors – mega-efficient energy storage solutions that can be as small as a coin. Graphene, a flat material stronger than steel, is an essential element in the production of supercapacitors but it’s expensive and energy-intensive to make.
The whole stem biomass (unused plant waste) from cannabis could provide a low-cost way to make graphene. Research shows that supercapacitors using hemp-based graphene perform much more efficiently than current commercial models.
Hemp has many other known uses, from textiles to paper. The UK could lead the way in hemp innovation. The previous UK government did announce some minor changes to hemp licensing. Now, further changes to legislation could help farmers to harness the potential of this wondercrop in the fight against climate change.
Don’t have time to read about climate change as much as you’d like?
Recently, a leaflet was delivered to my home from Nuclear Waste Services, the company that is overseeing the final disposal of some of the most dangerous waste that exists. It reminded me that the small village where I live in Cumbria is one of three proposed locations for the burial of nuclear waste. If realised, it would be a site that has to be secure and safe for at least 100,000 years.
Such a timescale makes the markers around which we otherwise plan our lives (the birthdays, holidays, anniversaries and so on) seem almost infinitely small. This presents a challenge to any attempts to make us take ownership of such waste.
When you think about waste, you probably imagine the mundane leftovers of your everyday experience. Because of their proximity to our daily lives, cultural historians like me can learn a lot from the history of such leftovers.
Contemporary artists like Michael Landy and curators at the EU House of History’s year-long exhibition, Throwaway, have also explored this everyday aspect of waste.
But between such extremes of everyday life and the abstract future, we can find waste everywhere. After spending more than two decades thinking about what waste actually is and what we might learn from it, I have learned that waste, as a thing, an idea, a problem, is always wholly determined from a human standpoint.
There is no waste in nature. And what is waste in human life only remains so if it cannot be reused or reconfigured for human ends or absorbed by nature.
Contemporary waste
If we can say that nuclear waste was a development of the 20th century, then it is clear that we can think of waste through the particular historical forms it has taken. An example of 21st-century waste is the immaterial digital leftovers that we now unconsciously generate. This data waste, generated from the technologies and media platforms that now facilitate much of our work and leisure time, is harvested and recycled by a multitude of corporate, business, government and other interests. Such leftovers will outlive us, but they are more or less invisible to us.
What we can learn from this, as I explore in my new book, The Idea of Waste, is not only that there are forms of waste originating in certain times or places, but that waste is very much a contemporary phenomenon. It is always an idea that is taking new forms, while at the same time continuing to exist in all prior forms.
A new waste consciousness emerged in the late 1960s in response to consumer society and the new packaging wastes it created. It was summed up by the concept of recycling (a word almost unknown before that time).
There was a dual meaning in environmental activist campaign messages such as “Don’t waste waste – recycle!”. The point was that waste was not just a material thing, it was a way of perceiving or thinking about such material things. Promoting notions like zero waste hinges on how we perceive what is valuable or what is worthless, which varies according to our knowledge at any given time.
But even their efforts to minimise or reduce waste to zero still have to face the fact that in any act of making or creating, energy and resources will have been expended. The life cycle of designed or upcycled materials that embody circular ideals will also come to an end, returning us once again to remainders and leftovers. In that sense, zero waste is an ideal that is intended to design a new human consciousness.
The lesson we may draw from all of this is that there can be no history of waste that charts a path of victory. It is impossible to say that we conquered one form of waste and then moved on the next one. Waste is always with us. But it is also always taking new forms and without constant vigilance, it will, in one form or another, overwhelm us.
Don’t have time to read about climate change as much as you’d like?
John Scanlan 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 – France – By Jean-Pierre Darnis, Full professor at the University of Côte d’Azur, director of the master’s programme in “France-Italy Relations”. Associate fellow at the Foundation for Strategic Research (FRS, Paris) and adjunct professor at LUISS University (Rome), Université Côte d’Azur
US President Donald Trump’s pivot toward Russia amid its war in Ukraine has collided with the stance of Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s government, which has always shown unwavering support for Kyiv as well as loyalty to Washington. When Trump came to power, Meloni wanted to appear connected to his administration, hoping to play the role of a bridge with Europe while France and Germany were in unfavourable political cycles. Trump’s pivot led to a revival of France’s role in Europe, while Germany emerged from its electoral period with its likely next chancellor, Friedrich Merz, calling for European defence’s “independence from the USA”.
Meloni’s position is not only weakening within the European context, where France, Germany and the UK play leading roles, but also in Italian politics, as US policy has created rifts within the three-part governing coalition. Meloni’s party, Fratelli d’Italia, supports Ukraine and Europe, as does Forza Italia. But the leader of Lega, Matteo Salvini, has come to embody Trumpism in Italy, taking an openly pro-Russian position and opposing European rearmament. If a break with Lega were to occur, it could call into question the viability of the government, as it would no longer hold an absolute majority in parliament.
Anti-French rhetoric
For her part, Meloni always tends to push back against any “European-only” defence solution proposed by France. This position is a way for Italy to avoid facing the fact that NATO has weakened. It also reactivates an anti-French rhetoric that is a classic refrain among Italian nationalists. Salvini has recently accused French President Emmanuel Macron of being “crazy” and calling for Europe to prepare for nuclear war.
However, Macron has not made any significant missteps toward Italy. Since the first informal emergency meeting in Paris after Trump’s policy shift toward Ukraine (a gathering that included the UK, Germany, Italy, Denmark, the Netherlands, Spain and Poland), the Italian government has always been involved. Moreover, Macron’s policy convergence with UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer has dulled criticisms, because Rome is traditionally close to London.
Both Meloni’s government and the opposition have put forward complicated if not unrealistic proposals for the war in Ukraine, such as a UN peacekeeping mission after a ceasefire, and repeatedly reaffirmed their commitment to NATO. In terms of public opinion, a poll published in mid-February – two weeks before Trump scolded Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky during a White House visit – found that 69 percent of Italians “are favourable toward a common European army”.
There is also a growing debate in Italy on nuclear deterrence. This issue had been taboo until now, with Italy benefitting from an arrangement in which US nuclear bombs are stored in bases on Italian soil. While Germany and Poland have expressed interest in an expansion of the French nuclear umbrella, Italian media and policymakers are also beginning to discuss it. The discussion may reflect doubts about US reliability within NATO, including Washington’s commitment to the alliance treaty’s Article 5, which holds that “an armed attack” on one member “shall be considered an attack against them all”.
There are also significant signals coming from Italian industry. While, in recent months, the Italian government appeared to want to use the telecommunications services of Starlink, the satellite network created by Elon Musk, for its defence needs, a contract no longer seems to be on the agenda. Musk’s fluctuating stance about the Starlink service provided to Kyiv, as well as the US decision that temporarily cut aid to Ukraine, introduced questions about reliability. This explains how, in just a few weeks, the French company Eutelsat, which owns the OneWeb constellation, has seen a resurgence of interest, as many countries assess its services as alternatives to Starlink. Following this turmoil, the Italian company Leonardo recently announced that it is planning to launch a constellation of 18 telecommunications satellites for defence purposes.
These developments also tie into Italy’s industrial position in aerospace and defence, because Leonardo and Fincantieri, another large, publicly owned company, do not limit their markets to the Italian armed forces. As part of a European strategy, Leonardo concluded an agreement with the German company Rheinmetall in 2024 to jointly produce battle tanks, and recently announced an agreement with the Turkish company Baykar to produce drones. Leonardo is part-owner, along with French defence company Thales, of Telespazio and of Thales Alenia Space, and is also in discussions with Airbus to form a European satellite production group. In the missile sector, Leonardo’s participation in European joint venture MBDA allowed Italy and France to produce the SAMP/T anti-missile system, which could lead to further developments for the European missile-defence network. In shipbuilding, Fincantieri has expressed interest in merging its activities with the German group Thyssen Krupp Marine Systems. And in aircraft, Italy is participating in the Global Air Combat Programme, which includes the UK and Japan in the production of fighter jets. These examples show that Italian aerospace and defence development is intrinsically linked to European collaborations and export markets.
Both in terms of industrial interests and politics, Italy is firmly anchored in the European camp. The positive stance that the Meloni government took toward Washington does not mean Rome is considering an alternative to EU affiliation. Italy is also facing continuous cyberattacks from Russian groups, which feeds a clear threat perception. The prime minister has stressed her differences with France and the UK during the recent European security summits, but while Italy may be reluctant to deploy peacekeeping troops in Ukraine, it cannot distance itself too much from the future defence architecture of Europe.
Jean-Pierre Darnis ne travaille pas, ne conseille pas, ne possède pas de parts, ne reçoit pas de fonds d’une organisation qui pourrait tirer profit de cet article, et n’a déclaré aucune autre affiliation que son organisme de recherche.
The history of medicine is filled with remedies that, viewed through a modern lens, seem perplexing, misguided or downright macabre. Among these is “mumia” — a medicinal substance derived from mummified human remains.
From the 12th to the 17th century, physicians across Europe prescribed powdered mummy as a cure-all for ailments ranging from internal bleeding and broken bones to epilepsy and melancholia.
Once regarded as a potent elixir infused with the life force of the ancients, mumia was a staple in apothecaries, sought after by the wealthy and recommended by the learned. Yet, as medical knowledge evolved, so too did attitudes toward this unusual remedy, and by the 18th century, it had largely faded into obscurity.
The belief in mumia’s healing power was deeply rooted in prevailing medical theories of the time. One such theory was the doctrine of signatures, which held that natural substances resembled the ailments they were meant to cure.
Mummified flesh, preserved for centuries, seemed an obvious candidate for treating decay, wounds and internal deterioration. Another influential idea was vitalism, the notion that life force could be transferred from one body to another, particularly from a preserved human to a living patient.
Adding to this was the European fascination with the medical traditions of the Islamic world. Arabic physicians such as Avicenna had described the therapeutic use of bitumen – a naturally occurring tar-like substance also called mūmiyā – that had medicinal applications in wound healing.
When these texts were translated into Latin, European scholars mistakenly conflated mūmiyā with Egyptian mummies, assuming that the embalmed dead were imbued with similar restorative properties. The result was a booming trade in ground-up human remains, with mummies sourced from Egyptian tombs, grave robbers and even local execution sites.
Mumia was prescribed for an astonishing array of conditions. Physicians believed it could speed up healing, prevent infection and even cure epilepsy. Ingested in powdered form or mixed into tinctures, it was recommended for internal bleeding, strokes and tuberculosis. Some suggested it could ward off melancholy or restore youthful vitality, making it a popular remedy among the European elite.
Apothecaries stocked mummy powder alongside other human-derived medicines such as powdered skull (cranium humanum) and distilled human fat (axungia hominis).
The more ancient the remains, the more potent they were thought to be. However, as the demand for mumia outstripped the supply of genuine Egyptian mummies, opportunistic traders turned to more recent corpses – some even resorting to robbing the gallows to meet the market’s needs.
Eventual decline
Despite its widespread use, mumia was not without its detractors. By the 16th century, some physicians began to question both its efficacy and its ethical implications. The Swiss physician Paracelsus (1493–1541) argued that only fresh human remains – not ancient, embalmed flesh – had medicinal value, while others dismissed the practice as nothing more than superstition.
The growing emphasis on empirical science in the 17th and 18th centuries further eroded faith in mumia. As anatomy and pathology advanced, the idea that centuries-old preserved tissue could heal the living seemed increasingly implausible. At the same time, public attitudes toward human remains began to shift.
The rise of Egyptology and archaeological interest in mummies reframed them as historical artefacts rather than medical commodities, making their consumption distasteful even to those who had once sworn by their healing properties.
By the early 18th century, mumia had largely disappeared from medical practice, relegated to the annals of history as an example of medicine’s sometimes gruesome past.
Mumia’s decline serves as a reminder of how medical knowledge evolves, shedding once-revered treatments in favour of evidence-based approaches. Yet, while medicinal cannibalism may seem shocking today, the pursuit of miraculous cures continues. From stem cell therapies to longevity supplements, the desire to harness the essence of life itself persists – albeit with more scientific rigour.
Looking back at the use of mummified medicine, we are reminded that the boundary between science and superstition is not always as clear as we might like to believe.
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.
For years, nature has been blamed as a blocker of economic growth. After some ministerial bluster about not letting newts and bats get in the way of growth ambitions, the UK government released more details of its plans to get Britain building again.
The centrepiece of its aspirations to balance both nature and economic growth is a nature restoration fund, to be set up in England through changes to habitat regulations. This should allow developers to stay within their legal obligations towards nature through a payment scheme without delaying their projects.
The broad concept is that, as an alternative to relocating important species or improving habitats on the site of a proposed development, a developer could pay into the nature restoration fund. This would pay for larger, more strategically located schemes to protect the species in question.
The fund simplifies and streamlines the regulations while collecting funds to promote more, bigger, better and increasingly joined-up sites for nature.
Protecting nature is not just about bats and newts. According to trade association the Home Builders Federation (HBF), there are 160,000 homes being delayed by what are known as “nutrient neutrality” measures. These rules were a response to growing public concerns about land and water pollution caused by nutrient loads – pollutants such as nitrogen and phosphorus – associated with livestock farming and spillages from sewage works.
Government agency Natural Englandadvised 74 local authorities that they should not allow any more house building in their areas unless this pollution could be mitigated. But this has led to lengthy and expensive project-by-project reviews to identify potential damage.
How will a fund help?
The fund will build on some schemes that are already known to work. One such scheme works for the protection of great-crested newts. Another successful scheme is Thames Basin Heaths project, working to protect and enhance heathland sites where rare birds such as nightingales breed. Crucially, this scheme allows new development to go ahead in adjacent areas.
The fund will be run by Natural England, which aims to draw on these experiences to unblock development at a large scale rather than at single-site level, pooling contributions from developers to pay for mitigation measures when there is a risk to nature.
If a particular “blocking” issue is identified, experts from Natural England will produce a plan, which must be approved by the environment secretary. A levy on developers will then pay for mitigation measures “in perpetuity” (often 30 years), allowing the development to get under way.
Environmental experts have cautiously welcomed the general principles and approach of the nature restoration fund. But there has also been concern about whether the plan is well enough thought through. There are also questions on how well it will integrate with other schemes.
A widespread worry is for the future of biodiversity net gain – which includes measures for creating and improving habitat banks using biodiversity units, effectively a form of “nature market”. This approach sets a target of 10% for biodiversity improvement based upon the combined distinctness, condition and significance of affected habitats over the lifetime of the development. But these measures are only just getting started.
The concern is that providers of sites for these habitat banks – which might be councils, landowners, charities or private businesses, for example – might get cold feet and pull out if they can’t be certain that their plans will be compatible with the nature restoration fund.
The Thames Basin Heaths scheme has been protecting the breeding grounds of nightingales. Erni/Shutterstock
There is concern, too, about how payments from the nature restoration fund would be calculated. These will need to be locally appropriate and not pit nature restoration and biodiversity net gain against each other if, for example, landowners are forced to choose a particular scheme for their land that they are then committed to for decades. With two parallel systems in play, the relationship between them must be crystal clear, otherwise shared goals could be missed.
Another question is whether Natural England can be both regulator and financial beneficiary of the new scheme. There have been calls from some of those already involved in nature markets for some form of independent oversight.
And it will also be vital that the new scheme respects what’s known as the “mitigation hierarchy”. This hierarchy aims to avoid, reduce and then mitigate any impacts on nature on-site in that order. Then developers should consider off-site measures in areas where there could be greater gains for biodiversity.
But a danger here is that this could disconnect people from nature even further by mitigating ecological loss miles away from the site of the damage. This disconnection is considered to be a critical underlying cause of biodiversity loss.
There is much to like about the nature restoration fund, but there is a risk that little will be achieved without the government showing genuine ambition and allocating enough money and staff to properly monitor and enforce it over the long term. Only time will tell whether it achieves the government’s goal of speeding up development.
At the moment, it is not clear how the fund will complement similar schemes and there is a danger of creating a complex patchwork in nature restoration funding. But if it works well, it could provide a richer funding ecosystem for nature recovery – a much-needed boost for England’s nature-depleted landscape.
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 Stuart Black, Associate Professor, Department of Archaeology, University of Reading
Chimpanzees helped to make PG Tips tea famous with their iconic TV ads in the 1970s. But what happened to these animals afterwards? Our new study, using techniques previously used only on human remains, reveals the fascinating life story of Choppers, a celebrity chimpanzee, also known as Ada Lott from the PG Tips ads.
Zoos have transformed over the last century. They once focused on entertainment, but in the UK zoos now have a greater emphasis on education, conservation, research and welfare. And our new study, led by experts at National Museums Scotland, shows how these changes are written on Choppers’ body.
Choppers died aged 46 in 2016, which is close to the average age for a wild or captive chimpanzee. Following her death, Choppers was donated to the National Museums of Scotland, which enabled an analytical investigation into her life through her remains. Researchers from across the UK created the most comprehensive osteobiography of a zoo animal by bringing together archival, chemical and metric analyses.
Osteobiography involves the analysis of bones and other tissue. It is more commonly used in archaeology to reconstruct the life stories of ancient human subjects, such as Richard III, identifying where and how they lived in remarkable detail.
As a celebrity, Choppers’ life has been extensively documented. This combination of
archival material and osteobiographical analysis provides one of the most complete
assessments of the life of an animal in zoo care.
The findings of our study paint a rich picture of Choppers’ key life events, including evidence of injuries sustained when she was poached from the wild at just six weeks old. Choppers had a broken right arm, which seemed to have healed badly. Her lower arm bones were bowed and much shorter than her left side. She seems to have not been able to bear much weight on this arm, which likely contributed to joint disease here and elsewhere in her skeleton.
It is also likely that many, if not all, of her social group were killed in her capture. The physical trauma would impact her throughout her life, impairing her movement and exacerbating degenerative issues associated with old age.
Analysis of Choppers’ tooth enamel indicates a geographical and dietary shift between the ages of three and four, coinciding with her relocation to the UK from Sierra Leone. In the following three years she played the grandmother character in the PG Tips adverts, which ran in the UK throughout the 70s and 80s and featured a family of tea drinking chimps.
A collection of PG Tips adverts using chimpanzees.
The long-running ads helped PG Tips become the market leader of tea in Britain for 35 years. Her performance career was short, ending before the onset of puberty, and Choppers probably retired at around the age of six or seven. In part this is due to behavioural change as adult chimpanzees become less predictable, but also as a result of human perceptions of the cuteness of adult chimpanzees compared to infants.
Choppers transitioned from a relatively active life with high levels of direct interaction with humans, to a sedentary life with two companion chimpanzees, Noddy and Brooke, who were also retired from the entertainment industry. She was cared for by Twycross Zoo in Leicestershire for the rest of her life.
Choppers’ upper jaw was significantly elongated compared with wild chimpanzees, reflecting an early diet of sugary soft fruit, but also of her performance diet that mimicked that of humans. The PG Tips advertisements followed on from a longstanding trope in the mid-20th century of chimpanzees participating in tea parties, eating cake, drinking “tea” and apeing human behaviour. The chimpanzees drank fruit juice or milk rather than tea during tea parties and advertisements.
In recent years there has been a shift towards tougher, less sugary vegetables in the diets of zoo primates, which is leading to improvements in their health and behaviour.
Later in life, Choppers was housed for a time with another chimpanzee, Bobby. Together they had one daughter, Holly.
Across the world today, there is considerable variation in zoo regulation, management and welfare. Despite accreditation of zoos and improved regulation, the illegal trafficking of chimpanzees and other primates into private collections and disreputable zoos continues. Choppers’ story is testament to the many thousands of chimpanzees that were (and still are) forcibly extracted from the wild for zoos, circuses, laboratories and private collections.
Choppers was not an unusual chimpanzee, but her story is an individual one, which resonates with human attitudes towards wildlife, zoos, entertainment, welfare and quality of life.
Stuart Black receives funding from The Wellcome Trust, UKRI and other research councils.
David Cooper has received funding from The Wellcome Trust.
Juliette Waterman received funding from the Wellcome Trust while this research was carried out.
Source: The Conversation – UK – By Dominic Davies, Senior Lecturer in English, City St George’s, University of London
Millions of people were abducted from west Africa and forcibly trafficked to the Americas over the 400 years of the transatlantic slave trade, from the 15th to the 19th century.
Slavery treated these people as forms of property. It forced them, with brutal violence, to work on plantations producing commodities such as cotton and coffee, sugar and tobacco. Their labour powered the world economy for several centuries.
While common understanding of this history has improved, less frequently remembered are those who spearheaded resistance against slavery. Revolutionary uprisings led by enslaved people themselves, as well as actions by radical groups such as Quakers and mutinous pirates, challenged slavery long before William Wilberforce and Britain’s abolition movement.
Now, an increasingly popular genre of the graphic novel is building public awareness and memory of these movements. Composing its stories of the past from framed documents, fragmented images and scraps of text, the form of the graphic novel resembles an archive. It is therefore well-placed to bring forgotten histories to life and to reflect on how those histories were recovered.
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Here are three recent graphic novels that can help us to remember resistance against slavery. They follow in the footsteps of historian Rebecca Hall’s collaboration with artist Hugo Martínez, Wake: The Hidden History of Women-Led Slave Revolts (2021), which I would also strongly recommend.
1. Toussaint Louverture: The Story of the Only Successful Slave Revolt in History
By C.L.R. James, Nic Watts, and Sakina Karimjee (2023)
It dramatised the story of the only successful slave revolt in history, when 100,000 slaves rose up against their white masters and eventually secured independence after almost 15 years of struggle.
James’s play was performed only twice in 1936, with the great African American actor Paul Robeson in the title role. The script was then lost for several decades, until 2005, when the historian Christian Høgsberg discovered a copy in the archives at the University of Hull and published a new edition of the play.
In 2012, graphic artist, Nic Watts and theatre practitioner, Sakina Karimjee, decided to bring James’s play back to life – not on the stage, but in the pages of a graphic novel.
James, who died in 1989, might not have guessed that he would one day be a co-creator of a graphic novel. But he would surely have been impressed with Toussaint Louverture, which takes readers through the Haitian Revolution in almost 300 thrilling pages.
The graphic novel uses its uniquely spatial medium to map the connections between the French Revolution, which proclaimed universal rights for all men, and the slave uprising in Haiti, which sought to realise those rights in France’s colonies. It is packed with powerful symbols and imagery that build a rich picture of the strategies and tactics that led to the uprising’s eventual victory.
2. Prophet Against Slavery: Benjamin Lay, A Graphic Novel
By David Lester, edited by Paul Buhle and Marcus Rediker (2023)
Historian Marcus Rediker has devoted his career to uncovering early histories of resistance against slavery and sharing them in compelling and accessible formats.
In 2021 he teamed up with the illustrator, David Lester, and longtime graphic historian, Paul Buhle, to translate this work into graphic novels.
The first, Prophet Against Slavery, takes readers back to a Quaker meeting house in the early 1700s. In its dramatic opening scene, Benjamin Lay disrupts the meeting with a piece of performance theatre. He appears to stab his own arm in protest against slavery, though we later learn that the spouting blood was in fact “red pokeberry juice”.
Lay was an innovator of performance protest, and he developed the strategy of boycotting commodities produced by slave labour. As Prophet Against Slavery details, he was one of the earliest and most outspoken abolitionists, campaigning for the end of the transatlantic slave trade almost a century before Wilberforce.
He was also a pioneer of veganism and an advocate for animal rights. Lay saw the parallels between early capitalism’s enclosure of common land in England and slavery’s enclosure of people’s bodies in the US. The claustrophobic borders of Lester’s graphic novel dramatise these acts of property making, even as they document Lay’s stubborn attempts to liberate the oppressed from bondage.
The enslaved themselves do not have a voice in Prophet Against Slavery. But Lester uses powerful charcoal sketches and image-only panels to make sure their presence is never forgotten.
These haunting images remind readers of the human cost of slavery without presuming to speak for those whose voices have been excluded from the written archive.
3. Under the Banner of King Death: Pirates of the Atlantic, A Graphic Novel
By David Lester and Marcus Rediker (2023)
Rediker and Lester teamed up again for Under the Banner of King Death. The title refers to the skull and cross bones flag that flies on the masts of pirate ships.
But this is not your conventional story of evil pirates drinking rum and hunting for gold (although there is some of that). It is rather a portrait of the pirate ship as a space of self-determination and political freedom at a time when, as Rediker puts it, “poor people had no democratic rights anywhere in the world”.
The graphic novel tells the story of John Gwin, an African-American man who escaped from slavery in South Carolina. After being kidnapped by the Royal African Company to labour on a slaving ship, he decides to resist. He rallies his shipmates, liberates the Africans below deck, and leads a mutiny to overthrow Skinner, the tyrannical captain.
With Skinner deposed, the pirates establish a commune at sea: “A world turned upside down,” as Gwin calls it. “All captains and officers elected. All tars [sailors] treated as brothers. No tyranny of the lash.” There is no hierarchy on this ship. Instead, they return to west Africa and begin breaking people out of slave castles along the coast.
Lester’s pen-and-ink sketches and frantic page layouts capture the scattergun nature of pirate life in the 17th century. It was a dangerous existence. Such was the threat posed by pirates to the ruling order that the British Navy worked quickly to capture them and make an example. Under the Banner of King Death starts and ends with hanging scenes, where pirates were put to death in public.
But while the British state could hang the pirates, it couldn’t kill their idea of freedom from slavery. Lester and Rediker recover this history and remind us of the revolutionary spirit that the skull and cross bones flag once represented.
These graphic novels commemorate new histories of resistance to the slave trade, while also reminding us of the historiographic work that must be put into recovering and retelling them, now and in the future.
Dominic Davies 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.
Greenland’s parliamentary election was held on March 11 against a backdrop of repeated calls from the Trump administration for America to annex the island. The poll delivered a momentous shift in Greenland’s political landscape as the pro-business Demokraatit (Democrats) emerged as the biggest winners overturning the two left-leaning parties which had formed the previous government.
Securing nearly 30% of the vote and gaining seven seats for a total of ten in the Inatsisartut (parliament), the party now holds the strongest mandate it has ever had. Close behind was the nationalist Naleraq party, which secured 24.5% of the vote and gained four seats, bringing their total to eight.
While both parties are united in their rejection of Trump’s ambitions and share a vision of Greenlandic independence, their approaches couldn’t be more different. Demokraatit advocates for a gradual, measured process, prioritising economic development. The party considers that economic self-sufficiency and strengthening domestic infrastructure are key preconditions to achieve independence. Naleraq, on the other hand, is pushing for a rapid break from Denmark. Its line is that Greenland will only be able to unleash its potential, economic and otherwise, once independent.
Independence has long been the dominant theme of Greenlandic politics. Ever since the territory gained home rule in 1979, most political parties across the spectrum have championed the idea of full independence from the kingdom of Denmark. Even the two major challengers – the Inuit Ataqatigiit, which lost five seats at the election to drop to seven, and the once-dominant Siumut, which lost six and now holds just four seats – are pro-independence.
But while independence remains a defining issue, the real story of this election is Greenland’s economy. The island is sitting on a treasure trove of rare earth elements, uranium, iron and other minerals critical to global industries. Yet despite decades of interest from foreign investors, strict regulations and environmental concerns have often slowed development.
With Demokraatit’s rise, that could change. The party is pushing for pro-business policies, including tax incentives, streamlined regulations and reduced state intervention in key industries like mining, fisheries and tourism. If successful, these reforms could transform Greenland into a major player in the global supply chain.
Despite its electoral gains, Demokraatit faces a challenge in implementing its economic vision. The party’s potential coalition partner, Naleraq, is deeply sceptical of foreign investment, at least when it comes from Denmark and Europe. While open to partnerships with the US, Naleraq is adamant that Greenland must retain full control over its resources, resisting any foreign influence that could compromise national sovereignty.
This ideological divide could create friction within a potential coalition government. Will Demokraatit’s pro-business agenda be tempered by Naleraq’s nationalistic stance? Or will the promise of economic growth push both parties toward compromise?
Global powers are watching
Greenland’s election came at a time when it was already the focus of world attention. Its strategic location and vast resources have attracted growing interest from global superpowers – none more so than the US. Trump has repeatedly expressed interest in acquiring Greenland, a move widely considered unrealistic, but indicative of Washington’s strategic priorities.
American interest in Greenland isn’t new. The island is home to the Pituffik Space Base, formerly Thule Air Base, since the 1950s as a critical part of North American missile defence and whose Arctic position makes it a key player in both American territorial defence and Nato’s security architecture. Pituffik is the only non-Danish military presence in the territory and is the northernmost American military base.
But the White House’s rhetoric has taken a more insistent tone, raising questions about whether the US might attempt to exert greater influence over Greenland’s economic and political future. The interest in Greenland seems guided by at least two factors: its strategic position at the centre of the North Atlantic security complex and its economic potential with hard-to-access but abundant resources.
In both cases, the growing involvement of both Russia and China in the Arctic seem to make the US wary of a potentially independent Greenland getting closer to unfriendly great powers.
Denmark’s central government is walking a diplomatic tightrope when it comes to responding to the US government’s repeated intentions to annex Greenland. Copenhagen has sought to Europeanise the debate, floating the idea of Greenland joining the European Union. Taking this step would provide welcome economic support to the island but could also clash with Greenland’s scepticism toward European interference.
Greenland now stands at a crossroads. Domestically, negotiations between Demokraatit and Naleraq will likely shape the trajectory of the island’s economic and independence ambitions. Internationally, major powers – including the US, the EU and possibly even China and Russia – are positioning themselves to engage with Greenland’s untapped potential.
As the world’s focus on Greenland intensifies, one thing is clear: this Arctic nation is no longer a remote outpost. It is fast becoming a key battleground for economic, political and strategic influence in the North Atlantic.
Nicolas Jouan 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.
