Category: Academic Analysis

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Rivka Isaacson, Professor of Molecular Biophysics, King’s College London

When I first began appropriating the plots of British-Irish novelist Iris Murdoch’s novels to explain scientific concepts, I never stopped to think about whether Murdoch herself would have approved of such an endeavour.

As a professor of molecular biophysics, I find that in both scientific research and all aspects of life, there can be great advantage in thinking differently. I’ve recently given some sessions on this at the Physics of Life summer school, and the fun, ideas and feedback were beyond my wildest dreams – especially as I’d been encouraged to conceal this side of myself as a young scientist.

Back in the 1990s, I did my PhD on protein folding – a conundrum underpinning all biology which has challenged scientists for decades. I wrote about it for The Conversation when a breakthrough won the Nobel prize in chemistry in 2024.

At its heart is a question of competing energies: entropic forces, which motivate a protein and its surrounding medium to move as freely as possible, versus enthalpic, in which positive charges gravitate towards negative charges and things with oily properties congregate. Protein folding is driven by finding the best balance in a three-dimensional shape to satisfy as many of these forces as possible.

An early book by the Booker-winning author A.S. Byatt, Degrees of Freedom, examines the power structures and layers of control that drive Murdoch novels. It’s a comparable scenario to protein folding: the compromise between many clashing forces.

When Degrees of Freedom first came out in 1965, Murdoch had published nine novels. The book was reissued in 1994 with additional material, when only Murdoch’s final novel, Jackson’s Dilemma – written when Alzheimer’s disease was just beginning to invade her beautiful mind – had yet to emerge.

Reading Murdoch’s 1975 novel A Word Child in 2003, I was struck by the helix-shaped nature of the plot, with London Underground’s Circle Line platform pubs at Sloane Square and Liverpool Street acting as points of vulnerability. I immediately turned to Byatt’s book to see whether her analysis matched my own.

In finding there was no chapter on A Word Child, I trawled the internet and discovered the Iris Murdoch Society, which one could join for the princely sum of £5. Signing up at that time required emailing Anne Rowe at Kingston University, and I couldn’t resist explaining my thoughts on A Word Child and the molecular mechanisms underpinning Alzheimer’s disease. She invited me to submit an abstract to a conference – and from then on, I was hooked.

So far, I’ve used ten out of Murdoch’s 26 novels to illustrate topics as broad as alcoholism and its effect on the liver, sex hormone signalling, evolution, molecular crowding and electron microscopy. While I’m not in any immediate danger of running out of Murdoch material, the recent publication of Poems from an Attic, a collection assembled from material found in her Oxford home many years after her death, adds a glorious new angle to my exploits.

While Murdoch is obsessed with nature – wild swimming, the changing seasons, flora, fauna and the meditative effects of being outdoors – she often speculates in her poems as to why things are as they are, which is an undeniably scientific way of thinking. There are examples of this in many of the poems, whatever their topic.

The word science occurs three times in the new volume – the first in the poem To B, who brought me two candles as a present (B was Murdoch’s lover, Brigid Brophy):

What you require of me no science gives –

To make these fires constant but not consumed.

What blazes every moment when it lives

Has eaten its own substance as it bloomed.

Yet though they burn not all the evening through,

While they are burning each to each is true.

This provides a satisfying analogy to justify sustaining Murdoch’s simultaneous passions. It invokes the same fuel-based resignation as American poet Edna St Vincent Millay’s First Fig:

My candle burns at both ends;

It will not last the night;

But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends

It gives a lovely light!

The other two mentions of science in the new collection appear in You by Telephone – in which Murdoch muses over the changes, both positive and negative, that the invention of the phone had on the practicalities of relationships:

For I cannot close with kisses the lips that may speak me daggers,

Nor give you a gentle answer just by taking your hand.

The poem also includes this delightful digression:

In spite of the case of Odysseus, who might have got home much sooner

If at the start he could have dialled Ithaca one.

But he might have offended Hermes, that rival tele-communer,

And science would have precluded a lot of Homer’s fun.

I am relieved Murdoch didn’t have to grapple with smart phones, social media and today’s attention spans. Years ago, I scoured her archive for thoughts on science, which were mostly touched upon in correspondence, and her entertaining annotations of The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays by Martin Heidegger, and The Tao of Physics by Fritjof Capra.

Murdoch was certainly interested in science, albeit with a healthy dose of scepticism, while being alarmed at its pace of development. I like to fantasise that I could have talked her down.

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Rivka Isaacson receives funding from the UK Research and Innovation Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council.

– ref. How I found an unexpected connection to science in the works of Iris Murdoch – by a molecular biophysicist – https://theconversation.com/how-i-found-an-unexpected-connection-to-science-in-the-works-of-iris-murdoch-by-a-molecular-biophysicist-269580

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Bridget Storrie, Teaching Fellow, Institute for Global Prosperity, UCL

The increasing number of injectable cosmetic treatments and fillers carried out around the world is driven by a seemingly universal need to look younger than we are. Most are administered to women, but a growing number of men are having them too.

This beauty-is-youth belief has a geological cost. Over 14 million stainless steel hypodermic needles are used and discarded annually for cosmetic treatments around the world. The metals used to create them are considered critical.

Stainless steel is an iron and chromium alloy with nickel added to most of it. The iron in a needle might have come from the Pilbara in Western Australia. It was born over a billion years ago when oxygen from the photosynthesis of early bacteria combined with iron in the ancient oceans and settled on the sea floor.

The chromium could have come from the Bushveld Complex in South Africa, an igneous intrusion created when magma found its way to the Earth’s crust through vertical cracks, then cooled, allowing the chromite to differentiate itself, crystallising in distinct layers.

Read more:
The importance of critical minerals should not condone their extraction at all costs

And then there’s the nickel. Like chromite, it began its life in the upwelling and cooling of magma associated with the formation of the continents as we know them now, and through the weathering of igneous rocks. It’s likely to have come from Indonesia, where deposits of nickel are close to the surface and economical to extract.

A critical mineral is one that is considered essential for a state’s economy, national security and clean energy technologies, and has a supply chain vulnerable to disruption by war, tariffs and scarcity. Critical minerals cannot easily be replaced by something else.

The critical list

What is on a particular country’s critical minerals list says something about the geopolitics of the places where commodities are mined, the characteristics of the commodity itself and the priorities of the country compiling the list.

Chromium is considered critical by the US, Canada and Australia because it is essential for stainless steel production and other high-performance alloys. Demand for chromium is expected to grow by 75 times between 2020 and 2040 due, in part, to the clean energy transition. Reserves are concentrated, with South Africa producing over 40% of supply in 2023, followed by Kazakhstan, Turkey, India and Finland.

Nickel was added to the UK’s critical mineral list in 2024. Described as the “Swiss army knife” of energy transition minerals, it is used to increase energy density in lithium batteries, allowing for their miniaturisation and increasing the range in electric cars. Indonesia holds 42% of the world’s reserves.

Read more:
The global race is on to secure critical minerals. Why do they matter so much?

Even iron ore is on the list. High-quality iron ore was put on Canada’s critical minerals list in 2024 because of its importance for “green steel” production and decarbonisation goals.

The rapidly increasing demand for stainless steel for cosmetic purposes is tangled up with urgent demands from other sectors. It is essential for construction, transportation, food production and storage, medicine and the manufacture of consumer goods.

It is vital for defence. Stainless steel is used in aircraft and vehicle components, naval vessels, missile parts and ballistics.

Needles used in cosmetic procedures are also entangled with other resource-related issues that have no easy answer: mining-related conflict, concerns about the environmental and social impact of mining and controversy over new mining frontiers, like the deep seabed and the Moon.

Then there is the carbon footprint of the multiple processes required to turn rocks into needles and disposing of them safely. Each one has to be mined, shipped, smelted, manufactured, trucked, used, put in a sharps bin and then incinerated.

Do we have to choose between cosmetic procedures or the green transition? Cosmetic procedures or defence? No. Our increasing demand for injectable cosmetic procedures isn’t responsible for making chromium, nickel and iron ore critical. But it’s part of that story and it comes with a cost.

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Bridget Storrie is a director of Storrie Consulting, a mining and minerals consultancy

– ref. The hidden environmental cost of anti-wrinkle injections – https://theconversation.com/the-hidden-environmental-cost-of-anti-wrinkle-injections-266926

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Will Cook, Reader in Policy Evaluation, Manchester Metropolitan University

As she carefully prepares the UK’s reaction to her second budget the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, has now hinted that she may be ready to scrap the two-child benefits cap.

This controversial policy prevents parents from claiming child tax credit or universal credit for more than two children (this is different to child benefit payments which are not limited by family size). According to the government’s own figures, the cap affects the households of 1.7 million children, and ditching it would cost upwards of £3.6 billion a year.

Introduced in 2017 as part of measures intended to cut public expenditure on welfare, the policy was designed to ensure that households on means-tested benefits “face the same financial choices about having children as those supporting themselves solely through work”.

However, when it was brought in, the then Conservative government’s impact assessment offered limited detail on the expected costs and benefits. A more comprehensive economic analysis of scrapping the policy would need to consider both the direct fiscal implications and the broader social and economic effects.

The direct fiscal cost is perhaps the most straightforward part of the calculation. Scrapping the cap would require the government to resume payments for families with more than two children, and the £3.6 billion annual cost is considerable at a time when the UK treasury doesn’t have a lot of money to spend.

So what about the potential economic benefits? These fall into two broad areas.

The first concerns the direct impact on children. For example, there is good evidence that additional household income during childhood improves future educational attainment and health. Increasing the money available to poorer households could therefore bring long-term social benefits.

However, the evidence to date on the specific effect of the two-child limit is limited. The Institute for Fiscal Studies recently examined the impact of the two-child limit on early years development (up to the age of five) and found no measurable effect on school readiness.

This finding may have come as a surprise to campaigners who argue that the policy harms child development. But it is consistent with evidence from the US which found that giving extra money to poorer families had no impact on early child development.

It seems then that the short-term effects of lifting the two-child benefit cap may not be significant. But longer-term influences, particularly on educational attainment, health and lifetime earnings could still emerge.

The second area of potential economic benefit relates to encouraging people to have more children. The logic here is that reinstating benefits payments for more than two children would lead to higher fertility rates (the average number of children a woman has over her lifetime).

This is particularly relevant given that birth rates in the UK have declined significantly in recent years from 812,970 births in 2012 to 694,685 in 2021.

As the population ages and lives longer, there is a risk that a shrinking working-age population will threaten economic prosperity. This is partly through a reduction in the number of workers supporting those who are not working, but also through a reduction in innovation, the key driver of economic growth.

Yet evidence that the two-child limit has significantly deterred parents from having more children is weak. Research suggests only a small decline in birth rates among low-income households likely to be affected by the policy.

Child poverty

Another important consideration is the policy’s effect on the labour market. Evidence indicates that the introduction of the two-child limit led to small increases in hours worked, and an increased likelihood of mothers of three children entering the workforce. This implies that the two-child limit incentivised some people to work more.

If scrapping the cap reverses these effects, the fiscal cost could be even higher because of reduced tax revenue and lower economic output.

That said, this reduction in employment could also be framed as a benefit. Stricter benefit rules that increase employment may also lead to negative mental health outcomes, which also carry social and fiscal costs.

From an efficiency standpoint then, the case for scrapping the two-child limit is ambiguous. The evidence on its impact on fertility and childhood outcomes is mixed, and there may be a effects on the labour market whose net benefit is uncertain.

But from an equity perspective, the case is much stronger. It is easy to argue that reducing poverty is a desirable policy goal in its own right, regardless of whether it leads to other measurable social benefits.

Scrapping the cap is one of the most cost-effective ways of reducing child poverty. The Resolution Foundation thinktank estimates that abolishing the two-child limit would lift around 500,000 children out of poverty and is the single most effective policy lever available to government. It may now be a lever that Reeves intends to pull.

The Conversation and LSE’s International Inequalities Institute have teamed up for a special online event on Tuesday, November 18 from 5pm-6.30pm. Join experts from the worlds of business, taxation and government policy as they discuss the difficult choices facing the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, in her budget. Sign up for free here

William Cook receives funding from UKRI, the Education Endowment Fund and the Youth Endowment Fund.

– ref. Is there a strong economic case for dropping the two-child benefits cap? This is what the evidence tells us – https://theconversation.com/is-there-a-strong-economic-case-for-dropping-the-two-child-benefits-cap-this-is-what-the-evidence-tells-us-267057

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Pablo Uchoa, PhD Candidate in the Institute of the Americas, UCL

The arrival of the world’s largest aircraft carrier, the USS Gerald R. Ford, in the Caribbean basin on November 11 has intensified fears of a large-scale conflict in the region. The carrier has been deployed as part of US president Donald Trump’s campaign against boats in the Caribbean and Pacific allegedly transporting drugs bound for the US.

But some experts suspect that the real objective is to support a possible US military strike aimed at toppling the regime of Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela. Trump has long accused the Venezuelan government of being a criminal organisation, offering US$50 million (£38 million) earlier in 2025 for information leading to Maduro’s arrest.

Trump recently authorised the CIA to conduct covert lethal operations inside Venezuela, adding that his administration was now considering operations on land. The deployment of the USS Gerald R. Ford, which has 4,000 sailors and dozens of aircraft on board, further raises the stakes.

However, US military action in Venezuela would carry immense risks. The Venezuelan government has long been preparing for an asymmetric conflict with the US, eccentric as this may have sounded in the past.

Venezuela’s military doctrine

In 2002, the Venezuelan government was subject to a US-backed coup attempt. This prompted Hugo Chávez, Venezuela’s leader at the time, to promote an overhaul of national military thinking to deal with a possible US invasion.

His strategy incorporated principles of “people’s war”, a Maoist tactic used extensively by Vietnamese military commander Vo Nguyen Giap in the Vietnam war. This tactic accepts ceding territory to an invading force initially, in favour of engaging the enemy in guerilla-style warfare until the conflict becomes impossible to sustain.

A key part of the tactic is that it blurs the boundaries between society and the battlefield, relying on the support and participation of the population. Reflecting on so-called people’s wars in the first half of the 19th century, Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz observed that the strongest wars are those driven by the determination of the people.

The concept of people’s war and asymmetric warfare has been codified in anti-imperialist doctrines throughout the 20th century. This is especially true for the Vietnamese guerrilla leaders. But it was also adopted more loosely by insurgencies such as the Taliban, which fought Soviet forces in Afghanistan in the 1980s.

The Iraqi resistance against US forces in the early 2000s featured highly in Chávez’s mind. Venezuela’s then-president had thousands of copies of Spanish political scientist Jorge Verstrynge’s 2005 book, Peripheral Warfare and Revolutionary Islam, distributed within the Venezuelan army. The book draws on the experience of jihadist groups to emphasise the power of smaller, irregular formations in deciding asymmetric conflicts.

The Bolivarian Militia, a special branch of the Venezuelan armed forces created in 2008, embodies the doctrine of people’s war by incorporating civilians into national security mobilisation. Membership of the militia grew from 1.6 million in 2018 to 5 million by 2024, according to official figures. Under Maduro, the Venezuelan government has said it wants to expand membership to 8.5 million people.

The goal of the militia is not to duplicate conventional Venezuelan armed forces, but to extend their presence across the country. Venezuela’s territorial defence system is based on military deployments at regional, state and municipal levels, with personnel and missions assigned according to local geography and population.

Under Chávez, this system was broken down into much smaller units, covering specific municipal areas and communities. This level of capillarity is possible because it relies on civilian soldiers from the Bolivarian Militia and their profound knowledge of local areas.

For a large proportion of militia men and women, especially older members, their main task would not involve weapons. They would probably be tasked with carrying out what the government calls “popular intelligence” – in other words, surveillance.

This has already been reinforced with a recently launched mobile phone app which allows Venezuelans to report “everything they see and hear” in their neighbourhood that they consider suspicious.

Political and economic quagmire

A powerful US invading force would probably be allowed to march into Venezuela relatively easily. The problem would be the ensuing political and military quagmire that Venezuela’s military doctrine has been designed to create.

There are many uncertainties surrounding this scenario. On the Venezuelan side, civil-military coordination in wartime would be highly complex. Large-scale exercises have seen hundreds of thousands of regular troops, militia members and police simulating possible wartime scenarios. But their logistics have never been tested in real life.

Another uncertainty concerns the cohesion of combatants. Trump’s hardline posture towards Venezuela could trigger a “rally round the flag” effect, reinforcing loyalty to the government in the early stages of war. But the ideological commitment of militia members in a protracted scenario is another question.

On the US side, Trump’s plan for Venezuela remains unclear. Assuming Washington’s aim is to install an opposition government, it’s not obvious how such an administration could survive in the days and weeks after taking power. A conflict could also trigger another wave of Venezuelan emigration, adding to the 8 million-strong diaspora living mostly in Latin American countries.

The Bolivarian doctrine hopes that the prospect of “another Iraq” in Latin America serves as a deterrent against US intervention in Venezuela. But it is unclear whether Trump is taking this prospect seriously.

The US president reportedly considers Venezuela “unfinished business” from his first term in office. At that time, he imposed harsh sanctions on Venezuela’s oil sector, saying in 2023: “When I left, Venezuela was ready to collapse. We would’ve taken it over, and would’ve gotten all that oil.”

Yet a military solution now would still risk leaving this business unfinished for the foreseeable future.

Pablo Uchoa has received UKRI funding for his research on the transformation of Venezuala’s military under Hugo Chávez.

– ref. Trump’s Latin America strategy risks creating a military quagmire – https://theconversation.com/trumps-latin-america-strategy-risks-creating-a-military-quagmire-269680