Category: Analysis

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Abi Lafbery, PhD Candidate, Sociology, Lancaster University

Centuries after the upper class flocked to the coast for therapeutic sea bathing, outdoor swimming is having a renaissance. Swimmers enter cold water for the many physical and mental health benefits it offers.

Despite the dangers – hypothermia, cardiac-related death and drowning – for many women, outdoor swimming feels like a safe space. My PhD research, which explored outdoor swimming in north-west England, found that some women experience their swimming as a form of liberation, from what they see as a male-centric culture, the male gaze and social convention.

Despite recent gains in women’s sport, men are still participating in higher numbers, especially in outdoor activities. However, approximately two-thirds of outdoor swimmers are women.

In this environment, stripping off at the water’s edge can feel like stripping back notions of how female swimmers feel they “ought to” look or behave.

This is particularly relevant in a context where more than half of women feel that the UK has become more dangerous in the past five years, and reports of violence against women are increasing.

While men are loved and valued members, founders of and advocates for outdoor swimming communities across the UK, female swimmers comment on enjoying a female-majority atmosphere. Compared to perceived male-dominated environments such as the city, where women may feel that they need to take precautions to ensure their safety, or change how and where they exercise during darker winter months, one woman described outdoor swimming as, “a sense of freedom that I don’t think I would necessarily have elsewhere”.

Outdoor spaces are widely perceived to be a male domain. The outdoors is where tropes of masculinity, including stoicism and the conquering of nature, are performed.

Through the practice of outdoor swimming, female swimmers are rewriting outdated ideas of how women might be, do and what they look like in the outdoors.

As late as the Victorian era, many outdoor sports were imagined to threaten a woman’s femininity and fertility. Recent research has shown that mainstream media often portrays women as passive or requiring male assistance during outdoor activities.

Outdoor swimming is a sport in which female physiology provides a significant edge, and women can feel athletic and empowered, no matter their body type.

Many of the swimmers in my research are between their 30s and 60s, and several are experiencing the menopause or ageing bodies. In each other’s company and in the water, patriarchal and capitalist ideals of a “good body” (slim, able-bodied and cisgender), are felt to wash away.

Female swimmers laugh heartily about their “bioprene”, a beloved euphemism for the body fat that allows them to outlast their husbands in cold water. As one swimmer in my study said:

When you’re swimming outdoors, there’s no glamour … it’s a levelling thing and I think in a world where we’re just bombarded with what we should be doing and what we should look like, it’s the way that people can just be themselves.

The outdoor swimming movement is known for its self-proclaimed non-conformist and subversive roots. For some female swimmers, their personal practice is a way to be unconventional. One swimmer commented:

I’ve got this concern about convention and what I ought to be doing, what people expect me to do, but I’ve got more concerned with what I need to do to find pleasure and peace.

For this swimmer, letting go of social norms is a way to find peace within herself.

Finding community

A sense of peace also comes in the form of the friendships that are forged in the water. Previous research has indicated that the social and communal elements of outdoor swimming are an important factor in the sense of wellbeing associated with the practice.

My research indicates that the femininity of some swimming circles can be a harbour for emotional intimacy.

One swimmer described how she and her fellow swimmers have had beautiful exchanges while immersed in the waves, including singing together:

That lovely little moment, which, had it been a male-dominated environment, we perhaps wouldn’t have felt comfortable to be like that. Lots of women around you, you just feel freer… it was spontaneous, it was beautiful.“

The rivers, lakes and seas of the UK offer energising and emboldening spaces where many women feel safe to be fully and unapologetically themselves. As outdoor swimming grows in popularity, and grassroots organisations such as Mental Health Swims have closed due to a lack of funding, nurturing female communities in the outdoors is increasingly important, such that more women may find safety, joy and more of themselves in the outdoors.

Abi Lafbery received funding from the Economic and Social Research Council, North West Social Science Doctoral Training Partnership, ES/P000665/1.

– ref. Outdoor swimming is becoming a sanctuary for female swimmers in the UK – https://theconversation.com/outdoor-swimming-is-becoming-a-sanctuary-for-female-swimmers-in-the-uk-268009

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Manal Mohammed, Senior Lecturer, Medical Microbiology, University of Westminster

You might think good sleep happens in your brain, but restorative sleep actually begins much lower in the body: in the gut.

The community of trillions of microbes living in your digestive tract, known as the gut microbiome, plays a powerful role in regulating sleep quality, mood and overall wellbeing. When the gut microbiome is balanced and healthy, sleep tends to follow. When it is disrupted, insomnia, restless nights and poor sleep cycles often appear.

Gut and brain communicate constantly through the gut-brain axis. This communication network involves nerves, hormones and immune signals.

The best known part of this system is the vagus nerve, which acts like a two-way communication line carrying information between gut and brain. Researchers are still studying how important the vagus nerve is for sleep, but evidence suggests that stronger vagal activity supports calmer nervous system states, steadier heart rhythms and smoother transitions into rest.

Because of this intimate connection, changes in the gut influence how the brain regulates stress, mood and sleep.

So, how does the gut actually communicate these signals to the brain?

Gut microbes do more than digest food. They produce neurotransmitters and metabolites that influence sleep-related hormones. Metabolites are small chemical by-products created when microbes break down food or interact with each other. Many of these compounds can influence inflammation, hormone production and the body’s internal clock. When the gut is in balance, these substances send steady, calming signals that support regular sleep. When the microbiome becomes imbalanced, a condition known as dysbiosis, this messaging system becomes unreliable.

The gut also produces several key sleep-related chemicals. Serotonin, for example, regulates mood and helps set the sleep-wake cycle. Most of the body’s serotonin is produced in the gut, and healthy bacteria help keep its production stable. Melatonin, which makes you feel sleepy at night, is made not only in the pineal gland but also throughout the digestive tract. The gut helps convert serotonin into melatonin, so its condition directly shapes how efficiently this happens.

The gut also supports the production of Gaba (gamma-aminobutyric acid), a calming neurotransmitter made by certain beneficial microbes. Gaba quiets the nervous system and signals that the body is safe enough to relax. Together, these chemicals form part of the body’s circadian rhythm, the internal 24-hour cycle that regulates sleep, appetite, hormones and temperature. When harmful bacteria dominate, that rhythm becomes less stable, which can contribute to insomnia, anxiety at bedtime and fragmented sleep.

Another major route linking gut and sleep is inflammation. A healthy gut maintains a balanced immune response. It does this by protecting the gut lining, hosting microbes that regulate immune activity and producing compounds that calm inflammatory reactions. If dysbiosis develops or a poor diet irritates the gut lining, gaps can form between the cells of the intestinal wall. This allows inflammatory molecules to escape into the bloodstream, creating chronic, low-grade inflammation.

Inflammation is known to interfere with sleep regulation. It disrupts the brain’s ability to coordinate smooth transitions between the stages of sleep because inflammatory chemicals influence the same brain regions that control alertness and rest. People with inflammatory gut conditions often experience this in very practical ways.

Irritable bowel syndrome, food sensitivities or increased intestinal permeability, often called leaky gut, all involve irritation or loosening of the gut lining. This allows immune-triggering substances to enter the bloodstream more easily, which increases inflammation and interferes with sleep. Inflammation also raises levels of the stress hormone cortisol, which makes the body feel primed for action rather than rest.

Stress, sleep and gut health continually reinforce each other. Stress alters the gut microbiome by reducing beneficial microbes and increasing inflammatory compounds. A disrupted gut then sends distress signals to the brain, which heightens anxiety and disrupts sleep. Poor sleep raises cortisol further, which worsens gut imbalance. This creates a cycle that can be difficult to break unless the gut is supported.

Strengthening the gut can make sleep noticeably better, and the changes do not need to be complicated. Eating prebiotic and probiotic foods, particularly fermented foods, supports beneficial microbes because fermentation creates live cultures that help repopulate the gut. Reducing sugar and ultra-processed foods lowers inflammation and prevents dysbiosis because these foods tend to feed bacteria that promote irritation or produce inflammatory by-products.

Keeping consistent meal times helps the gut maintain a steady daily rhythm because the digestive system has its own internal clock. Managing stress makes a difference. Staying well hydrated helps the gut microbiome because fluid supports digestion, nutrient transport and the mucus layer that protects the gut lining. Together, these changes create a more stable gut environment that supports deeper and more restorative sleep.

Good sleep does not begin the moment you climb into bed. It begins long before that, shaped by the health of the gut and the messages it sends to the brain throughout the day. When the gut is supported and balanced, the body is better able to settle, recover and shift into the rhythms that allow sleep to improve naturally.

Manal Mohammed 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.

– ref. Good sleep starts in the gut – https://theconversation.com/good-sleep-starts-in-the-gut-270487

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Renzo Lanfranco, Principal Researcher, Department of Clinical Neuroscience, Karolinska Institutet

Most of us go through the day without thinking much about our bodies – until something goes wrong. Yet beneath that apparent simplicity lies a remarkable achievement: the brain must constantly knit together sights, touches and signals from muscles and joints into a coherent sense of “this body is mine”.

Psychologists and neuroscientists call this body ownership. It is a key part of self-consciousness: the feeling of being a self located in a particular body, separate from the world around you. It’s partly what makes us different to AI.

For decades, theories have proposed that a lot of this bodily processing happens outside awareness. It’s a kind of unconscious process that quietly guides our movements while consciousness focuses on other things. Now our new study challenges this idea – giving interesting insights into theories of consciousness.

Most experiments on consciousness have used flashes of light or sounds, asking when and how these external stimuli reach awareness. Surprisingly, very little work has directly tested how conscious awareness relates to the bodily self.

Rubber hand experiments

To investigate this, we used a modern version of the famous rubber hand illusion. In this illusion, a participant’s real hand is hidden from view while a lifelike rubber hand is placed in front of them. If both hands are stroked in synchrony, most people begin to feel that the rubber hand is, strangely, part of their own body.

We built a robotic set-up that allowed us to control this illusion with millisecond precision. In our main experiment, 32 participants saw two rubber hands side by side, while a robot tapped their real, hidden hand.

On every trial, one rubber hand was tapped in perfect synchrony with the real hand and the other was tapped with a slight delay – from 18 to 150 milliseconds. After a short sequence of taps, people had to choose which rubber hand felt more like their own. Then they rated how clear that feeling was.

This gave us two things to compare. One was objective performance – how accurately people’s feeling of hand ownership could tell which hand matched their real hand’s timing. The second was subjective awareness – how clearly they reported feeling that sense of ownership.

If a lot of body ownership processing happens unconsciously, we might expect people to be more likely to pick the correct rubber hand, even when they report only a vague or unclear feeling of ownership.

That is not what we found. As we increased the lack of synchrony between the real and fake hands, people became better at picking the “correct” hand. Crucially, their awareness ratings improved in lockstep.

Both objective performance and reported clarity started to rise at around 30 milliseconds of mismatch. Below that, people were essentially guessing; above that, they both chose more accurately and reported clearer feelings of ownership.

In other words, as soon as the brain started to reliably tell the difference between “my hand” and “not my hand”, people’s conscious experience reflected that difference. We did not see the common pattern reported in visual studies, where unconscious processing can occur before stimuli reach awareness.

Body ownership vs timing

To test whether this was really about body ownership – rather than simply noticing timing – we ran two control experiments. When we rotated the rubber hands into an anatomically impossible position, the illusion disappeared and people mostly reported no clear feeling of ownership, regardless of timing.

And when we replaced the hands with wooden blocks and asked people to judge simultaneity instead of ownership, their awareness no longer tracked their performance as tightly. This suggests that strong conscious access is specific to body ownership, not just to any kind of multisensory integration.

In further experiments, we asked whether the same close relationship holds when body ownership builds up gradually. In one study, we varied how many taps people received before making their choice. More taps meant more sensory evidence. As expected, their ability to discriminate ownership improved with more touches. But again, their awareness ratings improved proportionally.

Taken together, our findings point to a simple but powerful conclusion: for body ownership, consciousness seems to have continuous, privileged access to the relevant information.

This contrasts with many studies of vision and hearing, where stimuli can be processed and influence behaviour without ever entering awareness. It suggests that the bodily self may occupy a special place in our conscious lives.

One reason may be that body ownership is intrinsically self-related: it anchors a first-person perspective in space and underpins almost everything else we experience. Another is that it depends on complex integration across many senses, which may require the kind of widespread brain activation associated with conscious experience.

Implications for mental health

Understanding how body ownership and awareness are linked is not just a philosophical exercise. Distortions of bodily self-perception are common in conditions such as schizophrenia, eating disorders, borderline personality disorder and autism spectrum disorders, where people may feel alienated from their bodies or misperceive their size, shape or boundaries. Our work offers new tools to study how finely tuned the system is.

The findings also resonate with rapidly developing technologies in virtual reality and prosthetics. Many applications aim to “embody” a user in a digital or artificial body. Knowing that body ownership is tightly tied to awareness suggests that successful embodiment will depend on keeping multisensory signals aligned in a way that sustains a clear, conscious sense of “this is me”.

Finally, our results speak to big-picture theories of consciousness. If information about our own body is almost always admitted into awareness, this supports the idea that maintaining a stable, embodied self may be one of the core functions of conscious experience. This perspective ultimately highlights a key gap between humans and current artificial systems, challenging the idea that AI – at least in its current forms – could resemble human consciousness.

Renzo Lanfranco receives funding from the Swedish Research Council (Vetenskapsrådet) and the Strategic Research Area Neuroscience (StratNeuro).

– ref. Why our physical bodies may be a core part of conscious experience – new research – https://theconversation.com/why-our-physical-bodies-may-be-a-core-part-of-conscious-experience-new-research-270836

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Renaud Foucart, Senior Lecturer in Economics, Lancaster University Management School, Lancaster University

The UK government makes a lot of money from cars. It taxes car ownership, it taxes the fuel, and it is about to charge drivers of electric vehicles by the distance they travel.

But Britons’ reliance on their 34 million cars also comes at great expense to the economy. Heavy traffic and congestion costs £7.5 billion a year in wasted time. An estimated £17 billion is needed to fix the worn out road network.

In the last 30 years, as the UK population has grown by 19%, the number of cars has exploded by 56%. Outside of London, 81% of British households own at least one car.

Fitting all of these vehicles into a fairly small country means that driving has clear priority over other forms of transport. In Germany, 90% of people living in large cities have access to a tramway or underground train system. In France, it’s 80%.

In the UK, the figure is less than 20%, a similar level to the US.

But the US has vast amounts of space, where brand new roads are regularly built to ease congestion. And so the UK has to deal with a population density comparable to the Netherlands (at least for England) and the urban transport choices of Texas.

This lack of decent public transport is expensive to sustain for all sorts of reasons – like the councils forking out £2.3 billion a year transporting 470,000 children to school, mostly in taxis. Or the cost of subsidising 800,000 motability vehicles, which accounted for one in every five new cars sold in 2024.

While the government should absolutely support the travel needs of people with disabilities and help children get to school, in a strange case of state-provided individualism, the UK has become a country where only cars can deliver these vital public services.

Designated drivers

Yet urban design is ultimately a choice. While the UK has a system which allows for 560 cars per 1,000 people, other places have taken a different route.

In Singapore, there are 146 cars per 1,000 people. This came about after the government implemented a quota system to release a limited number of (expensive) car-ownership licenses to limit congestion and finance public transport.

A ten-year “certificate of entitlement” to own a car in Singapore now costs more than US$100,000 (£76,000) on top of an additional congestion tax.

The result? Singapore’s public transport is cheap, fast, reliable and efficient.

People without cars are fine, because the number of overall cars is so small that buses and taxis don’t get stuck in traffic. People with cars subsidise the buses and trains, while enjoying smooth traffic.

The Netherlands used a different strategy. In the 1970s, Dutch streets were dominated by cars and had become dangerous for pedestrians and cyclists. Protests led to a reorganisation of cities to become far less car friendly.

My research with a fellow economist demonstrated that if you decrease the space given to cars, they go slower, public transit goes faster, and walking and cycling become safer.

Then, as more people turn to public transport, the higher uptake makes it a faster and more reliable form of transit. It gets to a point where people who would never have taken public transport end up using it and getting to their destination much more quickly than when the car was dominant.

So for the UK to be more like Singapore, the government needs to make motorists pay much more for their car use. To be more like the Netherlands, it must take away their space.

The UK, and especially England, which invented the railway and used to be full of electric tramways, has the population density to make a dramatic switch away from cars actually work. In fact, it’s hard to think of a country better suited to public transport, or where it is more needed. It just hasn’t been built.

Or at least, it has not been built outside of London, the only place in the UK where most households don’t own a car.

So London is rich, well connected and people don’t need cars. Elsewhere, people park on pavements in derelict high streets and drive to supermarkets and places of work.

With stretched public finances, doing nothing about this state of affairs is a risky option. The UK has been described by the Local Government Association as a “country in a jam”, where productivity is held back by car traffic, with no hope for improvement. Lost time on roads is set to increase by 27% in the coming decades.

Moving to a situation where cars are not considered the fastest and most convenient mode of transportation will take ambition and imagination. But the alternative is a very expensive dependency, which clogs up the UK economy.

Renaud Foucart 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.

– ref. How the UK’s dependency on cars slows down the economy – https://theconversation.com/how-the-uks-dependency-on-cars-slows-down-the-economy-270393

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Sven Batke, Associate Head of Research and Knowledge Exchange – Reader in Plant Science, Edge Hill University

If you walked into a supermarket during a supply hiccup, storm, fuel protest, or even the early days of the COVID pandemic, you will remember the sight of empty shelves. For most people in the UK, these moments are surprising, even unsettling, precisely because they are rare. We are a generation largely spared the rationing, shortages and hunger our grandparents and great-grandparents once endured.

But that rarity is exactly why we must not become complacent. Food security (the reliable availability, access and affordability of food) should be recognised as a major national concern. That means placing it firmly on the UK’s national risk register.

The national risk register is the UK government’s openly available list of the most serious risks that could affect the country in the short to medium term. These risks range from flooding and heatwaves to threats such as cyberattacks and energy shortages.

Being listed on the register does not mean the event is likely to happen tomorrow (but it could). It means the government has assessed it as significant enough, based on impact and probability, to require planning and mitigation measures.

Think of the national risk register as the country’s official “what could really go wrong?” list. If a threat is on the register, policymakers, emergency planners and critical industries take it seriously and plan accordingly. If it is not, the risk can drift into the background (even when it should not).

For all its importance, food security occupies a limited and somewhat indirect presence in the risk register. It only appears within broader categories such as supply-chain disruption, fuel shortages and animal disease. It’s not mentioned as a clearly defined risk in its own right.

Placing food security on the national risk register as its own defined category would send a clear signal that safeguarding stable, affordable food is a national priority – on par with energy, health and security. My team’s recent white paper for the government highlights this urgency.

Our modern food system is more complex, interconnected and vulnerable than many people realise. The UK imports around half of its food.

Some categories, such as fruit and vegetables, depend on imports for as much as 80–95% of supply. We rely on long, intricate supply chains involving overseas farming conditions, global shipping routes, international labour markets and constantly changing energy prices. When any of these are disrupted, our food system feels the shock.

In 2023, extremely bad weather in Spain and Morocco reduced crop yields, leaving UK supermarkets rationing tomatoes and peppers. The war in Ukraine has caused spikes in grain and sunflower oil prices. And the COVID pandemic and subsequent labour shortages have exposed how reliant farming and food distribution are on migrant workers.

An uncomfortable truth lies behind each of these disruptions: we are more dependent on global systems than the public think. Those systems are under pressure from climate change, geopolitical instability and resource competition.

Food systems also operate with tight margins. Fresh produce is harvested, shipped and sold quickly. Livestock feed supply needs to be constant. Fertiliser production depends heavily on natural gas for providing both the hydrogen feedstock and the energy required to make ammonia, the key ingredient in most nitrogen fertilisers. All of these dependencies create points of vulnerability. When several of those break at once, shortages can cascade.

Read more:
How unsustainable global supply chains exacerbate food insecurity

For many households, even small disturbances lead to real consequences: higher prices, reduced choice and increased stress about meeting weekly food bills. Families on tight budgets feel these effects most sharply.

While we are nowhere near the wartime rationing experienced by earlier generations, food banks across the UK are already serving record numbers, and food-price inflation has recently reached levels not seen in decades. Food insecurity is not a hypothetical risk for millions, it is a reality.

Lessons from the past

Historically, Britain has faced food insecurity before. During the second world war, German U-boats targeted supply ships, leading to rationing that lasted until 1954. Earlier still, crop failures and poor harvests in the 19th century caused widespread hardship. Today we benefit from refrigeration, global trade, advanced agriculture and data-driven logistics, but those advantages can create an illusion of invulnerability that our supply chains are robust.

Food security, even in the UK, is more fragile than it might seem. Our shelves look full until suddenly they do not. A combination of climate-driven harvest failures, rising energy prices and trade disruptions could create national shortages or unaffordable prices much more quickly than many people may expect.

Including food security on the national risk register would prompt government departments to plan coordinated responses. It would drive investment in resilient agriculture, storage and domestic production while encouraging diversification of food imports to avoid overreliance on just a few regions.

Better risk planning would also support households through better safety nets and targeted interventions such as emergency rations and direct support to vulnerable households. Raising public awareness that food security is a shared national responsibility does not suggest panic – it means preparation.

Don’t have time to read about climate change as much as you’d like?

Get a weekly roundup in your inbox instead. Every Wednesday, The Conversation’s environment editor writes Imagine, a short email that goes a little deeper into just one climate issue. Join the 47,000+ readers who’ve subscribed so far.

Sven Batke is affiliated with the Greenhouse Innovation Consortium.

– ref. The UK’s food supply is more fragile than you might think – here’s why it should be a national priority – https://theconversation.com/the-uks-food-supply-is-more-fragile-than-you-might-think-heres-why-it-should-be-a-national-priority-270709