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November 14, 2025

From misgendering to missed diagnoses: the barriers that can keep trans people from safe healthcare

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Stephanie Horsted, PhD Candidate, Pain management in the transgender community, Department of Research and Graduate Studies, Health Sciences University

Transgender people can encounter significant obstacles and barriers within healthcare systems that may hinder access to care or affect the quality of treatment they receive. These challenges vary widely, but together they can create environments that feel less supportive than they should be.

A 2025 report found that, in the UK, 52% of transgender people surveyed had a negative healthcare experience. The effect of such experiences, which can be due to prejudice, discrimination or simply a lack of knowledge among healthcare staff, can be profound. It forces many to live with health problems without seeking medical attention.

One of the most common problems encountered by transgender people in healthcare is misgendering. This occurs when a health professional uses incorrect names or pronouns, for example referring to someone as “he” instead of “she,” or using a former name – known as deadnaming – either through lack of knowledge or an unwillingness to acknowledge a patient’s gender identity.

For many transgender people, being misgendered is a denial of who they are, even if it’s not intended. Studies show that frequent misgendering can lead transgender and non-binary people to feel invisible, invalidated and emotionally distressed. This kind of miscommunication can leave patients feeling disrespected or dismissed, reinforcing existing inequalities in care.

The impact of misgendering trans people goes far beyond emotional discomfort. According to US charity the Trevor Project’s 2024 national survey on LGBTQ+ youth mental health, transgender and nonbinary young people whose pronouns were respected all or most of the time had around half the suicide attempt rate of those whose pronouns were rarely or never respected.

This doesn’t mean pronoun use alone prevents suicide, but that it signals something larger: affirmation, safety and belonging. Misgendering, by contrast, reinforces rejection and invisibility. The psychological strain of being misgendered, combined with the stress of untreated health issues, can make healthcare settings feel unsafe and discourage people from seeking support.

Research indicates that these experiences contribute to deeper mistrust of healthcare professionals and reduce engagement with medical services. Over time, that mistrust can make people reluctant to return for follow-up care, even when they are unwell. Evidence shows that transgender people who delay seeking healthcare because of anticipated discrimination experience poorer physical and mental health outcomes.

Exclusion from routine screening

Another widespread issue is the lack of inclusion in standard health screenings. Many medical protocols, from cervical smear tests to prostate exams, have been historically designed with cisgender patients in mind.

“Cisgender” refers to people whose gender identity matches the sex they were assigned at birth. This traditional focus has created serious gaps in preventive care for transgender people, particularly those who have transitioned or whose bodies do not align neatly with conventional gender categories.

Research shows that transgender people are significantly less likely to receive recommended cancer screenings than cisgender patients. A large US primary care study found that transgender people were screened at far lower rates for cervical (56% v 72%), breast (33% v 65%) and colorectal cancer (55% v 70%) than cisgender people.

Similarly, a systematic review reported that trans men were less likely to attend cervical and breast screening, while trans women had lower rates of prostate cancer screening than cisgender men.

These disparities are not simply a matter of personal choice. Administrative systems in many countries still match screening invitations to gender markers rather than anatomy. As a result, some patients are automatically called for irrelevant tests while others are excluded from ones they need.

This can delay early detection and leave treatable conditions undiagnosed. Experts note that such oversights reflect a healthcare model that still operates around a rigid gender binary rather than one based on a person’s medical need and anatomy.

Even when screenings are offered, they can be uncomfortable or traumatic. Procedures such as pelvic or breast exams are often not designed with transgender bodies or experiences in mind.

For example, trans men may still have internal reproductive organs that are associated with the female anatomy, but experience heightened distress or gender dysphoria, a feeling of discomfort or anxiety caused by a mismatch between their gender identity and physical anatomy, during pelvic exams. Research shows that this can make routine care feel invasive or emotionally painful.

Trans women may find breast or prostate examinations distressing or triggering (they can provoke anxiety, fear or memories of past discrimination) if staff are unfamiliar with gender-affirming care, which emphasises respectful communication, consent and understanding of diverse anatomies. In settings where these practices are lacking, patients may fear being judged, misgendered or asked insensitive questions.

Equipment, clinic environments and communication styles are often based on cisgender assumptions, which presume that all patients’ bodies and identities align with the sex they were assigned at birth.

This can heighten anxiety and discomfort, making medical visits feel unsafe. Consequently, many transgender people postpone preventive screenings, reinforcing a cycle in which missed appointments lead to later diagnoses and poorer health outcomes.

“Trans broken arm syndrome”

A particularly common phenomenon in transgender healthcare is known as “trans broken arm syndrome”. The term describes how healthcare professionals sometimes overlook or minimise a transgender person’s immediate medical needs by focusing disproportionately on their gender identity or transition history, even when unrelated to the presenting issue.

For instance, a transgender person might attend an emergency department with a broken arm but find that clinicians focus on hormone therapy or surgical history rather than the injury, leading to misdiagnosis, delays in treatment or inappropriate care.

The cost of fear

The combined impact of misgendering, exclusion from essential screenings and “trans broken arm syndrome” often drives transgender people to avoid healthcare altogether. Many delay seeking medical help because they expect to be disrespected or mistreated.

The fear and anticipation of stigma can become so overwhelming that it outweighs the need for care, leading to worsening physical and mental health over time.

That so many transgender people continue to endure preventable suffering because they fear discrimination or practices that make them feel uncomfortable because of a lack of training reveals a persistent problem within healthcare systems. These disparities are not only the result of individual prejudice but also of structural inequities in medical education, screening protocols and institutional design.

Without a cultural shift towards inclusion and respect, transgender people will continue to face inequities in access to healthcare, with potentially serious consequences for their physical and mental wellbeing.

Stephanie Horsted 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. From misgendering to missed diagnoses: the barriers that can keep trans people from safe healthcare – https://theconversation.com/from-misgendering-to-missed-diagnoses-the-barriers-that-can-keep-trans-people-from-safe-healthcare-269427

November 14, 2025

Ukraine’s farms once fed billions but now its soil is starving

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Mark Sutton, Honorary Professor in the School of Geosciences, University of Edinburgh

Research suggests soil in Ukraine is degrading, affecting food production. Oleksandr Filatov/Shutterstock

For decades, Ukraine was known as the breadbasket of the world. Before the full-scale Russian invasion in 2022, it ranked among the top global producers and exporters of sunflower oil, maize and wheat. These helped feed more than 400 million people worldwide.

But beyond the news about grain blockades lies a deeper, slower-moving crisis: the depletion of the very nutrients that make Ukraine’s fertile black soil so productive.

While the ongoing war has focused global attention on Ukraine’s food supply chains, far less is known about the sustainability of the agricultural systems that underpin them.

Ukraine’s soil may no longer be able to sustain the country’s role as one of the major food producers without urgent action. And this could have consequences that stretch far beyond its borders.

In our research, we have examined nutrient management in Ukrainian agriculture over the past 40 years and found a dramatic reversal of nutrient levels.

During the Soviet era, Ukraine’s farmland was excessively fertilised. Nutrients such as nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium were applied at levels far beyond what crops could absorb. This led to pollution of the air and water.

But since independence in 1991, the pendulum has swung in the opposite direction. Fertiliser use, especially phosphorus and potassium, plummeted as imports fell, livestock numbers declined (reducing manure availability) and supply chains collapsed.

By 2021, just before the full-scale invasion, Ukrainian soil was already showing signs of strain. Farmers were adding much less phosphorus and potassium than the crops were taking up, around 40–50% less phosphorus and 25% less potassium, and the soil’s organic matter had dropped by almost 9% since independence.

In many regions, farmers applied too much nitrogen, but often too little phosphorus and potassium to maintain long-term fertility. Moreover, although livestock numbers have declined significantly over the past decades, our analysis shows that about 90% of the manure still produced is wasted. This is equivalent to roughly US$2.2 billion (£1.6 billion) in fertiliser value each year.

These nutrient imbalances are not just a national issue. They threaten Ukraine’s long-term agricultural productivity and, by extension, the global food supply that depends on it.

Ukraine’s farmers face multiple challenges.

The war has sharply intensified the problem. Russia’s invasion has disrupted fertiliser supply chains and damaged storage facilities. Fertiliser prices have soared. Many farmers deliberately applied less fertiliser in 2022-2023 to reduce financial risks, knowing that their harvests could be destroyed, stolen or left unsold due to blocked export routes.

Our new research shows alarming trends across the country. In 2023, harvested crops took up to 30% more nitrogen, 80% more phosphorus and 70% more potassium from the soil than they received through fertilisation, soil microbes and from the air (including what comes down in rain and what settles onto the ground from the air).

If these trends continue, Ukraine’s famously fertile soil could face lasting degradation, threatening the country’s capacity to recover and supply global food markets once peace returns.

Rebuilding soil fertility

Some solutions exist and many are feasible even during wartime. Our research team has developed a plan for Ukrainian farmers that could quickly make a difference. These measures could substantially improve nutrient use efficiency and reduce wasted nutrients, keeping farms productive and profitable, while reducing soil degradation and environmental pollution.

These proposed solutions include:

Precision fertilisation – applying fertilisers at the right time, place and amount to match crop needs efficiently
Enhanced manure use – setting up local systems to collect surplus manure and redistribute it to other farms, reducing dependence on (imported) synthetic fertilisers
Improved fertiliser use – applying enhanced-efficiency fertilisers that release nutrients slowly, reducing losses to air and water
Planting legumes (such as peas or soybeans) – including these in crop rotations, improves soil health while adding nitrogen naturally

Some of these actions require investment, such as better facilities for storage, treatment and better application of manure to fields, but many can be rolled out, at least partially, without too much extra funding.

Ukraine’s recovery fund, backed by the World Bank to help Ukraine after the war ends, includes support for agriculture, and this could play a key role here.

Why it matters beyond Ukraine

Ukraine’s nutrient crisis is a warning for the world. Intensive, unbalanced farming, whether through overuse, under use or misuse of fertilisers, is unsustainable. Nutrient mismanagement contributes to both food insecurity and environmental pollution.

Our research is part of the forthcoming International Nitrogen Assessment, which highlights the need for effective global nitrogen management and showcases practical options to maximise the multiple benefits of better nitrogen use – improved food security, climate resilience, and water and air quality.

In the rush to ensure cheap food and stable exports, we must not overlook the foundations of long-term agricultural productivity: healthy, fertile soils.

Supporting Ukraine’s farmers offers a chance not only to rebuild a nation but also to change global agriculture to help create a more resilient, sustainable future.

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Prof. Mark Sutton works for the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, based at its Edinburgh Research Station. He is an honorary professor at the University of Edinburgh, School of Geosciences. He receives funding from UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) through its Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF), the UK Department for Environment and Rural Affairs (Defra), the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the Global Environment Facility (GEF). He is Director of the International Nitrogen Management System (INMS) funded by GEF/UNEP, and of the GCRF South Asian Nitrogen Hub. He is co-chair of the UNECE Task Force on Reactive Nitrogen (TFRN) and of the Global Partnership on Nutrient Management (GPNM) which is convened by UNEP.

Sergiy Medinets receives funding from UKRI, Defra, DAERA, British Academy, UNEP, GEF, UNDP and EU

– ref. Ukraine’s farms once fed billions but now its soil is starving – https://theconversation.com/ukraines-farms-once-fed-billions-but-now-its-soil-is-starving-269147

November 14, 2025

Ukraine: battered by bombing and scarred by corruption

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Jonathan Este, Senior International Affairs Editor, Associate Editor, The Conversation

This newsletter was first published in The Conversation UK’s World Affairs Briefing email. Sign up to receive weekly analysis of the latest developments in international relations, direct to your inbox.

Nightly, for months now, Ukraine’s cities have been pounded by relentless aerial attacks. In addition to its grinding and attritional ground offensives in the east and south of the country, since early summer, the Russian military has greatly expanded its air offensive against centres of population, looking to collapse morale and undermine the Ukrainian people’s will to fight on.

And as winter approaches, so those aerial bombardments have targeted Ukraine’s power infrastructure.

Repeatedly in recent weeks, whole cities have been plunged into cold darkness as power plants, transmission lines and regional and local substations are damaged or destroyed. Rolling power outages are now common, reportedly lasting up to 14 hours in some cases.

So the latest political scandal to hit the government of Volodymyr Zelensky could hardly have come at a worse time for his country. And to make matters worse, it revolves around Ukraine’s energy industry.

Ukraine’s anti-corruption agencies this week released the findings of Operation Midas, an 18-month probe into Energoatom, the state-owned operator of all of Ukraine’s nuclear power plants, investigating allegations of bribes and kickbacks said to amount to US$100 million (£76 million). Raids were carried out around the country and seven people have been arrested.

What makes this so dangerous for Zelensky is that one of the people named in the probe is a former business partner of his. Businessman Timur Mindich was the co-owner, with Zelensky, of Kvartal 95 Studio – the platform on which the Ukrainian president made his name as a comedian before he entered politics (ironically, under the circumstances, as an anti-corruption candidate).

Mindich is reported to have left the country, but he is said to have connections to several senior government ministers. The scandal risks tainting the already embattled Zelensky government by association.

What’s worse, as Stefan Wolff and Tetyana Malyarenko explain, is that only a few months before this scandal exploded, Zelensky tried to bring Ukraine’s independent anti-corruption agencies under the direct control of his government. He backed down in the face of huge demonstrations, but this latest corruption scandal is likely to weaken him further.

He has already lost his justice minister, German Galushchenko, and energy minister, Svitlana Hrynchuk. And, as Wolff and Malyarenko point out, the last thing Zelensky needs while his European allies debate how to raise desperately needed funds to keep fighting is a whiff of corruption surrounding his administration.

Having spent the day debating how to raise the huge amounts of money Ukraine will need in 2026, it appears that the EU is closing in on a preferred option. The European Commission considered two main options. One plan is for either the EU to borrow €140 billion (£124 billion) using its long-term budget as collateral. Another is to use the frozen Russian assets as collateral for a loan to Ukraine, to be repaid after the war if Russia pays reparations to Kyiv.

An idea floated by Norwegian economists to use Norway’s €1.8 trillion sovereign wealth fund to guarantee the loan was quickly scotched by the country’s finance minister, former Nato secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg, who said that while Norway was happy to contribute, it could not be responsible for the entire amount.

The next move will be to assuage the fears of Belgium, which is where the assets are held by securities depository Euroclear, that a successful legal challenge by Russia could leave it liable for repayment. The Kremlin has already made noises to this effect.

Veronika Hinman, the deputy director of the University of Portsmouth’s military education team, believes that while the massive injection of funds will certainly enable Ukraine to continue to fight, it’s unlikely to be decisive. “It cannot deliver the manpower, weapons or morale,” she writes.

Hinman describes the fairly dire situation on the battlefield, where Russia is slowly but surely beating back the defenders outside key cities such as Pokrovsk and Huliaipole. The invaders continue to press for a breakthrough in these strategically important towns, which would allow them to make a push into central Ukraine.

ISW map showing the state of the conflict in Ukraine, November 11 2025. — The state of the conflict in Ukraine, November 11 2025.
Institute for the Study of War

Russia has been unsuccessfully trying to capture both Pokrovsk and Huliaipole for many months (its troops briefly entered Huliaipole on March 5 2022, only a couple of weeks after the invasion started, and were pushed back). But the fight appears to be increasingly lopsided, writes Hinman. Russia may have lost more than a million troops – killed or injured – but it has huge reserves and its retooled war economy appears to be bearing up reasonably well, despite US sanctions.

So the need for more money from the EU grows ever more critical, Hinman writes. But she worries that “in the end, this latest wave of aid may buy Ukraine time – but it’s unlikely to deliver victory”.

Trump: lawfare and diplomacy

In the US, meanwhile, blows were struck in a different kind of war as a Florida prosecutor issued subpoenas to a range of officials that the US president believes are part of the “deep-state” opposition to his presidency.

When you look at the targets of these subpoenas, which include former CIA director John Brennan, former FBI counterintelligence official Peter Strzok, former FBI attorney Lisa Page and former director of national intelligence James Clapper, the thinking becomes clear. All of them were involved in the federal investigation into alleged links between Russian intelligence and Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.

As we know, under instruction from Trump, the Justice Department has already gone after several of the president’s enemies, including former FBI director James Comey, former national security adviser John Bolton and New York attorney general Letitia James.

It’s all part of what has become known as the “grand conspiracy”, writes Robert Dover, an expert in intelligence from the University of Hull. And it appears as if the Trump administration is gearing up for some serious lawfare.

As Dover observes, whether or not these investigations actually end up with anyone facing court is, while not immaterial, not the whole point of the exercise. In the US, these investigations can take a huge toll on their targets: emotionally, financially and health-wise.

Dover points to a new unit in the Department of Justice, the “weaponization working group”, whose director, Ed Martin, said his job was to expose and discredit people he believes to working against the president: “If they can be charged, we’ll charge them. But if they can’t be charged, we will name them.” This, writes Dover, is a complete inversion of the traditional approach of: “charge crimes, not people”.

It feels like another step on the road to authoritarian government, he observes.

The incumbent of the Oval Office, meanwhile, received the (relatively) new leader of Syria, Ahmed al-Sharaa, this week. He’s the first Syrian leader ever to visit the White House and the visit represents a considerable rise to power and respectability for someone who, until a year ago, was leading an insurgent group against Syria’s Assad regime. His Hayat Tahrir al-Sham was, until July, proscribed by the US as a terrorist organisation.

But, as William Plowright, a Syria expert from Durham University, points out, as far back as 2015, former CIA director David Petraeus suggested that the US should consider working with the organisation which later became al-Sharaa’s group, Jabhat al-Nusra, against Islamic State.

As Plowright observes, there are upsides for both Trump and al-Sharaa in striking up a working relationship, not least of which is that it would deprive Iran of its closest ally in the region.

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– ref. Ukraine: battered by bombing and scarred by corruption – https://theconversation.com/ukraine-battered-by-bombing-and-scarred-by-corruption-269755

November 14, 2025

Commerce, résilience, durabilité : la recette du G20 pour l’Afrique

Source: The Conversation – in French – By Wandile Sihlobo, Senior Fellow, Department of Agricultural Economics, Stellenbosch University

Le groupe de travail sur les systèmes alimentaires et agricoles durables du Business 20, un groupe consultatif du G20, a approuvé trois principes qui, selon lui, contribueront à la mise en place de systèmes alimentaires et d’une agriculture durables. Ces principes sont l’augmentation des échanges commerciaux, la résilience des chaînes d’approvisionnement et les pratiques agricoles durables.

L’économiste agricole Wandile Sihlobo explique ces trois principes et comment les pays africains peuvent les mettre à profit.

Qu’est-ce que la sécurité alimentaire mondiale ? En quoi diffère-t-elle de la pauvreté alimentaire ?

La sécurité alimentaire mondiale est un concept plus large. Elle vise à relever les défis liés à l’accès à la nourriture, à la nutrition, à la durabilité et à l’accessibilité financière. Elle cherche aussi à renforcer la coopération entre les pays – notamment les membres du G20 – pour réduire la pauvreté, à la fois dans le monde, au niveau national et au sein des ménages.

Pour atteindre cet objectif, chaque pays doit adapter ses politiques agricoles. Cela passe par une hausse de la production, une approche respectueuse de l’environnement et une réduction des obstacles au commerce.

Les pays qui ne produisent pas assez doivent pouvoir importer de la nourriture à un coût abordable. Cela implique de faciliter la logistique mondiale, de supprimer certains droits de douane et de lever, dans certains cas, les interdictions d’exportation. En 2023, par exemple, l’Inde a interdit l’exportation du riz non basmati, ce qui a provoqué une hausse des prix mondiaux.

C’est pour cette raison que je défends l’approche consistant à « assurer la sécurité alimentaire grâce au commerce ». Dans un monde où les échanges sont souvent entravés, cette approche permet de réduire les coûts et d’améliorer le niveau de vie, notamment dans les régions les plus pauvres principalement le Moyen-Orient et l’Asie.

Comment l’augmentation des échanges commerciaux, la résilience des chaînes d’approvisionnement et les pratiques agricoles durables peuvent-elles renforcer la sécurité alimentaire ?

Ces leviers sont au cœur de la réduction des coûts. Si les obstacles au commerce (tarifs douaniers, barrières non tarifaires ou interdictions d’exportation) sont allégés, il devient plus facile et moins cher d’acheminer les denrées des zones de production vers les zones de consommation à un prix abordable.

Des chaînes d’approvisionnement résilientes signifient également que les denrées alimentaires peuvent être produites, transformées et acheminées vers les points de consommation avec moins d’obstacles, même en cas de catastrophes naturelles et de conflits.

Quant aux pratiques agricoles durables, elles sont essentielles au système alimentaire mondial. Cela ne signifie pas qu’il faut abandonner les semences améliorées, la recherche génétique ou les intrants chimiques. Il s’agit principalement de mieux les utiliser.

J’ai remarqué une tendance inquiétante à l’activisme qui vise à éliminer les intrants agricoles, une voie qui conduirait à une baisse de la productivité et de la production agricoles, et finalement à une aggravation de la faim. La clé réside dans une utilisation sûre et optimale de ces intrants.

Lors des récentes manifestations agricoles dans l’Union européenne, l’approche réglementaire de l’UE en matière de pratiques agricoles durables a été l’un des principaux risques soulevés par les agriculteurs. Ils ont cité le Pacte vert pour l’Europe, qui vise à accélérer la réduction de l’utilisation d’intrants tels que les pesticides, les engrais et certains autres produits chimiques, qui sont essentiels à l’augmentation de la production.

À mon avis, le G20 devrait se prémunir contre les initiatives militantes qui mettent en danger la sécurité alimentaire mondiale.

Quelles politiques spécifiques les pays, en particulier les nations africaines, devraient-ils mettre en place pour garantir le succès de ces principes ?

L’Afrique du Sud et l’Union africaine, qui sont toutes deux membres du G20, devraient promouvoir trois grandes interventions dans le domaine de l’agriculture afin de mettre en œuvre les trois principes du G20 et de stimuler la production alimentaire au profit du continent africain.

1. Agriculture intelligente face au climat

Tout d’abord, il convient d’appeler fermement au partage des connaissances sur les pratiques agricoles intelligentes face au climat. Il s’agit de nouvelles innovations et méthodes agricoles qui minimisent les dommages causés aux cultures par les catastrophes climatiques telles que la sécheresse et les vagues de chaleur. Cela est important car l’Afrique est très vulnérable aux catastrophes naturelles.

Pour que l’agriculture africaine puisse se développer, les gouvernements doivent mettre en place des politiques coordonnées sur la manière de répondre aux catastrophes. Ces réponses doivent inclure tout ce dont les pays africains ont besoin pour atténuer les catastrophes climatiques, s’adapter au changement climatique et se remettre rapidement lorsque des catastrophes surviennent.

2. Réforme commerciale

Deuxièmement, l’Afrique doit faire pression pour une réforme du système commercial mondial et améliorer la sécurité alimentaire en Afrique grâce au commerce. L’Afrique du Sud bénéficie déjà d’un meilleur accès au commerce agricole avec plusieurs économies du G20 grâce à des droits de douane réduits et à un accès en franchise de droits.

Tous les membres du G20 ont intérêt à défendre un commerce ouvert entre les nations. Cela permet d’acheter et de vendre des produits agricoles à moindre coût. Ce qui est essentiel dans un contexte mondial où certains pays adoptent une attitude plus conflictuelle en matière de commerce.

Les pays africains dont l’agriculture est moins productive, avec des rendements généralement faibles ou médiocres, pourraient ne pas bénéficier autant, à court terme, d’un commerce ouvert. Ils en tireront toutefois profit à long terme.

3. Améliorer l’accès aux engrais

Troisièmement, l’Afrique doit continuer à prioriser la production et le commerce des engrais. Dans la plupart des pays d’Afrique subsaharienne, l’accès et l’usage des engrais restent faibles. Or, ils sont essentiels pour accroître la production et réduire l’insécurité alimentaire. L’accès à des financements abordables est également un défi pour l’agriculture africaine.

Il est donc essentiel de relier les discussions sur les engrais aux investissements dans les industries de réseau telles que les routes et les ports. Disposer d’engrais est une chose, mais leur acheminement vers les zones agricoles est difficile dans certains pays et augmente les coûts pour les agriculteurs. Dans ce cadre, le G20 devrait encourager la production locale.

La production d’engrais sur le continent atténuerait l’impact négatif des chocs mondiaux sur les prix. Elle permettrait également aux pays africains les plus vulnérables d’acheter et de distribuer des engrais à un prix abordable.

Comment concilier productivité agricole et réduction de l’impact climatique ?

Nous devons utiliser la technologie pour nous adapter au changement climatique plutôt que de diaboliser l’utilisation des produits agrochimiques et la sélection des semences, qui est certainement une tendance à la hausse dans certaines régions d’Afrique du Sud. Si nous utilisons des variétés de semences à haut rendement, des engrais et des produits agrochimiques pour lutter contre les maladies, nous pouvons alors cultiver une superficie relativement plus petite et compter sur un rendement suffisant.

Mais si nous réduisons considérablement ces intrants, nous dépendons davantage de l’expansion de la superficie que nous cultivons. Cultiver plus de terres signifie nuire à l’environnement. L’accent devrait être mis sur l’utilisation optimale et sûre des intrants agricoles afin d’améliorer la production alimentaire. C’est la clé pour parvenir à la sécurité alimentaire mondiale.

Le G20 a un rôle à jouer pour garantir que nous nous dirigeons vers un monde meilleur. Les principes agricoles évoqués ici offrent une feuille de route concrète pour construire un monde meilleur avec plus de sécurité alimentaire.

Wandile Sihlobo is the Chief Economist of the Agricultural Business Chamber of South Africa (Agbiz) and a member of the Presidential Economic Advisory Council (PEAC).

– ref. Commerce, résilience, durabilité : la recette du G20 pour l’Afrique – https://theconversation.com/commerce-resilience-durabilite-la-recette-du-g20-pour-lafrique-269627

November 13, 2025

NASA goes on an ESCAPADE – twin small, low-cost orbiters will examine Mars’ atmosphere

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Christopher Carr, Assistant Professor of Aerospace Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology

This close-up illustration shows what one of the twin ESCAPADE spacecraft will look like conducting its science operations. James Rattray/Rocket Lab USA/Goddard Space Flight Center

Envision a time when hundreds of spacecraft are exploring the solar system and beyond. That’s the future that NASA’s ESCAPADE, or Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers, mission will help unleash: one where small, low-cost spacecraft enable researchers to learn rapidly, iterate, and advance technology and science.

The ESCAPADE mission launched on Nov. 13, 2025 on a Blue Origin New Glenn rocket, sending two small orbiters to Mars to study its atmosphere. As aerospace engineers, we’re excited about this mission because not only will it do great science while advancing the deep space capabilities of small spacecraft, but it also will travel to the red planet on an innovative new trajectory.

The ESCAPADE mission is actually two spacecraft instead of one. Two identical spacecraft will take simultaneous measurements, resulting in better science. These spacecraft are smaller than those used in the past, each about the size of a copy machine, partly enabled by an ongoing miniaturization trend in the space industry. Doing more with less is very important for space exploration, because it typically takes most of the mass of a spacecraft simply to transport it where you want it to go.

A patch with a drawing of two spacecraft, one behind the other, on a red background and the ESCAPADE mission title. — The ESCAPADE mission logo shows the twin orbiters.
TRAX International/Kristen Perrin

Having two spacecraft also acts as an insurance policy in case one of them doesn’t work as planned. Even if one completely fails, researchers can still do science with a single working spacecraft. This redundancy enables each spacecraft to be built more affordably than in the past, because the copies allow for more acceptance of risk.

Studying Mars’ history

Long before the ESCAPADE twin spacecraft Blue and Gold were ready to go to space – billions of years ago, to be more precise – Mars had a much thicker atmosphere than it does now. This atmosphere would have enabled liquids to flow on its surface, creating the channels and gullies that scientists can still observe today.

But where did the bulk of this atmosphere go? Its loss turned Mars into the cold and dry world it is today, with a surface air pressure less than 1% of Earth’s.

Mars also once had a magnetic field, like Earth’s, that helped to shield its atmosphere. That atmosphere and magnetic field would have been critical to any life that might have existed on early Mars.

A view of Mars' crater-flecked surface from above. — Today, Mars’ atmosphere is very thin. Billions of years ago, it was much thicker.
©UAESA/MBRSC/HopeMarsMission/EXI/AndreaLuck, CC BY-ND

ESCAPADE will measure remnants of this magnetic field that have been preserved by ancient rock and study the flow and energy of Mars’ atmosphere and how it interacts with the solar wind, the stream of particles that the sun emits along with light. These measurements will help to reveal where the atmosphere went and how quickly Mars is still losing it today.

Weathering space on a budget

Space is not a friendly place. Most of it is a vacuum – that is, mostly empty, without the gas molecules that create pressure and allow you to breathe or transfer heat. These molecules keep things from getting too hot or too cold. In space, with no pressure, a spacecraft can easily get too hot or too cold, depending on whether it is in sunlight or in shadow.

In addition, the Sun and other, farther astronomical objects emit radiation that living things do not experience on Earth. Earth’s magnetic field protects you from the worst of this radiation. So when humans or our robotic representatives leave the Earth, our spacecraft must survive in this extreme environment not present on Earth.

ESCAPADE will overcome these challenges with a shoestring budget totaling US$80 million. That is a lot of money, but for a mission to another planet it is inexpensive. It has kept costs low by leveraging commercial technologies for deep space exploration, which is now possible because of prior investments in fundamental research.

For example, the GRAIL mission, launched in 2011, previously used two spacecraft, Ebb and Flow, to map the Moon’s gravity fields. ESCAPADE takes this concept to another world, Mars, and costs a fraction as much as GRAIL.

Led by Rob Lillis of UC Berkeley’s Space Sciences Laboratory, this collaboration between spacecraft builders Rocket Lab, trajectory specialists Advanced Space LLC and launch provider Blue Origin – all commercial partners funded by NASA – aims to show that deep space exploration is now faster, more agile and more affordable than ever before.

NASA’s ESCAPADE represents a partnership between a university, commercial companies and the government.

How will ESCAPADE get to Mars?

ESCAPADE will also use a new trajectory to get to Mars. Imagine being an archer in the Olympics. To hit a bull’s-eye, you have to shoot an arrow through a 15-inch – 40-centimeter – circle from a distance of 300 feet, or 90 meters. Now imagine the bull’s-eye represents Mars. To hit it from Earth, you would have to shoot an arrow through the same 15-inch bull’s-eye at a distance of over 13 miles, or 22 kilometers. You would also have to shoot the arrow in a curved path so that it goes around the Sun.

Not only that, but Mars won’t be at the bull’s-eye at the time you shoot the arrow. You must shoot for the spot that Mars will be in 10 months from now. This is the problem that the ESCAPADE mission designers faced. What is amazing is that the physical laws and forces of nature are so predictable that this was not even the hardest problem to solve for the ESCAPADE mission.

It takes energy to get from one place to another. To go from Earth to Mars, a spacecraft has to carry the energy it needs, in the form of rocket fuel, much like gasoline in a car. As a result, a high percentage of the total launch mass has to be fuel for the trip.

When going to Mars orbit from Earth orbit, as much as 80% to 85% of the spacecraft mass has to be propellant, which means not much mass is dedicated to the part of the spacecraft that does all the experiments. This issue makes it important to pack as much capability into the rest of the spacecraft as possible. For ESCAPADE, the propellant is only about 65% of the spacecraft’s mass.

ESCAPADE’s route is particularly fuel-efficient. First, Blue and Gold will go to the L2 Lagrange point, one of five places where gravitational forces of the Sun and Earth cancel out. Then, after about a year, during which they will collect data monitoring the Sun, they will fly by the Earth, using its gravitational field to get a boost. This way, they will arrive at Mars in about 10 more months.

This new approach has another advantage beyond needing to carry less fuel: Trips from Earth to Mars are typically favorable to save fuel about every 26 months due to the two planets’ relative positions. However, this new trajectory makes the departure time more flexible. Future cargo and human missions could use a similar trajectory to have more frequent and less time-constrained trips to Mars.

ESCAPADE is a testament to a new era in spaceflight. For a new generation of scientists and engineers, ESCAPADE is not just a mission – it is a blueprint for a new collaborative era of exploration and discovery.

This article was updated on Nov. 13, 2025 to reflect the ESCAPADE launch’s date and success.

Christopher E. Carr is part of the science team for the Rocket Lab Mission to Venus (funding from Schmidt Sciences and NASA). More information is available at https://www.morningstarmissions.space/rocketlabmissiontovenus

Glenn Lightsey does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. NASA goes on an ESCAPADE – twin small, low-cost orbiters will examine Mars’ atmosphere – https://theconversation.com/nasa-goes-on-an-escapade-twin-small-low-cost-orbiters-will-examine-mars-atmosphere-269321

November 13, 2025

How the Plymouth Pilgrims took over Thanksgiving – and who history left behind

Source: The Conversation – USA (3) – By Thomas Tweed, Professor Emeritus of American Studies and History, University of Notre Dame

‘The First Thanksgiving, 1621,’ by Jean L. G. Ferris. Library of Congress

Nine in 10 Americans gather around a table to share food on Thanksgiving. At this polarizing moment, anything that promises to bring Americans together warrants our attention.

But as a historian of religion, I feel obliged to recount how popular interpretations of Thanksgiving also have pulled us apart.

Communal rituals of giving thanks have a longer history in North America, and it was only around the turn of the 20th century that most people in the U.S. came to associate Thanksgiving with Plymouth “Pilgrims” and generic “Indians” sharing a historic meal.

The emphasis on the Pilgrims’ 1620 landing and 1621 feast erased a great deal of religious history and narrowed conceptions of who belongs in America – at times excluding groups such as Native Americans, Catholics and Jews.

Farming faiths and harvest festivals

The usual Thanksgiving depiction overlooks Indigenous rituals that give thanks, including harvest festivals.

The Wampanoag, who shared food with the Pilgrims in 1621, continue to celebrate the cranberry harvest, and similar feasts were held long before Columbus sailed and Pilgrims landed.

As I note in my 2025 book, “Religion in the Lands That Became America,” for instance, celebrants gathered for a communal feast in the late 11th century in the 50-acre plaza of Cahokia. That Native city, across the river from present-day St. Louis, was the largest population center north of Mexico before the American Revolution.

An overhead view of a grassy green area with several raised mounds. — The St. Louis, Mo., skyline is seen beyond Monks Mound at Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site in Collinsville, Ill., on July 11, 2019.
Daniel Acker for The Washington Post via Getty Images

Cahokians and their neighbors came in late summer or early autumn to give deities thanks, smoke ritual tobacco and eat special food – not corn, their dietary staple, but symbolically significant animals such as white swans and white-tailed deer. So, those Cahokians attended a thanks-giving feast five centuries before the Pilgrims’ harvest-time meal.

‘Days of Thanksgiving’

The usual depiction also de-emphasizes the tradition of officials announcing special “Days of Thanksgiving,” a practice familiar to the Pilgrims and their descendants.

The Pilgrims, who settled in what is now Plymouth, Massachusetts, were separatist Puritans who had denounced the Catholic elements that remained in the Protestant Church of England. They first sought to form their own “purified” church and community in Holland. After about 12 years, many of them moved again, crossing the Atlantic in 1620. The Pilgrims’ colony southeast of Boston was gradually absorbed into Massachusetts Bay Colony, founded in 1630 by a larger group of Puritans who did not split from England’s official church.

As historians have noted, Puritan ministers in Massachusetts’ state-sanctioned Congregational Church didn’t just speak on Sundays. Now and then they also gave special thanksgiving sermons, which expressed gratitude for what the community considered divine interventions, from military victory to epidemic relief.

The practice continued and spread. During the American Revolution, for instance, the Continental Congress declared a Day of Thanksgiving to commemorate the victory at Saratoga in 1777. President James Madison announced Days of Thanksgiving during the War of 1812. Leaders of the United States and the Confederate states did the same during the Civil War.

This tradition influenced Americans such as Sarah Hale, who called for a national Thanksgiving holiday. A magazine editor and poet best known for “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” she successfully pitched the idea to Abraham Lincoln in 1863.

Harvest feast of 1621

Many Americans’ view of “The First Thanksgiving” resembles the scene depicted in a Jean Ferris painting by that name. Finished around 1915, it is similar to another popular image painted around the same time, Jennie Augusta Brownscombe’s “The First Thanksgiving at Plymouth.”

A painting in muted colors of a small group of people in plain clothing seated around a table outside, with a log cabin in the background. — ‘The First Thanksgiving at Plymouth’ by Jennie A. Brownscombe.
Stedelijk Museum De Lakenhal/Wikimedia Commons

Both images distort the historical context and misrepresent Indigenous attendees from the nearby Wampanoag Confederacy. The Native leaders wear headdresses from Plains tribes, and there are too few Indigenous attendees.

Only one eyewitness account survives: a 1621 letter from the Pilgrim Edward Winslow. He reported that the Wampanoag’s leader, Massasoit, brought 90 men. That means, some historians suggest, the shared meal was as much a diplomatic event marking an alliance as an agricultural feast celebrating a harvest.

Ferris’ painting also implies that the English provided the food. Plymouth residents brought “fowl,” as Winslow recalled – probably wild turkey – but the Wampanoag added five killed deer. Even the harvest of “Indian corn” depended on Native aid. Tisquantum or Squanto, the lone survivor of the village that the Pilgrims called Plymouth, had offered lifesaving advice about planting as well as diplomacy.

The image’s cheerful scene also obscures how death had destabilized the area. The Pilgrims lost almost half their group to famine or exposure that first winter. After earlier European contact, however, even larger numbers of the Wampanoag had died in a regional epidemic that raged between 1616-1619. That’s why the Pilgrims found Squanto’s village abandoned, and why both communities were open to the alliance he brokered.

Pilgrims’ primacy

The Pilgrims were latecomers to the Thanksgiving table. Lincoln’s 1863 proclamation, published in Harper’s Monthly, mentioned “the blessing of fruitful fields,” but not the Pilgrims. Nor were Pilgrims depicted in the magazine’s illustrated follow-up. The page showed town and country, as well as emancipated slaves, celebrating the feast day by praying at “the Union altar.” For years before and after the proclamation, in fact, many Southerners resisted Thanksgiving, which they saw as a Northern, abolitionist holiday.

Several small black-and-white illustrations around a larger one of a woman with long hair and a star headdress kneeling in prayer. — This ‘Thanksgiving Day’ illustration, made by cartoonist Thomas Nast, commemorated its first celebration as a U.S. holiday.
Syracuse University Art Museum

The Pilgrims’ absence makes sense, since they were not the first Europeans to land on North America’s eastern coast – or to give thanks there. Spanish Catholics had founded St. Augustine in 1565. According to an eyewitness account, the Spanish leader asked a priest to celebrate Mass on Sept. 8, 1565, which Native Americans attended, and “ordered that the Indians be fed.”

Two decades later, an English group had tried and failed to establish a colony on Roanoke Island, North Carolina – including a Jewish engineer. The English had more success when they settled Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607. A commander leading a new group to Virginia was instructed to mark “a day of Thanksgiving to Almighty God” in 1619, two years before the Plymouth meal.

But over the years, Plymouth’s Pilgrims still moved slowly toward the center of the national holiday – and America’s founding narrative.

In 1769, Plymouth residents promoted their town by organizing a “Forefathers’ Day.” In 1820 the Protestant politician Daniel Webster gave a speech commemorating the bicentennial of the landing at Plymouth Rock and praising the Pilgrims’ arrival as “the first footsteps of civilized man” in the wilderness. Then in an 1841 volume, “Chronicles of the Pilgrim Fathers,” a Boston minister reprinted the 1621 eyewitness account and described the shared harvest meal as “the first Thanksgiving.”

Rising immigration

Between 1880 and 1920, the Pilgrims emerged as the central characters in national narratives about both Thanksgiving Day and America’s origin. It was no coincidence that these years were the peak of immigration to the U.S., and many Americans saw the new immigrants as inferior to those who had landed at Plymouth Rock.

An illustration in faded colors of a group of men and women standing, a bit disoriented, on a hill beside the ocean. — A late-1800s depiction of the Plymouth landing, published by the printmaking business Currier and Ives.
Mabel Brady Garvan Collection/Yale University Art Gallery

Irish Catholics already had a presence in Boston when the “Pilgrim Fathers” volume appeared in 1841, and more came after the Irish potato famine later that decade. Boston’s foreign-born population increased further as poverty and politics pushed Italian Catholics and Russian Jews to seek a better life in America.

The same was happening in many northern cities, and some Protestants were alarmed. In an 1885 bestseller called “Our Country,” a Congregational Church minister warned that “the glory is departing from many a New England village, because men, alien in blood, in religion, and in civilization, are taking possession of homes in which were once reared the descendants of the Pilgrims.”

During the 300th anniversary of the Pilgrims’ landing and harvest meal, celebrated in 1920 and 1921, the federal government issued commemorative stamps and coins. Officials staged pageants, and politicians gave speeches. About 30,000 people gathered in Plymouth, for instance, to hear President Warren Harding and Vice President Calvin Coolidge praise the “Pilgrim Spirit.”

Soon nativist worries about the newcomers, especially Catholics and Jews, led Coolidge to sign the Immigration Act of 1924, which would largely close America’s borders for four decades.

Americans kept telling the Pilgrim story after U.S. immigration policy became more welcoming in 1965, and many will tell it again next year as we celebrate the nation’s 250th anniversary. Understood in its full context, it’s a story worth telling. But we might use caution since, as history reminds us, stories about the country’s spiritual past can either bring us together or pull us apart.

Thomas Tweed does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. How the Plymouth Pilgrims took over Thanksgiving – and who history left behind – https://theconversation.com/how-the-plymouth-pilgrims-took-over-thanksgiving-and-who-history-left-behind-267944

November 13, 2025

Renewable energy is reshaping the global economy – new report

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Sam Fankhauser, Professor of Climate Economics and Policy, Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, University of Oxford

World leaders gather for the UN climate summit (Cop30) in Belém, Brazil, amid concerns about the slow progress in cutting global carbon emissions. Ten years into the historic Paris climate agreement, we are off track to meet its core objective, to keep global warming well below 2°C, relative to pre-industrial levels.

Yet there are glimmers of hope, and none more important than the astounding progress on renewable energy. Renewables are now so cheap that the clean energy transition is no longer an economic burden, it is a momentous opportunity.

Climate change campaigners tend to see renewables as an environmental imperative, an effective way of cutting emissions. They are that, of course. But they are also a powerful engine of investment, jobs and growth. They are reshaping the global economy. In my team’s new report, we lay out the evidence.

The first economic dividend of renewables is inclusion. Access to affordable energy remains a critical sustainable development goal, which shapes everything from education to health to women’s empowerment. Distributed renewables – from solar home systems to mini-grids – are our best chance yet of bringing affordable energy to all.

Across Africa, Asia and Latin America, renewable energy entrepreneurs are doing what national grids have struggled to do: reaching remote villages and replacing polluting diesel generators with clean, reliable power.

Because of its modularity, renewable electricity can be built out fast, expanded flexibly and maintained locally. Renewable energy firms are combining these technical advantages with new business models that make renewables more accessible (for example, through pay-as-you-go models) and keep benefits in the local community (for example, by offering energy services like cold storage, phone charging and water pumping, as well as electricity).

Investment, jobs and growth

If inclusion is the first dividend, investment is the second. Every dollar invested in renewables delivers more economic bang than a dollar spent on fossil fuels. The International Monetary Fund estimates that clean energy investments generate about 1.5 times their cost in economic activity, while fossil fuels yield less than one-for-one. Renewables do not just pay back; they pay forward through spending on supply chains and local wages.

The numbers are staggering. Between 2017 and 2022, climate finance flows into the 100 largest developing countries (excluding China) boosted their GDP by a combined US$1.2 trillion (£0.9 trillion) – the equivalent of 2-5% of GDP for most nations. In Brazil, the host of Cop30, renewable investments raised GDP by US$128 billion over those six years, according to our report.

woman in hard hat with clip board standing near hydroelectric dam — A report found that, in South Africa, clean energy jobs pay 16% more on average than all other advertised roles.
bsd studio/Shutterstock

Climate finance flows are still insufficient. To increase them, we need more concessional funding, more risk guarantees and more partnerships between governments, investors and local communities.

In the Dominican Republic, a blend of policy reform, clear incentives and blended finance has helped the country mobilise over US$6.5 billion in clean energy investment and double its renewables capacity in just three years.

The energy transition is often painted as a jobs killer, but the evidence says otherwise. Intergovernmental organisations project that there will be 43 million clean energy jobs by 2050, far outstripping those lost in fossil fuels.

For our report, we took a closer look at the jobs market in South Africa. For 12 months we collected data from job adverts and found a striking fact: clean energy jobs pay 16% more on average than all other advertised roles. For the most part the higher wages reflect the fact that clean energy jobs are high-skilled jobs, which require experience, training and problem-solving skills.

The high skills requirements are a challenge as well as a boon. Taking full advantage of the clean jobs revolution will require proactive skills development, both in the classroom and on the job. But for the young labour forces of many developing countries, the message is clear: renewables are not just a climate strategy, they are a job opportunity.

Perhaps the most underappreciated economic benefit of renewables concerns productivity. Cheap, efficient energy is the lifeblood of industrial growth. Renewable energy is now much cheaper than fossil fuels, particularly when factoring in what is lost when turning energy (say, car fuel) into usable services (propulsion).

We calculated that with a rapid conversion to renewables, energy-sector productivity could double by 2050, compared to both current levels and a fossil fuel future. Since energy is such a ubiquitous input to all other economic activities, this has significant economy-wide benefits. For some developing countries, the GDP boost could be as high as 9-12% – simply from having more efficient energy services.

These productivity gains are not evenly distributed. For once it could be developing countries that benefit most. Industrialised countries grew rich on the back of cheap and abundant energy. In a low-carbon economy, it will be sun-rich developing countries that have the cheapest, most abundant sources of energy. This critical shift in comparative advantage could finally help to narrow the global prosperity gap.

At Cop30, leaders are debating climate targets, finance mechanisms and transition timelines. But they should also recognise this deeper reality: renewables are not a drag on growth but its new engine. In a world anxious about growth and prosperity, the clean energy transition is an economic strategy as much as an environmental one.

The challenge, as our report reminds us, is to share these gains equitably. Without fair benefit-sharing the transition risks repeating the inequities of the fossil fuel era. But get it right, and renewables can power not just cleaner economies, but fairer ones.

This work was supported by grants from SSE plc and the UK Foreign and Development Office under the Climate Compatible Growth programme. .

– ref. Renewable energy is reshaping the global economy – new report – https://theconversation.com/renewable-energy-is-reshaping-the-global-economy-new-report-268676

November 13, 2025

It’s a myth that the Victorians created modern dog breeds – we’ve uncovered their prehistoric roots

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Carly Ameen, Lecturer in Bioarchaeology, University of Exeter

Domestic dogs are among the most diverse mammals on the planet. From the tiny chihuahua to the towering great dane, the flat-faced pug to the long-muzzled borzoi, the sheer range of canine shapes and sizes is staggering.

We often attribute this diversity to a relatively recent phenomenon: the Victorian kennel clubs that first emerged around 200 years ago. These clubs are usually credited with formalising the selective breeding that created the hundreds of modern breeds we recognise today.

But our new research, published in Science, shows that this is only the latest chapter in a much older story. Dogs were already remarkably diverse in their skull size and shape more than 10,000 years ago, long before kennel clubs and pedigrees.

This discovery challenges the idea that directed breeding alone created the physical variety we see in dogs today. Instead, our research found that early dogs had already evolved an extraordinary range of forms soon after domestication – a diversity that has been continually shaped by thousands of years of shared history with humans.

Looking for the first dogs

For decades, archaeologists and geneticists have been trying to answer a deceptively simple question: when did wolves become dogs?

The history of human interaction with wolves is a long one, stretching into the last ice age, perhaps even as far back as 30,000 years ago. But the exact timing of dog domestication is uncertain. What makes dogs particularly special is that they were the first species humans domesticated – well before any plant or livestock. Yet despite decades of research, the first dogs continue to elude us.

Part of the challenge is the similarity between wolves and dogs. Even today, some modern dog breeds closely resemble wolves. This makes tracking their domestication in the archaeological record particularly difficult. By using a technique called geometric morphometrics – a way to map and measure shape variation in three dimensions – we could track subtle changes in shape over time from 3D models of the archaeological skulls.

We analysed 643 skulls of ancient and modern dogs and wolves, spanning 50,000 years from sites mainly across the northern hemisphere to track the emergence and diversification of domestic dogs across time and space.

What we found was striking: the earliest skulls with clearly domestic skull shapes in our dataset date to around 11,000 years ago, from the Mesolithic site of Veretye in Russia.

By this point, dogs had not only diverged in terms of skull shape from wolves but had begun to diversify among themselves. These early dogs were not all alike, but instead exhibited skulls of different sizes and shapes, probably reflecting the influence of local environments, population histories and human preferences.

In fact, some early dogs exhibit skull forms not found in any modern breeds, hinting at lineages and morphologies that may have since vanished. While we don’t see some of the most extreme forms of skull shape that we see today (such as pugs or bull terriers), the variation we see by the Mesolithic is already half the total amount of variation we see in modern breeds.

Photograph of an archaeological canid skull (top) and a modern dog skull (bottom).
C. Ameen, CC BY-SA

This echoes genetic studies that reveal deep splits among early dog populations. By the Neolithic (around 8,000–5,000 years ago), dogs had already formed regionally distinct lineages across Europe, the Near East and Asia. Some of these lineages survive in modern breeds, while others appear to have gone extinct, possibly replaced or diluted through interbreeding and human movements.

Uneven domestication

Our findings complement a growing body of genetic and archaeological evidence suggesting that the domestication of dogs was a protracted and regionally varied process. Ancient DNA research has shown that major dog lineages were already distinct by 11,000 years ago, implying that the domestication process began much earlier.

The exact timing is still debated, with some research pointing to close human-canid relationship from over 30,000 years ago. However, our study found no domesticated dogs among the 17 Late Pleistocene (126,000 to 11,700 years ago) skulls we examined, suggesting it may not reach that far back. Of course, the earliest dogs had to closely resemble wolves, and it’s possible that early dogs retained wolf-like skulls for generations, but for how long remains unknown.

There is still much we don’t know. To deepen our understanding, we need more specimens from the critical window between 25,000 and 11,000 years ago, particularly in underrepresented regions like central and south-west Asia. What this work has revealed, or perhaps reinforced, is the much older story of evolution between humans and dogs that began soon after domestication itself.

Ultimately, dogs are a mirror of human history. Their story is intertwined with ours, shaped by shared migrations, changing environments and evolving societies. As the first domesticated species – and still our most enduring companion – dogs offer a unique window into how humans have shaped the natural world and how the natural world has shaped us in return.

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.

– ref. It’s a myth that the Victorians created modern dog breeds – we’ve uncovered their prehistoric roots – https://theconversation.com/its-a-myth-that-the-victorians-created-modern-dog-breeds-weve-uncovered-their-prehistoric-roots-269534

November 13, 2025

Dormir bien y moverse más: las 24 horas mágicas para niños sanos

Source: The Conversation – (in Spanish) – By Alicia Mª Alonso Martínez, Vicedecana Grado en Ciencias de la Actividad Física y del Deporte / Profesora Titular área de Educación Física y Deportiva Facultad Ciencias de la Salud, Universidad Pública de Navarra

Si alguna vez han visto a una niña de cinco años lanzar un balón con la intensidad de una final del Mundial, ya conocen la magia de las habilidades motrices básicas. Correr, saltar, lanzar o atrapar objetos no son simples juegos, sino los cimientos de la confianza en el parque, del gusto por el movimiento y la actividad física y uno de los factores más decisivos para mantenerse activos al crecer.

Estos cimientos en ocasiones no se establecen con la solidez necesaria, por causas diversas, como demasiado sedentarismo en la escuela, poco tiempo para jugar al aire libre, dificultades de acceso a zonas adecuadas… Por eso es tan importante pensar de manera global en las 24 horas de un día de un niño o niña: cuánto se mueve, cuánto está sentado o cómo duerme, tanto en casa como en la escuela.

Recientemente hemos investigado cómo es posible mejorar las destrezas motrices en conjunción con buenas rutinas de sueño y hábitos que combaten el sedentarismo. Nuestras conclusiones apuntan a beneficios consistentes en las funciones ejecutivas y en la regulación emocional. Es decir, con este enfoque global los niños y las niñas se desarrollan con mayores habilidades físicas, pero también intelectuales y emocionales.

¿Qué nos dice la evidencia?

El análisis de doce estudios con casi 5 000 niños y niñas de entre 4 y 6 años en entornos de educación infantil muestra que los programas que combinan juegos motrices, retos cognitivos sencillos y mensajes para organizar las 24 horas –es decir, más movimiento, menos sedentarismo y sueño de calidad–, producen mejoras sólidas en competencia motriz, especialmente en las destrezas de control de objetos, como lanzar y atrapar una pelota o botar un balón sin que se escape.

En cambio, los avances en resistencia, fuerza o velocidad son más discretos, porque para mejorar la condición física se necesita repetición y progresión a lo largo del tiempo.

Nuestros resultados muestran que para favorecer el desarrollo infantil es clave variar los juegos y actividades, evitando la rutina. Por ejemplo, alternar juegos de cooperación, equilibrio y lanzamiento con nuevas consignas o materiales mantiene la motivación. En cambio, repetir los mismos ejercicios o circuitos durante meses limita el interés y el progreso. Por eso, no es la duración, sino la variedad y calidad de las experiencias lo que impulsa un desarrollo motor y cognitivo real.

Leer más:
Cómo fomentar el juego al aire libre

De la habilidad a la confianza y la participación

Las habilidades con objetos son mucho más que simples ejercicios. Abren la puerta a juegos con pelota como “balón prisionero” o “bomba” y también a la participación en deportes de equipo como el balonmano o el waterpolo. Son clave en espacios donde niños y niñas aprenden no sólo a moverse sino también a compartir, cooperar, competir y disfrutar de la actividad física en grupo.

Cuando un niño se siente motrizmente competente, ocurre algo especial: participa más, se divierte más y busca nuevas oportunidades para repetir esa experiencia positiva. Se crea así un pequeño círculo virtuoso que refuerza la confianza y la motivación: “Sé hacerlo, me gusta, lo repito”. Y lo más importante es que este ciclo puede mantenerse en el tiempo, siempre que la escuela y la familia ofrezcan espacios adecuados para la práctica y el juego.

Movimiento, cognición y las emociones

Desarrollar la competencia motriz va mucho más allá del simple movimiento: implica pensar. No es casualidad que actividades como coordinar el cuerpo, ajustar la fuerza necesaria, esperar turnos o seguir las reglas de un juego requieren discurrir, decidir y autocontrolarse y se vinculan con la mejora de funciones ejecutivas fundamentales como la atención, la memoria de trabajo y el control inhibitorio. Los programas con reglas variables o consignas que obligan a replantear decisiones muestran mejoras visibles en el procesamiento ejecutivo y en el comportamiento en el aula.

En el ámbito emocional sucede algo similar. El juego activo con reglas claras, tiempos de espera y retroalimentación inmediata favorece la autorregulación tanto en la conducta, como en las emociones. Por ejemplo, un niño que aprende a “parar, mirar y tirar” en un juego suele también aprender a “parar, pensar y actuar” en otras situaciones de su vida diaria.

Este vínculo entre desarrollo motriz, cognición y emoción refuerza la importancia de programas integrales que estimulen no solo el movimiento físico, sino también el desarrollo cognitivo y el control emocional desde edades tempranas.

Leer más:
Problemas de sueño y TDAH: ¿cómo se relacionan estos dos trastornos?

Sueño, movimiento y alimentación: pilares del desarrollo

Las guías de comportamiento que abarcan las 24 horas del día insisten en abordar la actividad física, el sedentarismo y el sueño como un sistema integrado. ¿Por qué el sueño, con horarios regulares y de calidad, resulta clave para un desarrollo físico, cognitivo y socioemocional óptimo en niños y niñas de 4 a 6 años?

Un descanso adecuado y reparador mejora el rendimiento ejecutivo, mientras que el sueño corto o irregular dificulta la concentración y la regulación emocional, afectando el desarrollo infantil. Y, en general, las intervenciones que combinan actividad física con desafío mental reducen el sedentarismo y regulan los tiempos de sueño favoreciendo la atención, la memoria y la gestión emocional durante la infancia.

El camino hacia la mejora

Las siguientes pautas nos servirán para aplicar en casa este enfoque:

• Permitir a los niños correr, saltar, lanzar, girar… Dejar que la condición física emerja de forma natural con la práctica continua.

• Integrar retos mentales sencillos durante el juego (cambiar reglas, contar, nombrar, enumerar).

• Multiplicar los momentos activos durante el día. Todo movimiento suma.

• Promover que jueguen sin pantallas. El juego es el momento de conectar de verdad.

• Fomentar rutinas de sueño. A los 3-4 años se necesitan 10-13 horas diarias, incluyendo siestas, con horarios fijos.

• Ser ejemplo: los niños imitan lo que ven. Si los adultos evitamos pantallas y nos movemos, harán lo mismo.

Familias, docentes y comunidades deberían implicarse en promover hábitos saludables con este enfoque global, en especial mejorando espacios en el entorno urbano para que los niños tengan lugares protegidos de juego.

Para crear un cambio sostenible, será fundamental que la opción saludable, como moverse más, dormir bien y reducir el sedentarismo, sea la más accesible, sencilla y natural para todos los niños y niñas y sus familias.

Alicia Mª Alonso Martínez no recibe salario, ni ejerce labores de consultoría, ni posee acciones, ni recibe financiación de ninguna compañía u organización que pueda obtener beneficio de este artículo, y ha declarado carecer de vínculos relevantes más allá del cargo académico citado.

– ref. Dormir bien y moverse más: las 24 horas mágicas para niños sanos – https://theconversation.com/dormir-bien-y-moverse-mas-las-24-horas-magicas-para-ninos-sanos-268111

November 13, 2025

El coste psicológico del acoso digital que sufren las deportistas en las redes sociales

Source: The Conversation – (in Spanish) – By Erika Borrajo Mena, Doctora en Ciencias Sociales/Ciencias de la Actividad Física y el Deporte, Universidad de Deusto

Con cada victoria, las deportistas ganan seguidores, pero también detractores que las observan desde la trinchera del anonimato. La tenista británica Katie Boulter, número uno del circuito en su país, lo vivió tras un torneo internacional: mensajes anónimos en redes le desearon la muerte a ella y a su familia.

Aunque pueda parecerlo, no es un caso aislado. En España, la campeona olímpica de waterpolo Paula Leitón tuvo que enfrentarse a una oleada de insultos por su físico, justo después de ganar el oro en París 2024. Tal y como contó en RTVE, en lugar de celebraciones tuvo que leer mensajes como “¿se valen focas?” o “¿no se vació la piscina?”.

Sus testimonios reflejan una realidad cada vez más presente en el deporte: el acoso digital que muchas mujeres reciben en redes y que afecta a su bienestar personal y profesional. En otras palabras, una forma contemporánea de violencia simbólica que se disfraza de opinión.

Visibilidad + algoritmos = exposición

La visibilidad trae consigo logros y reconocimiento, pero también exposición.
Una investigación de World Athletics reveló que, en recientes campeonatos internacionales, el 59 % de los abusos en redes se dirigieron a deportistas mujeres, y un 36 % tenían carácter sexual.

En redes sociales, la visibilidad no se mide por mérito, sino por reacción. Plataformas como Instagram, X o TikTok premian lo que genera debate, sin distinguir si es apoyo u odio. Un comentario ofensivo o una imagen viral pueden alcanzar miles de personas en segundos. En ese juego de algoritmos, las deportistas quedan doblemente expuestas: por lo que hacen y por cómo se ven.

Sexualización

La raíz del problema no se encuentra en la tecnología, sino en el hecho social. Es la versión 2.0 del sexismo que ha existido históricamente en el deporte. Las redes sociales se han convertido en un espacio donde se repiten las mismas lógicas de sexualización que antes se daban en otros medios.

A ellas se las juzga no solo por su rendimiento, sino por su aspecto, su ropa o su forma de expresarse. El anonimato refuerza la impunidad: decir en línea lo que no se diría cara a cara. Y la falta de estructuras de apoyo –protocolos, recursos, acompañamiento psicológico– deja a muchas deportistas enfrentándose solas a un problema que es colectivo.

Consecuencias psicológicas, sociales y profesionales

Recibir insultos o críticas constantes no es algo “normal” ni debería asumirse como parte del juego. El acoso digital deja huellas invisibles que van más allá de la pantalla: ansiedad, inseguridad, insomnio o aislamiento son algunas de sus consecuencias más comunes. El abuso y el acoso en línea están entre los factores que más dañan la salud mental y el bienestar de las mujeres deportistas. Muchas optan por reducir su presencia en redes o delegar su gestión a otras personas para protegerse, aunque eso implique perder visibilidad u oportunidades profesionales. Todo esto sabiendo que el rendimiento mediático pesa casi tanto como el deportivo, y que desconectarse también tiene coste.

Hacia entornos digitales seguros

El acoso digital a las deportistas no es una cuestión de sensibilidad, sino de responsabilidad colectiva. No basta con denunciar los ataques: hacen falta medidas estructurales que garanticen entornos digitales seguros.

Algunos torneos internacionales ya están dando pasos en esa dirección. Uno de los más destacados es el sistema Threat Matrix, creado por la empresa británica Signify Group y adoptado por Wimbledon y la Asociación de Tenis Femenino (WTA), entre otros. Esta tecnología analiza en tiempo real miles de mensajes en redes sociales para detectar amenazas, insultos o comentarios sexistas en más de treinta idiomas. Cuando identifica contenido abusivo, alerta a un equipo humano que decide si debe avisar a las plataformas o a las autoridades competentes.

De forma parecida, el torneo de Roland Garros utiliza Bodyguard, un software que filtra automáticamente los mensajes de odio antes de que lleguen a las deportistas. Si bien es cierto que estas herramientas no eliminan el problema, intentan prevenirlo. Y, sobre todo, buscan proteger la salud mental de quienes compiten fomentando una cultura digital más segura y respetuosa.

Los clubes, las federaciones y los medios de comunicación deben dejar de mirar hacia otro lado. Las plataformas tecnológicas también tienen una responsabilidad: actuar con la misma rapidez para detener el odio que cuando impulsan una polémica. Y el público debe recordar que, detrás de cada mensaje, hay una persona que lo lee, lo siente y lo sufre.

Conquista del respeto

Cuando las deportistas ganan visibilidad, inspiran a miles de niñas que las miran como referentes. Esta inspiración solo tiene sentido si el entorno digital es un espacio seguro, donde puedan mostrarse sin miedo al juicio o al insulto. Es curioso hablar de ello cuando el deporte femenino ha conquistado por fin su espacio en los estadios. Ahora le toca conquistar también su espacio en las redes: libre de miedo, de insultos y de juicios sobre cuerpos o voces. Porque, al fin y al cabo, ¿de qué sirve ganar una medalla si después hay que seguir luchando para ser respetadas?

Las personas firmantes no son asalariadas, ni consultoras, ni poseen acciones, ni reciben financiación de ninguna compañía u organización que pueda obtener beneficio de este artículo, y han declarado carecer de vínculos relevantes más allá del cargo académico citado anteriormente.

– ref. El coste psicológico del acoso digital que sufren las deportistas en las redes sociales – https://theconversation.com/el-coste-psicologico-del-acoso-digital-que-sufren-las-deportistas-en-las-redes-sociales-267952