English – Page 388 – MIL Submissions Engine

September 24, 2025

100 years before quantum mechanics, one scientist glimpsed a link between light and matter

Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By Robyn Arianrhod, Affiliate, School of Mathematics, Monash University

The Irish mathematician and physicist William Rowan Hamilton, who was born 220 years ago last month, is famous for carving some mathematical graffiti into Dublin’s Broome Bridge in 1843.

But in his lifetime, Hamilton’s reputation rested on work done in the 1820s and early 1830s, when he was still in his twenties. He developed new mathematical tools for studying light rays (or “geometric optics”) and the motion of objects (“mechanics”).

Intriguingly, Hamilton developed his mechanics using an analogy between the path of a light ray and that of a material particle. This is not so surprising if light is a material particle, as Isaac Newton had believed, but what if it were a wave? What would it mean for the equations of waves and particles to be analogous in some way?

The answer would come a century later, when the pioneers of quantum mechanics realised Hamilton’s approach offered more than just an analogy: it was a glimpse of the true nature of the physical world.

The puzzle of light

To understand Hamilton’s place in this story, we need to go back a little further. For ordinary objects or particles, the basic laws (or equations) of motion had been published by Newton in 1687. Over the next 150 years, researchers such as Leonard Euler, Joseph-Louis Lagrange and then Hamilton made more flexible and sophisticated versions of Newton’s ideas.

“Hamiltonian mechanics” proved so useful that it wasn’t until 1925 – almost 100 years later – that anybody stopped to revisit how Hamilton had derived it.

His analogy with light paths worked regardless of light’s true nature, but at the time, there was good evidence that light was a wave. In 1801, British scientist Thomas Young had performed his famous double-slit experiment, in which two light beams produced an “interference” pattern like the overlapping ripples on a pond when two stones are dropped in. Six decades later, James Clerk Maxwell realised light behaved like a rippling wave in the electromagnetic field.

But then, in 1905, Albert Einstein showed some of light’s properties could only be explained if light could also behave as a stream of particle-like “photons” (as they were later dubbed). He linked this idea to a suggestion made by Max Planck in 1900, that atoms could only emit or absorb energy in discrete lumps.

Energy, frequency and mass

In his 1905 paper on the photoelectric effect, where light dislodges electrons from certain metals, Einstein used Planck’s formula for these energy lumps (or quanta): E = hν. E is the amount of energy, ν (the Greek letter nu) is the photon’s frequency, and h is a number called Planck’s constant.

But in another paper the same year, Einstein introduced a different formula for the energy of a particle: a version of the now-famous E = mc ². E is again the energy, m is the mass of the particle, and c is the speed of light.

So here were two ways of calculating energy: one, associated with light, depended on the light’s frequency (a quantity connected with oscillations or waves); the other, associated with material particles, depended on mass.

Photo of a young Albert Einstein. — In 1905, Albert Einstein published two ways of calculating the energy of a particle: one linked to the frequency of wave, the other to the mass of the particle itself.
Hulton Archive / Getty Images

Did this suggest a deeper connection between matter and light?

This thread was picked up in 1924 by Louis de Broglie, who proposed that matter, like light, could behave as both a wave and a particle. Subsequent experiments would prove him right, but it was already clear that quantum particles, such as electrons and protons, played by very different rules from everyday objects.

A new kind of mechanics was needed: a “quantum mechanics”.

The wave equation

The year 1925 ushered in not one but two new theories. First was “matrix mechanics”, initiated by Werner Heisenberg and developed by Max Born, Paul Dirac and others.

A few months later, Erwin Schrödinger began work on “wave mechanics”. Which brings us back to Hamilton.

Schrödinger was struck by Hamilton’s analogy between optics and mechanics. With a leap of imagination and much careful thought, he was able to combine de Broglie’s ideas and Hamilton’s equations for a material particle, to produce a “wave equation” for the particle.

An ordinary wave equation shows how a “wave function” varies through time and space. For sound waves, for example, the wave equation shows the displacement of air, due to changes in pressure, in different places over time.

But with Schrödinger’s wave function, it was not clear exactly what was waving. Indeed, whether it represents a physical wave or merely a mathematical convenience is still controversial.

Waves and particles

Nonetheless, the wave-particle duality is at the heart of quantum mechanics, which underpins so much of our modern technology – from computer chips to lasers and fibre-optic communication, from solar cells to MRI scanners, electron microscopes, the atomic clocks used in GPS, and much more.

Indeed, whatever it is that is waving, Schrödinger’s equation can be used to predict accurately the chance of observing a particle – such as an electron in an atom – at a given time and place.

That’s another strange thing about the quantum world: it is probabilistic, so you can’t pin these ever-oscillating electrons down to a definite location in advance, the way the equations of “classical” physics do for everyday particles such as cricket balls and communications satellites.

Schrödinger’s wave equation enabled the first correct analysis of the hydrogen atom, which only has a single electron. In particular, it explained why an atom’s electrons can only occupy specific (quantised) energy levels.

It was eventually shown that Schrödinger’s quantum waves and Heisenberg’s quantum matrices were equivalent in almost all situations. Heisenberg, too, had used Hamiltonian mechanics as a guide.

Today, quantum equations are still often written in terms of their total energy – a quantity called the “Hamiltonian”, based on Hamilton’s expression for the energy of a mechanical system.

Hamilton had hoped the mechanics he developed by analogy with light rays would prove widely applicable. But he surely never imagined how prescient his analogy would be in our understanding of the quantum world.

Robyn Arianrhod 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. 100 years before quantum mechanics, one scientist glimpsed a link between light and matter – https://theconversation.com/100-years-before-quantum-mechanics-one-scientist-glimpsed-a-link-between-light-and-matter-261551

September 24, 2025

Who are the worst fathers in literature? Our experts make the tough call

Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By Suzy Freeman-Greene, Books + Ideas Editor, The Conversation

Penguin Books, Goodreads, Harper Collins, Text Publishing

Literature has long portrayed messed-up families. As poet Philip Larkin famously wrote, “They fuck you up, your mum and dad. / They may not mean to, but they do.”

In honour of this rich vein of dysfunction, we asked experts to nominate the worst literary fathers and mothers. Today we delve into dads. Tomorrow, we turn to mothers.

Of course, complex characters – neither wholly good nor bad – are the best sort. Author Andrew O’Hagan has spoken eloquently about striving to humanise even his most unpleasant creations, to fully amplify a novel.

Still, some characters are awfully hard to like. My least favourite dad might be Shug Bain, a cruel, violent man who abandons his wife and kids in Douglas Stuart’s Booker Prize-winning novel. Shug is appalled by his son Shuggie’s feminine mannerisms. “Look how twisted you’ve made him,” he tells his wife.

Here are our experts’ picks.

James Mortmain, I Capture the Castle – Dodie Smith

Perhaps the worst parent is not an obvious “monster”, but one you can all too easily imagine as your own. In Dodie Smith’s I Capture The Castle, James Mortmain, a once-successful writer in the grip of decade-long writer’s block, threatens his first wife with a cake knife and assaults a neighbour. His younger daughter, Cassandra, softens Mortmain’s awfulness with disarming humour. In court, she writes, everyone was being very funny, but “Father made the mistake of being funnier than the judge … he was sent to prison for three months.” The self-focused Mortmain condemns his family to penury in a crumbling castle, where he reads detective novels in the gatehouse and Cassandra captures their plight in her journal.

– Carol Lefevre

Heathcliff, Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte

For me, Heathcliff even beats bad-dads King Lear and Agamemnon. Most readers won’t remember that Heathcliff is a dad at all, which is part of what makes him so bad. The sadistic, dysfunctional passion between Heathcliff and Catherine dominates Brontë’s novel, leaving young Linton, the kid Heathcliff has with another woman, Isabella, neglected, abused and dominated by his terrifying father.

Heathcliff doesn’t even meet his son until he’s 13, after Isabella dies. Linton is then forced to live in tormented isolation and tortured into marrying his first cousin, Cathy. All this so Heathcliff can take revenge on Cathy’s father Edgar, who married his beloved Catherine Earnshaw.

– Sophie Gee

Zeus, the Iliad

Zeus wakes up in book 15 of the Iliad, having been lulled to sleep by Hera with sex and potions. Poor Zeus – with his sneaky wife, bickering, divine siblings and children, all trying to manipulate the war at Troy – and he is only trying to keep the Olympian show on the road. Seriously? Who started the family games? And, if he had canned the swan costume and not raped Leda (or the dozens of other nymphs he “manifested himself” to), no Helen, no war, no problems.

He really is the paterfamilias of toxic patriarchy.

– Robert Phiddian

Reunion – John Cheever

The last time you see your father, I hope he is not drunk on Beefeater Gibsons. I hope he doesn’t clap at the wait staff or demand they speak languages they do not know. I hope he doesn’t get you removed from four restaurants in a single afternoon. Walking away as he curses at a newsstand clerk, I hope you don’t mourn his flaws as “your future and your doom”. But, were this all to occur, I hope it’s happening inside a John Cheever story, where the comic and tragic mix like flesh and blood, or gin and vermouth.

– Alex Cothren

Kev, Last Ride – Denise Young

I’m not in favour of binaries of any kind, so I’m not comfortable with “best” vs “worst”. Rather, I contribute a father figure from Australian literature who may be both/and best/worst. I’m thinking of Kev, the father in Denise Young’s astonishingly moving novel, Last Ride, who takes his ten-year old son, Chook, with him on the run from the law across outback NSW after committing a brutal murder. Kev is among the worst, because: who would drag a kid into that? But Kev is simultaneously among the best, because his love for Chook, and his deep-seated impulse to protect him from another man’s abuse, is as genuine and moving as the paternal instinct gets. Kev wields fatherhood as double-edged sword. I feel for him.

– Julienne van Loon

Albion Gidley Singer, Dark Places – Kate Grenville

The worst father in literature is an easy one for me, though it has been decades since I have read his story. I first encountered the incestuous father Albion Gidley Singer in Kate Grenville’s novel Lilian’s Story, in which he is a somewhat shadowy but menacing figure. But it’s in Dark Places that Albion’s evil is brought fully to bear. I can’t remember the details of the book, but I can remember all too well the feeling of suffocation that came from being too close to Albion, to his thoughts and his feelings. A tremendous book I never want to read again.

– Natalie Kon-yu

Sam Pollit, The Man Who Loved Children – Christina Stead

In Christina Stead’s exhilarating and suffocating semi-autobiographical The Man Who Loved Children, the naturalist and patriarch Sam Pollit is nicknamed by his wife Henny “the Great Mouthpiece” for his endless maxims and sickening Pollit-“fambly” patois. He claims to love his many children but mocks, cajoles, and insults them; even has them spy on each other. Family life is so bad that the novel’s heroine, the adolescent Louisa, believes her only hope of escape from the squalor and tyranny is through murder.

– Jane Messer

My pick is a towering figure in Australian fiction: Sam Pollit of Christina Stead’s 1940 masterpiece The Man Who Loved Children. Sam’s oppressive sunniness, his maniacal refusal to look reality in the face, and his demand that his family play along with his ego-fantasy force them to absorb cruelty, mockery and contempt, all the while descending into more and more perilous poverty at his hands. He is a modern day narcissist par excellence, but also a grotesquerie or travesty of optimism as a virtue in the world. In Sam, “positivity” is transformed into dangerous and delusional thinking that steamrolls everything before it and leaves destruction in its wake.

– Edwina Preston

Allie Fox, The Mosquito Coast – Paul Theroux

Charismatic, brilliant and narcissistic, Allie Fox drags his family off to live in an isolated part of Honduras’ Mosquito Coast to escape what he has persuaded himself is the impending end of the world. Like any colonist, he takes over a village and attempts to introduce Western technology and ideas. It all ends in catastrophe of course, and his wife and children barely escape with their lives. Allie is the exemplar of the charming destroyer and is at the top of my “bad dad” list.

– Jen Webb

Captain Ahab, Moby-Dick – Herman Melville

Herman Melville, a great American author, was a lamentable father and an erratic provider for his family, who drove his son Malcolm to shoot himself in his bedroom in his parents’ house in 1867 after a row about the 18-year-old’s late hours. Melville’s fictional character Captain Ahab in Moby-Dick behaves even more reprehensibly, abandoning his own wife and son to focus obsessively on a doomed quest for a white whale that ultimately leads his whole crew to destruction. Ahab takes his name from the worst king of Israel in the Old Testament, and the author of this epic novel trains his gaze not just on one bad father, but the whole nature of patriarchy.

– Paul Giles

Victor Frankenstein, Frankenstein – Mary Shelley

The worst father in fiction has to be one of the first fathers in the horror genre, the eponymous figure in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). Victor, of course, does not beget the monstrous creature via the conventional method of procreating with a female, and he fashions his infamous progeny out of corpses, but he is very much a horrible dad when he denies his ghastly son his love. The Swiss medical genius is the true Gothic monster here, not the hapless and unsightly creature who just wants to be loved.

– Ali Alizadeh

My dear Victor,

I should address you Father, but how can I? I do not have your own creator’s Miltonic power to throw moral injunction at you, as Satan did to God: “Did I request thee … from darkness to promote me?” Was there ever a son whose “being” (your own word) is not named but de-named as monster, dreaded spectre, fiend, vile insect, abhorred devil? I have entered literature as a hideous progeny, as an abortion and an anomaly. You never gave me love but do not forget, Father, that my form is “a filthy type of yours, more horrid from its very resemblance”.

Your son.

– Vijay Mishra

The novel’s horror is set in motion not just by Victor’s transgressive hubris as a scientist, but also by his refusal to accept responsibility. Victor abandons his “monster” at almost the moment after its birth, and repeatedly rejects its appeals for compassion and empathy. Victor’s attempts to disavow his legacy are ultimately futile, as his creation relentlessly pursues his “father” to the end of his days.

– Julian Novitz

Thomas Sutpen, William Faulkner – Absalom, Absalom!

“They feared him and they hated him because of his ruthlessness.” Thomas Sutpen is truly one of William Faulkner’s most terrifying creations: a man who arrives in Mississippi with nothing and wills a dynasty into being. Everything – his marriage, his children, his land – is subsumed by his amoral “design,” which he pursues at any cost and with no concern for those who get in his way.

When a hidden fact about his first marriage comes to light, he casts aside his wife and child, setting in motion a cycle of vengeance that consumes the Sutpen line. In Faulkner’s hands, this ghastly patriarch ultimately becomes a figure for the antebellum South itself – built on inhumanity, colonialism and slavery, unwilling to reckon with the horrors of the reality it has brought into being.

– Alexander Howard

Do you have a nomination for the worst father – or mother – in literature? If so, let us know by scrolling to the end of this article and adding your choice in the comments.

– ref. Who are the worst fathers in literature? Our experts make the tough call – https://theconversation.com/who-are-the-worst-fathers-in-literature-our-experts-make-the-tough-call-263815

September 24, 2025

Lawsuits, cancellations and bullying: Trump is systematically destroying press freedom

Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By Denis Muller, Senior Research Fellow, Centre for Advancing Journalism, The University of Melbourne

United States President Donald Trump is well advanced in his systematic campaign to undermine the American media and eviscerate its function of holding him and others in power to account.

Since the late 18th century this function has often been called the fourth estate. It’s the idea the media is a watchdog over the other three estates which, in modern democracies, are parliament, the executive government and the judiciary.

In the US, Trump has had considerable success in weakening the other three.

His Republican Party controls both Houses of Congress, and they have shown no sign of wishing to restrain him.

He has stacked the executive government with cronies and ideological fellow travellers, including Robert F. Kennedy Jr (and his anti-vaccination agenda) as secretary of health, a brief stint by Elon Musk as head of the Department of Government Efficiency, and former Fox News host Pete Hegseth as defence secretary.

He has secured the support of the Republican Party to stack the Supreme Court with politically aligned judges who have routinely struck down lower court decisions against Trump, most notably in the matter of deporting migrants to countries other than their homelands.

Pulling funding, applying pressure

The fourth estate’s turn started in March, when Trump stripped federal funding from Voice of America, a public broadcasting service with a global reach, because it was “anti-Trump” and “radical”.

These cuts also hit two other projections of American soft power, Radio Free Europe and Radio Free Asia.

In July, he cut funding to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) in a move that ended all federal support for National Public Radio, the Public Broadcasting service and their member stations.

Now he has turned to the private sector media. He does not have the power to cut their funding, so he is taking a different approach: financial shake-downs and threats to the foundations of their business.

In October 2024, even before he was elected, Trump sued the Paramount company for US$10 billion (about A$15 billion). He alleged an interview with Kamala Harris during the 2024 election campaign had been “deceptively edited” by the CBS television network, a Paramount subsidiary.

In February 2025, after he had been sworn in as president, Trump upped the ante to US$20 billion (A$30 billion).

The case was considered by lawyers to have no legal merit, but at that time, Paramount was anxious to merge with Skydance Media, and this was subject to regulatory approval from the Trump administration.

So Paramount was vulnerable to, how shall we say? Blackmail? Extortion? Subornation?

A busy, dangerous July

On July 2, Paramount settled with Trump for US$16 million (A$24 million), which ostensibly is to go towards funding his presidential library.

On July 17 Paramount’s CBS network announced its longtime Late Show would be cancelled from May 2026 after its presenter Stephen Colbert, an outspoken critic of Trump, condemned the corporate cave-in. The Trump administration approved the merger shortly after.

Subsequently the House of Representatives Judiciary and Energy and Commerce committees announced an investigation into whether the $16 million settlement constituted a bribe.

Also in July, Trump sued Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal for defamation arising from an article linking Trump to the sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. He claimed the now-familiar amount of US$10 billion (A$15 billion) in damages.

Legal experts in the US say Trump has next to no chance of winning. In the US, public figures who sue for defamation have to prove that the publisher was motivated by malice, which means they published either knowing the material to be untrue, or not caring whether it was true or not.

This case is never likely to end up in court, nor is it likely that Trump will see a red cent of Murdoch’s money. The two men need each other too much. To borrow a phrase from the Cold War, they are in a MAD relationship: Mutually Assured Destruction.

Coming to heel, one by one

Rupert Murdoch was a guest at Windsor Castle at the recent banquet given for Trump by King Charles.

Considering Murdoch’s bitter history with the Royal Family, it is difficult to imagine Buckingham Palace inviting him without Trump’s urging. It may have been a sign of rapprochement between the two men.

Meanwhile Trump has set his sights on The New York Times, suing it for defamation and claiming US$15 billion (A$27 billion).

Referring to the Times’ endorsement of Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election, he said it had become a “mouthpiece for the Radical Left Democrat Party”.

This case faces the same difficulties as his suit against the Wall Street Journal. The question is whether the Times will stand its ground or whether, like Paramount, it caves.

Among the big three US newspapers, the Times is the only one so far not to have been intimidated by Trump. The other two, The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times, refused to endorse a candidate at the election on instructions from their owners, Jeff Bezos and Patrick Soon-Shiong respectively, both of whose wider business interests are vulnerable to Trumpian retribution.

The Post’s decision was condemned as “spineless” by its celebrated former editor Marty Baron.

Now Disney is in the firing line. It owns another of the big four US television networks, ABC. On September 17, it pulled its late-night talk show Jimmy Kimmel Live.

Kimmel had responded to White House accusations that leftists were responsible for the assassination of Charlie Kirk, saying:

we hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them.

In what had all the hallmarks of a preemptive buckle, ABC and two of its affiliate networks took Kimmel off air indefinitely after Brendan Carr, the Trump-appointed chair of the Federal Communications Commission, said his agency might “take action” against the network because of Kimmel’s comments.

Kimmel is returning to TV, but the damage is already done.

Over at cable network MSNBC, its senior political analyst Matthew Dowd was fired after he had uttered on air the blindingly obvious statement that Kirk’s own radical rhetoric may have contributed to the shooting that killed him.

This cable network is no longer part of the main NBC network, so it can’t be said that NBC itself has yet come to heel.

Within 24 hours of Brendan Carr’s veiled threat, Trump stripped the veil away and made the threat explicit. Trump said of the national networks:

All they do is hit Trump. They’re licensed, they’re not allowed to do that. They’re an arm of the Democrat party. I would think maybe their licence should be taken away.

Whether cancelling a licence would breach the First Amendment to the US Constitution, which protects freedom of speech, is a question that might ultimately come before the Supreme Court. Given the present ideological proclivities of that court, the outcome would be by no means certain.

So Trump now has two out of three national newspapers, and two out of the big four national television networks, on the run.

Only one national newspaper and two national networks to go, and one of those is Murdoch’s Fox News, Trump’s most reliable cheerleader.

Denis Muller 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. Lawsuits, cancellations and bullying: Trump is systematically destroying press freedom – https://theconversation.com/lawsuits-cancellations-and-bullying-trump-is-systematically-destroying-press-freedom-265848

September 24, 2025

What a newly discovered gas bridge between galaxies tells us about the cosmic cycle of matter

Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By Lister Staveley-Smith, Professor at the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR), The University of Western Australia

A composite image shows a diffuse ‘bridge’ of gas linking two dwarf galaxies. ICRAR, N. Deg, Legacy Surveys (D.Lang / Perimeter Institute)

Most of the ordinary matter in the universe is hydrogen. But surprisingly, less than 20% of this hydrogen sits inside galaxies. The rest lies in the vast spaces between them – the so-called intergalactic medium.

This cosmic reservoir is thought to fuel the birth of new stars, as gas slowly falls into galaxies over billions of years. Yet much of that material doesn’t stay put: supernova explosions and powerful outflows from supermassive black holes can fling gas back out into intergalactic space.

The push-and-pull between inflows and outflows is central to understanding how galaxies grow and change over cosmic time. Probing this balance is one of the aims of the WALLABY survey, carried out using the Australian SKA Pathfinder (ASKAP) telescope at Inyarrimanha Ilgari Bundara, CSIRO’s Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory in Western Australia.

A new discovery from WALLABY, published today in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, sheds new light on the cosmic cycle of matter into, through and out of galaxies.

What is WALLABY?

Despite its name, WALLABY isn’t about animals. It’s a somewhat contrived acronym – Widefield ASKAP L-band Legacy All-sky Blind surveY – for a large survey of neutral hydrogen (the atomic form of hydrogen) across nearly half the southern sky. The ASKAP telescope is sensitive enough to detect hydrogen in and around galaxies up to a billion light years away.

Radio telescope dishes beneath an intense starry sky — The ASKAP radio telescope can detect hydrogen up to a billion light years away.
ICRAR

Because it’s a “blind” survey, WALLABY doesn’t target known galaxies. Instead, it scans huge patches of sky – each night covering an area about 150 times the size of the full Moon.

A galactic bridge

We then use automated algorithms to search for signs of hydrogen in the resulting data. One such search revealed an unusual gas bridge linking two otherwise unremarkable galaxies on the outskirts of the Virgo cluster, in the constellation Virgo. The bridge, at least 160,000 light years long, likely formed through tidal interactions between two dwarf galaxies known as NGC 4532 and DDO 137.

An image of red blobs and one of stars and galaxies. — Left: Radio astronomy image of neutral hydrogen gas in and around the galaxies NGC 4532 / DDO 137. Right: An optical image of the galaxies.
ICRAR and D.Lang (Perimeter Institute)

These tides are the cosmic equivalent of Earth’s ocean tides, but on a vastly larger scale and made of hydrogen rather than water. Gas pulled from the galaxies now stretches between them, filling the surrounding intergalactic space.

Such bridges are hard to detect because they contain few stars. But we have a local example: the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, two dwarf galaxies orbiting the Milky Way, are joined by a 70,000-light-year-long gas bridge.

An extraordinary tail

The newly discovered bridge also helps explain a long-standing puzzle: an enormous gas tail streaming away from the dwarf galaxies NGC 4532 and DDO 137, first detected more than 30 years ago with the Arecibo telescope. This tail is ten times longer than the bridge and is the largest ever observed from a galaxy system.

New observations suggest that while tidal forces created the bridge and the envelope of gas around the galaxies, the spectacular tail was produced by another process.

As the pair of galaxies plunges into the Virgo cluster, they encounter extremely hot, thin gas that fills the cluster. The galaxies’ motion through this medium produces ram pressure – much like the resistance felt when cycling into a strong headwind – which strips gas from them and sweeps it out behind.

Remarkably, the gas density required for this effect is only around ten atoms per cubic metre, a value consistent with new measurements from the eROSITA X-ray telescope. Thanks to the galaxies’ high infall speed – more than 800 kilometres per second – this sparse medium is enough to create the vast tail.

The bigger picture

These two galaxies are just a fraction of the 200,000 WALLABY expects to detect by the end of its survey. Each discovery adds to our picture of how gas flows in and out of galaxies, enriching the intergalactic medium and shaping galactic evolution.

Together, they will help astronomers untangle the so-called baryonic cycle – the continuous recycling of matter between galaxies and the space around them.

Lister Staveley-Smith receives research funding from ICRAR, the Western Australian government, and the University of Western Australia.

– ref. What a newly discovered gas bridge between galaxies tells us about the cosmic cycle of matter – https://theconversation.com/what-a-newly-discovered-gas-bridge-between-galaxies-tells-us-about-the-cosmic-cycle-of-matter-265760

September 23, 2025

Facing a shutdown, budget negotiations are much harder because Congress has given Trump power to cut spending through ‘rescission’

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Charlie Hunt, Associate Professor of Political Science, Boise State University

Will Congress keep the government running? Phil Roeder/Getty Images

Congress faces a deadline of Oct. 1 to adopt a spending measure to keep the federal government open. Various reporters will be interviewing serious people saying serious things in the basement corridors of the U.S. Capitol. There will also be political posturing, misrepresentation and either braggadocio or evasion. Politics editor Naomi Schalit interviewed congressional expert Charlie Hunt, a political scientist at Boise State University, about the now-perennial drama over spending in Congress and what’s very different about this year’s conflict.

In the past, how did Congress pass budgets so that government could keep operating?

Typically, you would get an actual passage of a full budget for a year. But in the last 20 or 30 years or so, since we’ve become a more polarized country with a polarized Congress, we have a lot of what are called continuing resolutions, or CRs.They’re stopgap measures – not the full budget – and don’t tend to make a lot of changes on a lot of the spending priorities that Congress has.

Continuing resolutions usually just extend current levels of spending for a short time so that the two parties can continue negotiating. But as negotiations over long-term budgets have tended to fail more and more, these CR’s are becoming more common, and Congress almost never passes a full budget on a yearly basis at this point.

A bunch of people in office clothes, crowded around something in a hallway. — You’ll be seeing a lot of this sort of scrum – reporters interviewing members of Congress – as spending gets wrangled over.
Matt McClain/The Washington Post via Getty Images

What’s the role of the president here?

The president has the power to veto any piece of legislation, and that includes the federal budget. Essentially, what majorities in Congress need when they are going into a budget fight is either the president’s implicit sign-off on whatever they pass, or they need enough votes to override the president’s veto.

Congress and the presidency right now are both held by Republicans, they’re in pretty deep alignment, so that’s not as much of a concern this time. It’s really just what Trump wants that needs to be a part of this legislation, and if there’s something in it that he really doesn’t like, then Congress needs to go back to the drawing board and the Republicans need to find out a way to get that into the bill.

What is driving each party in these negotiations?

Two different things are at work here. One is that Congress, as I mentioned, is really polarized. The two parties are farther apart from each other than they used to be. So the average Democrat and the average Republican aren’t going to agree as much on policy priorities and funding priorities than they did, say, in the 1980s or 1970s or before that.

The other thing is that Congress in recent decades has been more closely divided than they have been in the recent past, say, the last century. In both chambers, House and Senate, it’s very rare for one party or the other to have some massive majority. You need a majority of 60 in the Senate to have a chance at passing most legislation, for example, and this big a majority hasn’t happened since 2009. That’s something President Obama enjoyed with the Democrats for just a short period of time.

Since then, there have been very closely divided chambers in Congress, and that means that you need, at least in the Senate, some bipartisanship in order to pass that 60-vote threshold to break a filibuster. That’s what’s really gumming up the works right now. Democrats don’t feel like they’re being included in negotiations, and so they’re not likely to agree to a Republican-only budget in the Senate.

A man in a suit and wearing glasses, surrounded by reporters with mobile phones used to record him. — Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, a Republican from Louisiana, has been key to rallying House Republicans behind a stopgap funding bill to avert a shutdown.
Kent Nishimura/Getty Images

What is different about the 2025 budget fight than previous ones?

A lot of the dynamics are still the same. You still have partisan fighting. And you still have some divides within the two parties that I think are worth mentioning. One example: There was a Senate vote just the other day on one of these budget resolutions, and a couple of Republicans voted with the Democrats. So for some of these more deficit-hawk Republicans, that concern is still playing a role.

What’s new this time around is this element of rescissions. This is a tool that’s been available since the 1970s in which presidents ask Congress to rescind spending that they had allocated. This is what happened earlier this year with the rescissions on public broadcasting – NPR and PBS – that got a lot of attention, as well as on USAID. Trump said he wanted to cut funding for public broadcasting – the GOP in the Senate and House voted to let him. They didn’t need 60 votes in the Senate for a rescission, either. Just a majority for this move.

So in this case, Democrats are looking at this and thinking, “Why should we negotiate, if you’re just going to rescind that later on without our consent?” That’s a major element that’s changed. While it’s a power that has been in place for a while, Trump and the Republicans have been really willing to wield that.

Do you see this rescission power being exercised with every budget or continuing resolution that Congress passes?

This is a pretty serious breach of what we call Congress’ “power of the purse.” That spending power is set out in Article 1 of the Constitution. It is a key power, maybe their most important power and point of leverage they have in going back and forth with the president and making sure the executive branch doesn’t accrue too much power.

But if this rescission authority is going to be used in this way going forward, where basically any spending priority that the president doesn’t want or doesn’t want to fund is going to be subject to rescission, then Congress doesn’t really have the power of the purse, right? They have a president who is going to veto anything that doesn’t live up to their expectations, or they can just sign it and then ask for these rescissions later.

The key thing here is that President Trump currently has in Congress a set of Republicans in both the House and the Senate who are willing to do virtually anything he wants and are subject to a lot of the political pressures in their districts that put him in office in the first place. So if they don’t go along with rescissions, they’re going to face the wrath of their Republican voters in their district.

That’s one thing that’s really changed in the last 30 years that I think gives the president a lot more authority in these matters, and makes rescission such a powerful tool that did not exist before.

Charlie Hunt 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. Facing a shutdown, budget negotiations are much harder because Congress has given Trump power to cut spending through ‘rescission’ – https://theconversation.com/facing-a-shutdown-budget-negotiations-are-much-harder-because-congress-has-given-trump-power-to-cut-spending-through-rescission-265827

September 23, 2025

Why you don’t have to block roads or glue yourself to buildings to be a climate activist

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Bob Walley, Researcher in Climate Change Engagement and Communication, University of Lancashire

A protestor outside Preston New Road Fracking Site in Lancashire. Bob Walley, CC BY-NC-ND

“Get a job!” shouted yet another driver going past me in the sweeping rain outside Preston New Road fracking site, on another bitingly cold winters day. Recipients of these outbursts were mostly retirees like the Nanas of Lancashire (a group of women from the northern shire of England who had become prominent anti-fracking activists).

My mum often joined me and other protesters to oppose the exploratory drilling that throughout 2018 and 2019 caused earthquakes. Local people were worried about the damage this could do to their homes, the water they rely on and the area’s nature and wildlife.

When it got too cold and I could see mum was starting to get the shivers, we would go back to my family home for a nice cup of tea, leaving the die hards to keep guard 24/7, continuing the fight until we could rejoin them next time.

“It’ll never make any difference,” Dad would comment as we put the kettle on. As a reader of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring – the 1962 book which exposed the destruction of wildlife through the widespread use of pesticides – and a school teacher all his life, he knew all too well the threats of the climate and ecological emergency. Especially once I joined the environmental protest movement.

But activism was not for him. “What was the point?” he’d wonder.

I can see why many people might feel like that. Especially when the decision by Lancashire County Council to reject fracking at Preston New Road was overruled by the Conservative government of the time, and the magnitude of permitted earthquakes was raised.

Frontline activism is certainly not for everyone. Especially when some journalists and politicians would have people believe these “eco-zealots” are the “enemies of society”, due to the disruption that can be caused by increasingly desperate and urgent protests and actions.

Stereotypes remain strong in public opinion and news sources often get basic climate change facts wrong. A quick google image search for “environmental activists” shows people with banners blocking roads, shouting into megaphones and looking angry. Perhaps even throwing soup at a painting or gluing themselves to the front of an office building if you scroll down a bit.

people standing around white protest banner about ecocide — Local activists blockade the front gate of Preston New Road Fracking Site in Lancashire, stopping any vehicles coming in and out of the site.
Bob Walley, CC BY-NC-ND

The radical flank frontline

More radical groups know that more disruptive actions lead to greater likelihood of coverage. This can lead to a “radical flank effect”, referring to the comparative outcome that occurs when more radical factions of a social movement like climate activism operate in the same arena as more moderate or less confrontational sections of that movement. The radical flank creates space behind it for others to move into and opportunities for social change can appear.

A vital role it would seem. But this doesn’t tell the whole story of what an activist is.

In a recent research study, I interviewed activists across a range of different ages, circumstances and ideological positions, from Just Stop Oil and Greenpeace to local wildlife trusts and community garden projects. All share concern for the future of life on this planet, trying to do what they can, where they can, to help shape a society we all deserve to live in.

Many express frustration and anger, alongside recognition, that the status quo and current economics are given more importance in political discourse and action than the large‐scale changes required to live sustainably within the natural world. One middle-aged woman who volunteers at the local climate hub (a public space for people involved in climate action) expressed “very little faith in governments. Just massive disappointment.”

The recent changes to protest laws which further vilify environmental activists and mean harsher sentences for attending zoom calls or holding a placard are seen as terrifyingly authoritarian. Yet a young employee of the group Surfers Against Sewage noted they are effective in that they “turn away the people who were kind of on the fence a little bit about it. But … it will also inspire others who are just like, dead against the injustice of it.”

My team’s research indicates a sense of despair due to this political inaction and pushback against those who speak out. Some on the radical flanks are seen by more conservative activists as too radical, and some on the flanks see those more conservative as too “soft” to generate the required changes.

Yet there is recognition of the vital roles everyone can play. A long-term Extinction Rebellion activist who now resides in Calderdale in West Yorkshire, recognised there needed to be “people fighting in different ways on so many different fronts, and I think there’s strength in supporting each other, if we can”.

Fracking was stopped in Lancashire. It was stopped by the Nanas, my mum and the many others on the radical flank frontline. But also by all of those working behind the scenes who put in time to lobby or protest in their own way. It was all these pieces of the puzzle working together that led to victory in Lancashire.

Our research shows you don’t have to be waving a placard shouting into a megaphone, although there is an important place for that too. Crucially, there are many roles for us all and ways we can work towards that future we all deserve to live in.

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 45,000+ readers who’ve subscribed so far.

Bob Walley receives funding from various internal research institutes and external funding bodies for the research and community projects he coordinates. He is affiliated with the University of Exeter, the University of Lancashire and Envirolution Network.

– ref. Why you don’t have to block roads or glue yourself to buildings to be a climate activist – https://theconversation.com/why-you-dont-have-to-block-roads-or-glue-yourself-to-buildings-to-be-a-climate-activist-260714

September 23, 2025

Jane Austen’s real and literary worlds weren’t exclusively white – just read her last book, Sanditon

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Olivia Carpenter, Lecturer in Literature, University of York

Jane Austen penned the last sentences of her unfinished manuscript for the novel we know as Sanditon in March 1817 before she died that July. Like me, many Austen fans often stumble upon this work after they have read all six of her completed novels.

At this point, readers of Austen feel like they know her and have sought out Sanditon because they want more of what they loved in her other works. However, they are often surprised by what they find.

In the final months of her life, Austen had moved away from writing about the English country house. The titular Sanditon is instead a seaside health resort, and the novel follows characters who spend a season there trying to get healthy or wealthy.

Austen’s most striking departure from the rest of her work, however, is in her inclusion of the character of Miss Lambe – a young heiress staying at the resort who is of African descent. Sanditon is the only Austen novel to contain an explicitly Black character.

Sanditon’s narrator explains that Miss Lambe is a mixed-race Black heiress of just 17 years old. Austen calls her a “chilly and tender” girl who attracts attention because she requires luxuries such as “a maid of her own”, and “the best room in the lodgings”.

Far from being disadvantaged because of race, Miss Lambe has more privileges than many of her white peers, and they react with interest and envy. The resort’s scheming foundress, Lady Denham, even fantasises about making an advantageous match for her nephew with the girl.

This article is part of a series commemorating the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen’s birth. Despite having published only six books, she is one of the best-known authors in history. These articles explore the legacy and life of this incredible writer.

Miss Lambe’s presence in Austen’s novel presents a stark challenge to any assumptions that Austen never wrote about people of colour. Many still assume that authors in Austen’s time simply weren’t writing about Black characters.

However, Miss Lambe is not the only character of this background to appear in books of the period. I am currently finishing up a book on the subject of Black representation in British marriage plots. I research Black characters who are heiresses, escapees, keepers of dark secrets, and participants in all manner of surprise twists and turns.

For example, in the anonymously authored 1808 novel The Woman of Colour, trouble ensues when a young Black woman, Olivia Fairfield, travels to England from Jamaica in order to marry according to her father’s wishes.

There have also been several rich and wonderful research projects demonstrating the enormous variety of Black British history in Jane Austen’s England. The writer and academic Gretchen Gerzina’s book Black England, for example, brings to life a vision of this world that included Black community, activism and intellectualism.

The Mapping Black London project, a stunningly detailed digital resource from Northeastern University, London, provides interactive maps demonstrating evidence of Black life in the city through the records of everyday people. We can see the proof of Black Britons being baptised, getting married, or being buried in London during Austen’s lifetime.

We can also turn to Black writers from the period who tell us their story directly, such as Olaudah Equiano, Ottobah Cugoano, and Mary Prince. Black British writers like these commented directly on their experience of finding ways to survive the violence of transatlantic chattel slavery.

In contrast to these writers’ real experiences, however, Miss Lambe’s in Austen’s literary take on Regency England is markedly different. As an heiress, she has a lot more in common with real historical figures who were the children of white British enslavers and Afro-Caribbean women.

The scholar of early American and Atlantic history, Daniel Livesay, has written extensively on these figures in his book Children of Uncertain Fortune, detailing the lives of the privileged few who were acknowledged by white fathers, and were either born free or granted their freedom. Such children were often educated on both sides of the Atlantic and might apply for special legal status, giving them similar rights to those of white British subjects.

Austen hints at this background for Miss Lambe in discussions of her wealth. Like the children Livesay discusses, Miss Lambe has left the West Indies and is now growing up in England. She is in the care of Mrs Griffiths, an older lady who treats her as “beyond comparison the most important and precious” client. This is because Miss Lambe “paid in proportion to her fortune”.

A wealthy family member would have needed to set up this arrangement with Mrs Griffiths. The family member also would have helped Miss Lambe gain the special legal status necessary for a Black person to inherit a fortune under colonial law.

While we can celebrate Austen’s inclusion of a Black character, we know that representation alone is not empowerment. As Kerry Sinanan, an academic in pre-1800 literature and culture, has insisted, we need to be careful about an uncritical celebration of Austen’s “radical politics”.

When we think of Black life in Austen’s world we need to think both about the Black wealth and privilege Austen chooses to represent in Miss Lambe as well as the enslavement Austen never addresses. If we long for Austen to be a champion of all women, including Black women, we may be sorely disappointed by Austen’s ten brief sentences mentioning her sole Black character.

Nevertheless, Miss Lambe remains an important reminder as we celebrate Austen’s enduring legacy 250 years on: Black British life and experience have always been part of British literature and history. Remembering this character in Austen’s writing can only help to add urgency to the ongoing re-evaluation of how we teach, learn and understand that literature and history.

This article features references to books that have been included for editorial reasons, and may contain links to bookshop.org. If you click on one of the links and go on to buy something from bookshop.org The Conversation UK may earn a commission.

Looking for something good? Cut through the noise with a carefully curated selection of the latest releases, live events and exhibitions, straight to your inbox every fortnight, on Fridays. Sign up here.

Olivia Carpenter 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. Jane Austen’s real and literary worlds weren’t exclusively white – just read her last book, Sanditon – https://theconversation.com/jane-austens-real-and-literary-worlds-werent-exclusively-white-just-read-her-last-book-sanditon-264813

September 23, 2025

Marie Antoinette Style at the V&A is a rare opportunity to see what survives of the queen’s closet

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Serena Dyer, Associate Professor, Fashion History, De Montfort University

Marie Antoinette (1755 to 1793) is a cultural icon of monumental proportions. She was the last queen of France before the brutal and bloody French Revolution, and her life was ended by the revolutionaries’ guillotine blade.

Her legacy courses through the visual language of music videos, fashion catwalks and drag shows. Even the shapes and styles behind the current corset trend, popularised by the show Bridgerton, owe more to the era of the French queen than to the Netflix regency romp.

Yet, standing in front of a single, gently worn, and very small shoe at the Victoria and Albert Museum’s latest exhibition, Marie Antoinette Style, the French queen suddenly feels as fragile and little as the brittle silk of her surviving heeled pump.

It is the tender fragility of the teenage queen that first greets visitors. The 16-year-old Dauphine smiles coyly in an animated version of Joseph-Siffred Duplessis’s 1772 portrait of the future queen. She is strikingly innocent, entirely oblivious to the tumultuous years which would define her legacy. It is a poignant moment for all who are aware of her tragic fate.

Joyful and incandescent youthfulness thrums from the first few spaces of the exhibition. A glittering mirrored hall filled with some of the most spectacular gowns of the period pulses with magical energy as a ball in Versailles’s hall of mirrors. The gowns that the visitor encounters, like the wedding ensemble of fellow European royal bride, Duchess Hedvig Elisabeth Charlotta, are tiny.

This is not, as many visitors may mumble, because everyone in the past was small (they were not), but because this was a court of teenage royals.

The garments chosen are a spectacular array of pastels, representing the diversity and complexity of styles worn at the French court. But these glistening, dazzling garments pale in comparison to the fragments of gowns which possibly once belonged to Marie Antoinette herself. Other than the shoes, a shift (the linen underwear worn closest to the skin) and a smattering of accessories, very few of Marie Antoinette’s own garments survive.

The revolutionaries who oversaw her downfall and execution in 1793 attempted to destroy her vast wardrobe. So fragments like the ivory silk one, encrusted with silver spangles, gems, velvet and metal embroidery are incredibly exciting. The scars of stitching from its former life as a court gown tantalisingly hint at how it might have formed the sweeping front section of a gown’s skirts.

The exhibition confidently places Marie Antoinette not as an exuberant and frivolous monarch, as she is so often seen, but as an intentional, frequently playful, and decidedly modern patron of the arts. Aside from the gowns, there is furniture, porcelain, jewellery, theatre props and some of the most recognisable and iconic portraits of the infamous French queen – many of which have never travelled to the UK before. It is in this section that the fervour of her celebrity becomes apparent.

There is a bowl supposedly modelled after Marie Antoinette’s breast, complete with nipple, and which it is said is the origin of the coupe glass. There are also an astonishing amount of diamonds, including a copy of the jewels from the infamous affair of the diamond necklace. This audacious con saw a cardinal and a self proclaimed Comtesse steal a priceless necklace while posing as Marie Antoinette. Despite the Queen’s innocence, her reputation is ruined.

It is here that the darker side of her reign also begins to trickle into the exhibition. Her expenses were nowhere near as detrimental to the French economy as her husband’s warmongering, but Antoinette’s very visible and enviably luxurious life earned her the moniker of Madame Déficit. She became an easy target for an angry and starving population, who began to vilify her, depicting her as a harpy and falsely accusing her of torrid affairs.

This insidious shift is cleverly woven into the exhibition narrative. For instance, there is an opportunity for visitors to smell samples of the scents from the court by sniffing perfumed busts of the Queen’s head. Visitors enjoying the scents are then suddenly assaulted with the stench of her impending prison cell.

Marie Antoinette was not oblivious to the rising revolutionary tide. That innocent girl that we met at the start had grown into a sympathetic queen. She recycled her garments, gifting them to her staff, she adopted and released enslaved children, she gave endlessly to charities and turned down gifts which she felt were too extravagant.

And while her luxury consumption looked extravagant, her patronage was essential to the success of French industry. When she stopped wearing silks and turned her attention to simple cotton gowns, for instance, the silk weavers rioted. She was never going to win.

Despite these warning signs, it is impossible to prepare for the next space. The dominance of pastel pinks and greens is quickly supplanted by a deep, blood red. A blade from a guillotine dominates the space cut a few words of repetition here. But her death is not the end.

The remaining rooms celebrate her enduring appeal across art, culture and fashion. She was a fancy dress costume within decades of her death, and by the 20th century cinematic portrayals like Norma Shearer’s 1938 portrayal of the Queen cemented her pop culture position. But her legacy, fraught with misogynistic myth-making and uncomfortable stereotypes, gets lost in a celebratory atmosphere.

It is undeniable that her cultural significance is massive. But so many of the visual signals designers nod to are just as false as the fake news generated during her fall from grace. For instance, the tall white wigs are a Hollywood invention. Marie Antoinette always wore her own, natural blonde hair pristinely pomaded and powdered.

It is disappointing that, while the myth-making from her lifetime is robustly challenged in the exhibition, the perpetuation of those myths in artistic responses to her legacy were largely overlooked. In this section, the fashion of John Galliano or costumes from the 2006 Sophia Coppola film or Hulu’s The Great, while wonderful to see, lacked the deeper critical engagement of the early sections of the exhibition.

The exhibition is a visual treat, and the opportunity to see rarely displayed objects make it a must see. But the imagined Marie Antoinette we leave at the end of the exhibition is a far cry from the real young woman that smiled shyly as we entered. Marie Antoinette may be immortalised in the cultural imagination, but I am not convinced she would recognise herself.

Serena Dyer 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. Marie Antoinette Style at the V&A is a rare opportunity to see what survives of the queen’s closet – https://theconversation.com/marie-antoinette-style-at-the-vanda-is-a-rare-opportunity-to-see-what-survives-of-the-queens-closet-265700

September 23, 2025

People with schizophrenia were hit hard by B.C.’s deadly 2021 heat dome

Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Liv Yoon, Assistant Professor, School of Kinesiology, University of British Columbia

In June 2021, British Columbia experienced an extreme climate event. A heat dome trapped hot air over the province, pushing temperatures to record highs for several days, killing more than 600 people.

A closer look at the numbers revealed something even more startling: people with schizophrenia — just one per cent of the population — made up 15.7 per cent of the deaths. This statistic underscores a troubling truth: climate change does not affect everyone equally.

Research by the BC Centre for Disease Control found that during the heat dome, people with schizophrenia had roughly three times the risk of dying compared to those without schizophrenia, more than any other chronic condition. Even before introducing housing or other critical social determinants of health, this diagnosis alone carried a much higher mortality risk.

Without targeted action, the most marginalized will continue to face the greatest risks. The heat dome revealed how schizophrenia combined with poverty, precarious and poor-quality housing, medication effects, stigma and social isolation led to a uniquely lethal risk.

As heatwaves grow more frequent and intense with climate change, public health and housing policy must shift from expecting people to cope on their own toward ensuring people are able to stay cool enough.

How schizophrenia increases heat risks

In a recent study, we interviewed 35 people with schizophrenia who lived through the 2021 heat dome for a more granular look at what it took to survive. Participants described suffering the physical effects (fainting, heat rash, exhaustion) and worsening symptoms like hallucinations, disrupted sleep and emotional distress.

Symptoms such as paranoia caused many to avoid news coverage, government warnings or even caretakers. This means many never received — or trusted — urgent alerts issued during the heat dome, and knowledge gaps were common.

For many, public cooling centres felt unsafe or unwelcoming due to previous experiences being stigmatized and feared because of their schizophrenia diagnosis. The stigma around schizophrenia also discouraged many individuals from seeking medical care or other public supports.

Homelessness or poor housing quality was another significant factor that compounded vulnerability. Many interviewees lived in older apartments without air conditioning. Others were unhoused and had to cope without shade, water or safe places to rest. For these reasons, staying cool indoors was not an option for many.

The result was a tragic overlap: people with the fewest resources to cope with extreme heat were also the least able to access help.

Why individual advice isn’t enough

Public health advice for heatwaves often focuses on individual actions: seek shade, buy a fan or check in on neighbours. While important, these messages assume equal access to information and resources — but evidence shows that many people with schizophrenia experience significant barriers to accessing them.

This way of thinking reflects a broader societal tendency to treat health as a matter of personal responsibility: that in the heat, each of us is on our own to prepare. But the disproportionate number of deaths among people with schizophrenia illustrates the flaw in this approach.

Our interviews revealed that many indeed internalized their struggles during the heat dome as personal shortcomings, when in reality, the problem was systemic: inadequate housing, limited access to care, widespread and debilitating social stigma and the lack of tailored public health strategies.

A different approach

To prevent the tragedies of 2021 from happening again, policymakers and experts need to view access to cool, safe spaces as a basic right. This means moving beyond a one-size-fits-all approach for advice, to one addressing the realities faced by those most at risk.

To be clear, this rights-based approach does not mean abandoning practical individual measures that save lives, such as opening public cooling centres or reminding people to drink water. These remain essential in the short term. But on their own, they are not enough.

To truly protect people with schizophrenia and others at high risk, these responses must unfold within a broader vision that treats access to safe temperatures as a basic right.

That means investing in affordable, climate-resilient housing and ensuring cooling centres are welcoming and accessible for all. It also means addressing stigma around mental health challenges, tailoring health advice to account for anti-psychotic medications and supporting outreach through trusted community networks.

We need both immediate interventions that provide relief during a heatwave and structural changes that address the root causes of vulnerability. Without this dual approach, responses to heatwaves will leave the same people exposed when the next extreme event arrives. Our goal should not be fewer deaths; we should aim for no deaths.

Structural solutions needed

The 2021 heat dome was tragic — more so because deaths were not inevitable. They were the result of overlapping vulnerabilities that our current housing and welfare systems fail to address. People with schizophrenia are not inherently more vulnerable to heat; they are made more vulnerable by the obstacles that shape their lives.

This means that solutions must also be structural. We need to change how we think about extreme heat; it is not just a natural hazard. It is a reflection of how social systems are failing people, especially those on the sharp edges of inequality.

Viewing cooling as a right means investing in societies that are more resilient to heat. This means governments investing in safer and more accessible housing for all, building welcoming public spaces, fostering a society where neighbours know and care for each other and allowing people with lived experience to play a central role in shaping future heat-health planning.

Liv Yoon received funding from Health Canada’s Climate Change and Health Office for the study that informs this article.

Samantha Mew 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. People with schizophrenia were hit hard by B.C.’s deadly 2021 heat dome – https://theconversation.com/people-with-schizophrenia-were-hit-hard-by-b-c-s-deadly-2021-heat-dome-265173

September 23, 2025

The more in favour of welfare you are, the more likely you are to support cycle lanes

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Joanna Syrda, Assistant Professor in Business Economics, University of Bath

Public transport infrastructure can be deeply political. A new cycle lane appears in a neighbourhood, and suddenly the letters page of the local paper is full. A plan to pedestrianise a city centre street sparks furious debate. A proposal to expand a bus route is hailed as progress by some and criticised as wasteful by others.

The conversations we have around urban planning reflect deeply held values and priorities. They even pit competing visions for society against each other. This was visible in debates over Ulez (ultra-low emission zones) in London, for example. Each of the two sides appealed to a different set of values: critics to individual choice and economic mobility and supporters to collective wellbeing and environmental responsibility.

In my recent study, I looked at how people’s world views affected their views on various transport infrastructure proposals. I used British Social Attitudes (BSA) survey data to investigate attitudes towards cycle lanes, increasing spending on public transport spending (potentially at the cost of other services), reserving parking spaces for electric car charging points, building car parks to introduce more park and ride routes, narrowing roads to widen pavements, and closing roads to create pedestrian high streets.

In each case, I found that whether people supported the change depended heavily on their political ideologies. But among these ideologies, the biggest predictor of how people felt about green transport projects overall was their attitude towards welfare spending.

Those who believed in generous, redistributive welfare systems, government support for the unemployed and efforts to reduce inequality also tended to support government investment in public transport.

Around 41% of differences in opinion on the six analysed infrastructure projects taken together were explained by differences in views on welfare. Political party preference comes next, accounting for 26%. Where people place themselves on the left–right political spectrum explained only 13% of differences of opinion.

When looked at separately, support for the welfare state is the strongest predictor of support for increasing public transport spending, widening pavements, and creating pedestrian high streets. Meanwhile, political party preference plays the biggest role in shaping opinions on cycle lanes, electric car charging points, and building new car parks.

When all political dimensions are considered together, two policies stand out as the most politically charged: narrowing roads to widen pavements and building new cycle lanes. These findings suggest that sidewalks and cycle lanes don’t just redistribute road space – they expose ideological space too. They challenge entrenched ideas about who the city is for, how mobility should be organised, and what kind of future we should invest in.

Historically, the bicycle has been associated with counterculture and leftwing politics. From the 1960s onward, it gained symbolic value as an alternative to the car – a challenge to dominant norms of consumption, status and mobility. Cars came to represent freedom, autonomy and success. Bicycles, by contrast, were reframed as environmental, communal, and anti-establishment. This symbolic opposition still resonates today.

People who are less positive about welfare often emphasise individual responsibility, self-reliance, and a belief that public support creates dependency. From this perspective, cars are earned through work, independence, and personal choice. Cycle lanes or pavements are seen as government interference, taking space (and status) away from drivers.

Changing minds

My research also shows that interest in politics moderates these effects. People who are highly interested in politics are much more likely to filter their views on green transport investment through their broader ideological and partisan commitments. In contrast, those with little political interest are less likely to have their opinions on transport shaped by their political ideology.

This matters because it means that the loudest voices in public debates tend to be the most politically entrenched. When political interest strengthens the link between ideology and opinion, it can polarise the discussion – turning questions of road design or bus funding into flashpoints for wider ideological battles. As a result, pragmatic compromise becomes harder, and transport policy can get stuck in symbolic conflict rather than being debated on practical or social terms.

An aerial view of a cycle lane next to a row of cars. — Left or right?
Shutterstock/Lenscap Photography

However, if we understand why people oppose green infrastructure projects, we can start to find ways forward. Framing these initiatives purely in terms of collective impacts, such as lowering pollution, rather than private interests may only resonate with people who already support that kind of public investment.

To reach those who are more sceptical of welfare and state intervention, we may need different messaging. Rather than focusing only on social equity or environmental impact, campaigns could highlight individual interests such as how cycle lanes can reduce congestion, cut commuting costs or boost local high streets. These are benefits that don’t necessarily rely on a belief in state intervention to feel relevant or persuasive.

If we want to build broader coalitions of support for green infrastructure, we need to speak to the diverse motivations people have for how they move through their cities.

Joanna Syrda 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. The more in favour of welfare you are, the more likely you are to support cycle lanes – https://theconversation.com/the-more-in-favour-of-welfare-you-are-the-more-likely-you-are-to-support-cycle-lanes-264246