Category: MIL-OSI

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Adam Taylor, Professor of Anatomy, Lancaster University

Celebrity outfits and endorsements often dominate social media, but Elton John recently drew attention for a very different reason. The musician has been spotted wearing jewellery made from his own kneecaps.

After a double knee replacement in 2024, he asked his surgeon if he could keep his patellae, the bones at the front of the knee, and later worked with jeweller Theo Fennell to turn them into wearable pieces.

While jewellery made from kneecaps is unusual, it raises a broader question: what happens to tissue once it leaves the body, and why do some people want to keep it?

Elton is not alone in wanting to hold on to parts of the body. Many people keep baby teeth or their children’s first lost tooth as sentimental objects. Social media is also full of stories about people preserving removed tonsils, adenoids, an appendix, or a newborn’s umbilical stump. Some of these are biologically inert keepsakes. Others carry medical and safety considerations.

In most cases, tissue removed during surgery is handled very differently. It is usually sent to a laboratory for testing, known as pathology, to confirm a diagnosis or check for disease. After that, it must be disposed of safely as clinical waste because it can carry biological risks. It is now relatively uncommon for patients to keep surgically removed tissue.

Handling human tissue can pose risks, especially for professionals working in operating theatres or pathology labs with unfixed tissue. “Unfixed” means the tissue has not been treated with chemicals to preserve it and kill microbes. Healthcare staff who use needles or sharp instruments are particularly vulnerable to exposure to blood-borne viruses such as hepatitis or HIV. Depending on the source, other pathogens may also be present, for example respiratory microbes in lung tissue.

Some keepsakes fall somewhere between harmless and medically relevant. Parents sometimes keep the umbilical stump after a baby is born. This small piece of tissue dries up and falls off naturally, usually within the first couple of weeks. If it is not kept clean and dry, it can become infected with a condition called omphalitis, meaning inflammation and infection of the stump.

Placenta

The most debated example of keeping human tissue comes after childbirth. Following delivery of the baby, the placenta is also delivered. This temporary organ connects the developing foetus to the uterus and acts as an interface for exchange of oxygen, nutrients and waste products between mother and baby, while keeping their blood supplies separate to prevent immune rejection and blood incompatibility.

Some people choose not only to keep the placenta but to consume it, a practice known as placentophagy. The idea comes from the belief that because the placenta nourishes the foetus during pregnancy, it must contain nutrients that can help the mother recover after birth. During pregnancy, nutrients such as calcium are transferred to the developing baby, and mothers can lose close to 4% of their bone mineral density. However, most nutrients stored in the placenta have already been passed to the foetus before birth.

Claims about the benefits of placentophagy are not strongly supported by scientific evidence. The nutrients present in placental tissue can generally be obtained through a balanced meal. Research in animal models has shown some positive effects, and similar findings have been reported in those studies, but these results have not been reproduced in humans.

People consume the placenta in various ways. It may be blended raw into smoothies, cooked into foods such as lasagne, steeped in high-strength alcohol to create a tincture, or dried and made into capsules, which is the most common approach, known as encapsulation.

Health risks

But there are also potential health risks. The placenta contains elevated levels of oestrogen, and high concentrations of this hormone in the bloodstream can increase the risk of thromboembolism, a condition in which blood clots form and travel through the circulation.

The placenta also acts as a filter during pregnancy, limiting the transfer of certain substances to the baby. Studies show that some heavy metals and other ions can accumulate in placental tissue, meaning levels may be higher in the placenta than elsewhere in the body.

In 2017, the CDC reported a case in which a baby developed repeated infections with group B Streptococcus agalactiae, a bacterium commonly found in the gut or vagina. Investigators traced the source of the infection to the mother consuming placenta capsules contaminated with the same bacterium. The process used to produce capsules reduces bacterial levels but does not completely remove them in all cases. Eating the placenta raw carries even greater risks, including exposure to bacteria such as E.coli.

Many animals eat their placentas after giving birth, largely to remove evidence that could attract predators and to reclaim nutrients. For humans, those same nutrients are easily obtained from a normal diet, and the medical benefits remain uncertain. At present, more robust studies are needed to determine whether placentophagy offers any genuine health advantages.

Whether transformed into jewellery, kept in a memory box or blended into a smoothie, once tissue leaves the body it moves from the personal and sentimental into the medical and biological. The meanings people attach to it vary widely, but the scientific questions about safety, benefit and risk remain the same.

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

– ref. From kneecap necklaces to umbilical cord keepsakes: the risks of keeping and consuming human tissue – https://theconversation.com/from-kneecap-necklaces-to-umbilical-cord-keepsakes-the-risks-of-keeping-and-consuming-human-tissue-276470

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Daniele D’Alvia, Lecturer in Banking and Finance Law, Queen Mary University of London

When a conflict escalates, financial markets respond within minutes. That reaction is not just panic or speculation – it is a kind of collective judgement about what might happen next.

Tensions involving the US, Israel and Iran triggered a sharp jump in oil prices when Asian markets opened on Monday (rising by as much as 13% amid fears of supply disruption). Major Gulf indices fell steeply, and in some cases trading was suspended amid volatility.

At the same time, investors moved into so-called “safe-haven” assets. Gold prices rose, and demand increased for traditionally defensive currencies such as the US dollar and Swiss franc.

This may sound like distant noise or random financial moves. In reality though, it is one of the clearest signals we have about how serious investors think the situation with Iran could become.

Markets are forward-looking. They do not only react to what has happened – they try to price what they expect will happen. Here’s how to read the signals.

Oil: the first warning light

Oil is usually the first market to move during Middle East tensions. That is because the region plays a crucial role in the global supply of energy. A particular point of concern is the strait of Hormuz, a narrow shipping route through which roughly a fifth of the world’s oil exports pass.

When oil prices jump, it does not mean supply has already stopped. It means traders believe there is a higher risk that supply could be disrupted.

Think of it like insurance. If the risk of damage rises, the price of insurance goes up immediately – even if no damage has yet occurred. Oil markets work in a similar way. Prices reflect the probability of trouble.

Why does this matter? Because oil affects almost everything. Higher oil prices push up fuel costs. Fuel affects transport. Transport affects food prices and goods on supermarket shelves. If oil remains expensive for weeks or months, it can push inflation higher.

So when oil spikes, markets are signalling that they see real economic risk – not just political drama.

At present, the scale of the oil move suggests markets are seriously reassessing the probability of disruption. The crucial question is persistence. If prices stabilise quickly, investors may believe escalation will be contained. If they remain elevated, markets are signalling expectations of prolonged instability.

Bonds: investors looking for safety

The second place to look is the bond market. A bond is essentially a loan. When you buy a government bond, you are lending money to a government in exchange for interest. US government bonds (Treasuries) are widely seen as one of the safest investments in the world.

In times of uncertainty, investors often move their money into these safer assets. This is known as “flight to safety”. When many people buy bonds at once, bond prices go up and their yields (the interest rate that is paid) go down.

You don’t need to follow bond charts every day to understand the message. If investors are accepting lower returns just to keep their money safe, it tells us they are worried.

If oil prices are rising while investors are piling into safe government bonds, markets may be signalling two concerns at the same time: higher short-term prices and weaker economic growth ahead. That is a difficult combination for any economy. Bond markets, in other words, are measuring anxiety.

Stock markets: how long will this last?

Stock markets reflect confidence in companies and economic growth. When shares fall sharply, it often means investors expect profits to be squeezed or business conditions to worsen. But the key issue is duration.

If stock markets fall briefly and then stabilise, investors may believe the conflict will be contained. If losses spread and persist, it suggests markets expect a longer or more disruptive episode.

Markets are not predicting headlines. They are estimating how long uncertainty might last and how deeply it might affect trade, energy supplies and consumer confidence.

Modern financial markets are highly interconnected. A shock in one region can ripple quickly across continents because supply chains, investment funds and large companies operate globally. That is why even a regional conflict can affect pension funds and savings accounts elsewhere.

Equity markets are not judging politics. They are estimating economic consequences.

What this means for markets – and for the conflict

Taken together, oil, bonds and equities provide a temperature check of expectations. Right now, markets are clearly pricing higher geopolitical risk. The sharp initial oil move shows concern about supply. The shift towards safer assets signals caution. Equity volatility reflects uncertainty about the duration of the conflict.

However, markets are not yet behaving as though they expect a systemic global crisis. We are seeing repricing – not collapse. That distinction matters.

As a finance expert, I believe markets are acting as early warning systems. If escalation of the conflict threatens to cause sustained disruption to energy infrastructure or shipping routes, we would expect the oil price to stay elevated, continued safe-haven flows and broader equity declines.

That would tighten financial conditions globally because higher energy prices push up inflation, falling stock markets reduce household wealth and confidence, and increased demand for safe assets raises borrowing costs for business and governments. In other words, credit becomes more expensive, investment decisions are delayed and consumers become cautious. This could slow economic growth.

If, however, tensions stabilise or de-escalate, markets may reverse quickly. Financial systems adjust rapidly when perceptions of risk change.

The broader implication is that modern conflicts transmit economic effects almost instantly through markets. Even before physical supply chains are interrupted, expectations alone can influence inflation, investment and policy decisions.

Markets do not determine the course of a conflict. But they shape the economic environment in which political decisions are made. For now, they are signalling caution – not panic. Whether that caution turns into something more severe will depend less on today’s headlines and more on whether disruption proves temporary or structural. That is what investors are watching. And it is what we should be watching too.

Daniele D’Alvia 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. What oil, stocks and bonds are telling us about the Iran conflict and how long it might last – https://theconversation.com/what-oil-stocks-and-bonds-are-telling-us-about-the-iran-conflict-and-how-long-it-might-last-277326

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Sophie Bartlett, Research Associate in Administrative Data Research Wales, Cardiff University

Concerns about living in a “post-truth” society – where evidence struggles to compete with misinformation, ideology and emotion – are now familiar. From vaccine hesitancy to climate change denial, public debates increasingly hinge not on a lack of information, but on how people judge evidence, expertise and uncertainty.

These concerns are often framed as a problem of facts. But a deeper issue may be at play – whether people have the skills to weigh competing claims, understand uncertainty and decide what counts as good evidence. Our new research suggests that science education could play a far bigger role in shaping those skills than is usually recognised.

Many philosophers and educationalists have argued that education plays a central role in preparing citizens to navigate an uncertain world. Today, organisations such as Unesco, the UN body for education, science and culture, are grappling with how schools and universities can respond to rising misinformation and declining trust in expertise. Higher education institutions and academics are attempting to find practical solutions to this challenge. Public concern often focuses on people rejecting scientific conclusions outright.

But the deeper challenge is epistemic: difficulty judging what counts as good evidence, how confident we should be in claims and when disagreement is legitimate rather than conspiratorial.

Our findings suggest science education – even for students who go on to study non-science subjects – may be crucial in shaping these abilities.

Using linked administrative data from more than 8,000 pupils in the UK, we examined achievement in GCSE science at age 15. We then looked at how this related to outcomes in the six most popular post-16 subjects: maths, biology, history, chemistry, English literature and physics.

Some results were expected. Students who achieved the equivalent of an A or A* in GCSE science were significantly more likely to go on to gain strong grades in science A-levels. But what surprised us was how far this effect extended beyond science.

Read more:
Post-truth politics and why the antidote isn’t simply ‘fact-checking’ and truth

High-achieving GCSE science students were more likely to achieve higher grades in every one of the six subjects we studied, including humanities. Even more strikingly, GCSE science turned out to be a stronger predictor of later success in history and English literature than GCSE maths. It was also a stronger predictor of success in history than GCSE English language (or Welsh language in Wales).

That matters because GCSE English language and maths are routinely used as determinants for post-16 education. Science rarely is. For decades, maths and English have been treated as the foundations of academic progress and employability. Science, by contrast, has often been justified mainly in economic terms – as a way to produce future scientists and fuel innovation.

Our findings suggest something broader is going on.

What is science education really doing?

Science education appears to be doing more than teaching just subject knowledge. It seems to help develop transferable ways of thinking that support learning across disciplines.

Educational researchers have long argued that science classrooms cultivate skills such as evaluating evidence, reasoning about cause and effect, handling uncertainty and distinguishing claims from data. In a world shaped by science and technology, these abilities increasingly matter in almost every career, and in everyday civic life.

Success in science at age 15 seems to signal – or help build – forms of reasoning that support later achievement. These skills matter in subjects like history and English, where students must weigh sources, construct arguments and interpret complex information.

This fits with wider research showing that scientific reasoning is linked to better judgement of misinformation. It is also associated with a stronger grasp of risk and probability, and a more nuanced engagement with expert disagreement. In a post-truth context, these skills may be just as important as subject-specific knowledge.

Implications for a post-truth society

This has implications for how science is taught and defended. If science education really does foster transferable ways of reasoning, curricula that prioritise experimentation, argumentation and uncertainty may matter more.

So too does teaching the nature of scientific knowledge, rather than relying on rote learning. Reducing science to memorisation risks stripping away precisely the features that seem to deliver long-term benefits.

Our findings also raise broader questions. How explicitly are these forms of reasoning made visible to students? Are assessments capturing them? And could non-science subjects draw more directly on the epistemic practices that science helps to cultivate?

Science education may need to do more to articulate its connections to other disciplines. History, English and other subjects may benefit from making shared ways of thinking more explicit.

In an increasingly polarised, misinformation-rich public sphere, the value of science education should not be judged solely by how many future scientists it produces. Our research suggests its influence is wider and longer-lasting: helping young people develop tools for thinking that support learning and judgement across many areas of life.

If we are serious about addressing the challenges of a post-truth society, science classrooms may be one of our most important – and underappreciated – starting points.

Sophie Bartlett receives funding from the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), grant reference: ES/W012227/1, and is part of Administrative Data Research (ADR) Wales.

Chris Taylor receives funding from ESRC (Grant number ES/W012227/1) and Welsh Government.

– ref. Why science GCSEs matter more than we think in a post-truth age – https://theconversation.com/why-science-gcses-matter-more-than-we-think-in-a-post-truth-age-276306

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Katie Edwards, Commissioning Editor, Health + Medicine and Host of Strange Health podcast, The Conversation

Light therapy sounds wholesome. Clean. Almost pastoral. Sit in front of a lamp. Feel better.

In our latest episode of the Strange Health podcast, we discovered that it can also mean strapping on a flashing mask and watching your own brain generate kaleidoscopic hallucinations behind closed eyelids.

The spark for this episode was a stroboscopic light device called the Lumenate Nova, promoted on social media by celebrities including Jennifer Aniston and Rosamund Pike, who serves as the brand’s creative director and is also an investor. The device claims to use carefully timed pulses of light to guide users into altered, meditative states, described by the company as “sober tripping”.

I was sceptical but gave it a go. “Sober tripping” sounded like a level of experimentation I could live with.

After watching what looked like brightly coloured fireworks, I eventually felt as if I were surrounded by a mountainscape, basking in a warm ray of sunshine coming from the left side of my vision. I had to remind myself I was on my sofa in Doncaster at 7pm. There was no sun.

The visions quietened my usually chatterbox brain. For 15 minutes, that alone felt like relief.

So what is actually happening? Stroboscopic light delivers rhythmic pulses that pass through the eyelids and stimulate the retina. When those flashes align with rhythms the visual system naturally oscillates at, including alpha-range activity, signals in the visual cortex begin to synchronise with the pattern. The result can be surprisingly vivid: spirals, tunnels, lattices, shifting colours and, for some people, more complex scenes with recognisable shapes and places.

The brain is constantly predicting what it expects to see. It breaks visual input into edges, colour and movement, then rebuilds it into the seamless scene we experience. When rhythmic light disrupts those patterns, the brain tries to make sense of the signals. Sometimes that means geometry. Sometimes it feels like landscapes.

We spoke to David Schwartzman, a research fellow at the Sussex Centre for Consciousness Science at the University of Sussex, who has been studying these effects for more than a decade. He describes stroboscopic hallucinations as a controllable way to explore how the brain constructs visual experience. They offer a glimpse of the underlying machinery of perception rather than a treatment in themselves.

Interest in stroboscopic light is not new. In 1819, the Czech anatomist Jan Purkyně described geometric patterns seen when moving his fingers in front of a candle with eyes closed. In the 1960s, artists Brion Gysin and Ian Sommerville built the “Dreamachine”, a spinning cylinder designed to induce altered states without drugs.

More recently, a large public installation called Dreamachine toured the UK in 2022, allowing tens of thousands of people to lie inside a purpose-built structure and experience synchronised light and sound. Participants reported everything from gentle patterning to overwhelming geometric worlds.

But what about the health claims? The phrase “light therapy” now covers very different technologies. Some regulate sleep and mood. Others aim to alter perception itself. Bright light therapy is well established for seasonal affective disorder (SAD). Used correctly, typically in the morning at prescribed intensities, it can help regulate circadian rhythms and improve mood in some people. That is different from stroboscopic stimulation, which targets visual perception rather than sleep-wake cycles.

Read more:
How light can shift your mood and mental health

Research into strobe-based interventions for depression is ongoing. Early studies are exploring safety, tolerability and whether the immersive experience might influence mood in ways researchers are beginning to compare with psychedelic-assisted therapy. It is promising, but not yet a standard treatment.

There are also experimental trials using 40 hertz flickering light in Alzheimer’s disease, based on the idea that synchronising brain rhythms could influence disease processes. This approach remains in clinical testing and is not an established therapy.

There are risks. Flashing lights can trigger seizures in people with photosensitive epilepsy, although only a small proportion of people with epilepsy are photosensitive. Even in people without epilepsy, intense exposure can cause discomfort, headaches or nausea. Dose, brightness and individual sensitivity matter. People with epilepsy or migraine disorders may be advised to avoid stroboscopic devices.

Light can be therapeutic. It can also overwhelm. From SAD lamps to UV treatment for psoriasis and neonatal jaundice, light is powerful biology, but it is not automatically benign.

Strange Health is hosted by Katie Edwards and Dan Baumgardt. The executive producer is Gemma Ware, with video and sound editing for this episode by Anouk Millet. Artwork by Alice Mason.

Listen to Strange Health via any of the apps listed above, download it directly via our RSS feed or find out how else to listen here. A transcript is available via the Apple Podcasts or Spotify apps.

David Schwartzman receives funding from the Medical Research Council (UKRI083) and was partly supported by a grant from the UK Government for his participation in the Dreamachine Programme, as part of Unboxed2022. Katie Edwards received a Lumenate Nova device as a PR sample for editorial use in this episode.

Dan Baumgardt 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. Can flashing light alter your mind? The science of stroboscopic stimulation – https://theconversation.com/can-flashing-light-alter-your-mind-the-science-of-stroboscopic-stimulation-276034