Category: The Conversation – UK

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Stefan Wolff, Professor of International Security, University of Birmingham

Thirty years ago, on December 14 1995, the presidents of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia and the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia signed the Dayton agreement. The treaty ended three years of bloodshed in what was, at the time, the largest war in Europe since 1945.

This distinction is now held by the Russian war against Ukraine. The conflict which began in February 2022 has already lasted longer than the one in Bosnia-Herzegovina and has reportedly led to the death and displacement of millions of people.

The war in Bosnia-Herzegovina happened at a very different time than the war against Ukraine and a very different setting. It was at the end of the cold war, in a fracturing multinational state amid rising nationalism. It started as a civil war rather than an external invasion and it was fought throughout the country’s territory.

Yet despite their differences, there are several eerie parallels between both wars. These are lessons worth considering for how the war against Ukraine might end.

Both wars have a very strong ethnic element, and they both happened in a shifting geopolitical environment. Both wars have had high levels of internationalisation. They were not only fought between the belligerent parties, but indirectly between their supporting allies through the military equipment and support they provided.

The negotiation process that led to the agreement that ended the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina did not just involve the belligerent parties. It also involved “parent” states – Serbia and Croatia – which signed on their behalf. Similarly, but in some ways worse, it seems that any agreement on Ukraine will involve first and foremost the US and Russia. Ukraine and Europe appear set to be excluded.

The war in Bosnia-Herzegovina ended as a result of heavy-handed, US-led mediation at an air force base in Dayton, Ohio. The Dayton mediation effort succeeded after multiple earlier European-led efforts had failed and a UN peacekeeping operation was unable to protect civilians, even in so-called safe areas.

The Dayton accords, as the agreement became known, provided an operational framework that, with all its faults, has managed to keep the country away from violent conflict for 30 years. It has not, however, provided a framework for a functioning state.

The rigid power-sharing structures agreed in Dayton have created frequent political paralysis. Dayton requires key decisions – such as the elections law or on the financing of institutions – to be taken by an international high representative who still holds ultimate authority over Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Nor did the Dayton accords instil much loyalty to the new state. Especially among its Serb population, the desire for breaking away from Bosnia-Herzegovina remains strong. This was clearly evident from the results in the latest presidential elections in the Serbian part of the country on November 23. The candidate who campaigned on a platform for secession won the vote.

What has largely contributed in keeping Bosnia-Herzegovina together is a range of EU actions and funds aiming at maintaining stability. This includes the presence of a UN-mandated European Union peacekeeping force: Eufor Althea.

The clear European commitment to stability in Bosnia-Herzegovina and the western Balkans more broadly is commendable in its endurance. But it is also an indictment of local politicians for failing to establish a self-sustaining peace based on the Dayton accords.

Comparisons with Ukraine

There are a number of lessons that Dayton can offer to efforts to end the war against Ukraine. The first relates to the process of negotiations. In the run-up to the talks, US president Bill Clinton dispatched his national security advisor, Anthony Lake, to Europe to consult extensively with allies.

US leadership in Nato and the clear signal sent to the Bosnian Serbs with operations Deadeye and Deliberate Force, bombing missions which brought the Serbs to the table for negotiations. These were then brought to a successful conclusion by Richard Holbrooke, one of the most gifted diplomats of his generation.

The ceremonial signature event in Paris, three weeks after its initialling in Dayton, gave the agreement additional weight. The three presidents of the warring factions signed under the watchful eyes of the presidents of the US, France and the Council of the EU, as well as the prime ministers of the UK and Russia and the German chancellor.

The sheer extent of the Dayton accords – an agreement with 12 annexes – speaks volumes of the attention to detail. Not all of the original provisions have worked out in the way their drafters may have intended.

But, if nothing else, the military provisions in annex 1A and the subsequent UN-authorised peacekeeping operations, led initially by Nato and then by the EU, provided a robust set of security arrangements. These have been key in deterring any of the parties from defecting from the Dayton accords and contributed to the prevention of renewed large-scale violence in Bosnia.

Most of what made the Dayton accords adoptable, and at least minimally functional, is currently absent from the process to achieve peace in Ukraine.

First, Russia in 2025 is not Serbia in 1995. Where Serbia was already worn out by years of international sanctions, Russia has found ways to minimise their impact.

This is mainly due to the support of allies like China, Iran and North Korea as well as the reluctance by the US president, Donald Trump, to get tough on his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin. Serbia did not have resources, population or strategic depth comparable to what Russia can throw into its war against Ukraine.

Second, western assistance to the wartime Bosnian-Croat alliance was a fraction of what would be necessary to enable Ukraine to achieve a similarly advantageous negotiation position. At this stage, it is not even clear whether US and European support will continue at a level to enable Ukraine to avoid an outright military defeat.

While Ukraine’s defeat on the battlefield is not on the cards immediately, it is a less distant prospect now, given the country’s domestic turmoil, the capriciousness of US engagement under Trump and the weakness of Europe.

The final lesson from Dayton to consider might therefore be that even an imperfect agreement may be preferable to an unending, and likely unwinnable, war.

Stefan Wolff is a past recipient of grant funding from the Natural Environment Research Council of the UK, the United States Institute of Peace, the Economic and Social Research Council of the UK, the British Academy, the NATO Science for Peace Programme, the EU Framework Programmes 6 and 7 and Horizon 2020, as well as the EU’s Jean Monnet Programme. He is a Trustee and Honorary Treasurer of the Political Studies Association of the UK and a Senior Research Fellow at the Foreign Policy Centre in London.

Argyro Kartsonaki has received funding from the German Federal Foreign Office and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE). She is past recipient of grants from the United States Institute of Peace and from the Economic and Social Research Council (UK). She is a part of the Centre for OSCE Research at IFSH, co-editor of OSCE Insights, and consults the OSCE as a member of the OSCE Expert Network.

– ref. Thirty years after the Balkans peace deal, a different US leadership is fumbling the war in Ukraine – https://theconversation.com/thirty-years-after-the-balkans-peace-deal-a-different-us-leadership-is-fumbling-the-war-in-ukraine-270024

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Carolyn Jackson, Professor of Gender and Education, Lancaster University

The UK government has committed to reducing the amount of time pupils spend in GCSE exams in England by up to three hours on average. This comes after recommendations to cut exam time were made in an independent review of the national curriculum and school assessment.

Professor Becky Francis, who led the review, has said: “Exams are currently this very stressful, elongated period that young people have to endure, and it’s an unusually long period in England.”

But the government has announced the introduction of a new test. Children in year eight will take a reading assessment, intended to improve standards before they take their GCSEs. This seems to be different from the diagnostic tests in English and maths (also in year eight) recommended in the independent review’s final report.

Children in England are among the most tested in the world and are set to remain so. However, frequent testing isn’t a requirement of school education – and it could be having a serious effect on children’s wellbeing.

In our recent research, we wanted to explore how frequent, high-stakes exams – those with significant consequences, such as for your future career or education – affect children’s fear of failure. We also investigated whether children see school as competitive, how competitive they are, if they see other students as cooperative and whether they feel like they belong in school.

We analysed data from England and the Belgian region of Flanders, as these regions have very different systems when it comes to testing.

England is renowned for setting lots of tests that are high-stakes for pupils, teachers and schools. GCSE and A-level results affect pupils’ learning and career paths; schools are ranked by performance in tests that children sit in primary and secondary school.

Flanders, on the other hand, has no national high-stakes tests. Indeed, it had no nation-wide centrally-administered tests at all until 2024.

Our analysis used data from Pisa, a programme that measures 15-year-olds’ skills and knowledge in reading, mathematics and science in countries across the globe. Questions are also asked about wellbeing and school life. We analysed the data of the 5,242 English students (in 175 schools) in the assessment, as well as the 4,882 Flemish students (in 171 schools).

Competition and failure

It showed that in England, where high-stakes testing is common, students’ fear of failure is higher and they perceive more competition in school than in Flanders. By contrast, in Flanders, students perceive less competition and more cooperation from other students, and they have a higher sense of belonging and less fear of failure than their English counterparts.

The difference in fear of failure is explained partly by students experiencing more competition in England. For example, English students are more likely to report that their peers value competition and that they feel they are being compared with other students. Research by one of us (Carolyn Jackson) has shown that competition and comparisons are fuelled by testing.

A positive sense of belonging has been linked to better academic performance, positive mental health and wellbeing, greater happiness, less stress, higher attendance and greater engagement in school.

Its value is accepted in England: Bridget Phillipson, secretary for education, recently announced her vision to foster student belonging in schools. But she discussed this at the same time as announcing more testing and related targets. According to our analyses, increased competition, which is associated with high-stakes testing, is likely to reduce rather than increase students’ sense of belonging.

Fear of failure – which is also higher in England – can lead to reduced academic performance. It’s also linked with missed opportunities for learning, lower emotional wellbeing and higher levels of stress, burnout and depression. Fear of failure is typically higher in competitive, rather than cooperative, learning contexts.

Overall, our analyses show the importance of creating education systems (and schools and classrooms) that downplay competition and instead foster cooperation and a sense of belonging. Systems like this are associated with lower fear of failure. Reducing fear of failure is crucial given that it is associated with the broad range of negative factors listed above.

This is especially important at the moment, as school-related stress is a major concern in many European countries. It has been linked to growing mental health problems among young people, especially girls.

Returning to the curriculum review, the panel’s push to reduce time spent in exams at GCSE may help slightly to reduce stress. Also, the recommendation to keep any new tests in year eight low stakes and diagnostic, and not to return to high-stakes Sats tests at this level, is encouraging in light of our findings.

Policymakers in Flanders are increasingly looking to learn lessons from the English system. But they would do well to avoid implementing changes that might increase competition and students’ fear of failure, and also reduce cooperation and feelings of belonging.

Currently, many more students in England than in Flanders report school-related pressure. That could soon change if Flanders introduces high-stakes testing and drives up competition.

Carolyn Jackson has received funding from the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and The Nuffield Foundation.

Mieke Van Houtte 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. High-stakes tests are common in England’s schools – and they’re linked to a fear of failure – https://theconversation.com/high-stakes-tests-are-common-in-englands-schools-and-theyre-linked-to-a-fear-of-failure-269459

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Andrea Piovesan, Lecturer in Psychology, Edge Hill University

Have you ever thought a font looked “friendly” or “elegant”? Or felt that Comic
Sans was somehow unserious? You’re not imagining it.

Typefaces carry personalities, and we react to them more than we realise. My work explores how the shapes of letters can subtly influence our feelings.

When we read, we are not just processing the words. We are also taking in the typeface, which can shape how we interpret a message and even what we think of the person who wrote it.

Researchers demonstrated this in a 2018 study using simulated text conversations. They presented participants with an ambiguous message (for example, “That’s what I do”) and altered the typeface. A cheerful-looking font seemed to encourage readers to interpret the message positively, while a harsher one pushed them toward a more negative reading.

A similar pattern appears in email communication. In a 2014 study, the same email sent in Times New Roman made the sender seem formal and professional, whereas the more playful Kristen ITC made them appear more polite and even more attractive. Just as a voice sets the mood of a conversation, a typeface sets the mood of the page.

Research also shows that we process words more quickly when the typeface matches the meaning we expect. In one experiment, published in 1989, people recognised the word “slow” more quickly when it appeared in Cooper Black, a typeface associated with heaviness and slowness, but took longer when the same word was shown in Palatino Italic, which conveys lightness and speed.

A 2021 study found a similar priming effect in brand logos. After seeing a logo set in a particular typeface, participants were quicker to identify words that matched the qualities suggested by that design. When the style of the lettering aligns with the message, our brains seem to work more efficiently.

But how is that possible?

The answer is a mix of factors. Some qualities are built into the physical features of the typeface. Thick, straight lines signal sturdiness, while curves tend to feel softer or more approachable. Some associations may even have evolutionary roots.

Across a range of studies, people reliably link curved shapes with positivity and angular ones with threat or negativity. A 2016 review of this research traces the pattern back to survival mechanisms.

Sharp, angular forms in the environment can indicate danger, so our visual system has evolved to detect and prioritise them quickly. This bias appears to spill over into our perception of typefaces too, making angular fonts feel harsher or more alarming, while curved ones seem warmer and more pleasant.

Other typeface personalities have been shaped by history and use. Take Times New Roman, originally designed in the 1930s for the British newspaper the Times. Over time, its connection with journalism has become ingrained, making Times New Roman synonymous with professionalism and formality today.

The influence of typefaces becomes even clearer when the wrong choice is made. An example comes from the European organisation for nuclear research, Cern, in 2012 when researchers used Comic Sans to announce the discovery of the Higgs boson (also called the “God particle”).

The decision sparked widespread criticism because Comic Sans is widely seen as playful and informal, hardly befitting one of the most important scientific discoveries of our time.

People who work in design, communication and marketing know this phenomenon well and use it deliberately. Think about the last time you bought a product you couldn’t see inside the box. What persuaded you if the product itself wasn’t visible? Most likely the packaging.

Designers choose typefaces as well as images that communicate the qualities they think you’re looking for.

If you’re searching for screws for a DIY project, you’re more likely to trust packaging set in bold, heavy lettering that signals strength and sturdiness. If you’re choosing a perfume as a gift, a delicate, flourished typeface might suggest elegance and femininity before you’ve even smelled it.

In one 2006 study, people were shown a range of fonts and asked where they would feel appropriate.

Serif typefaces such as Times New Roman and Cambria, which are recognisable by the small finishing strokes at the ends of their letters, were judged most suitable for business documents. Monospaced fonts like Courier New, in which every character takes up the same amount of space, were seen as better suited to technical materials and computer code.

This very article is set in Baskerville, and that’s no accident. Baskerville, like Goudy Old Style and other classic typefaces, tends to be seen as professional, trustworthy and high-quality. Those are the qualities The Conversation aims to convey to its readers. The same principle applies to any professionally designed website. Every typeface has been chosen to create the right impression.

Typefaces can also shape our experience of music. An album cover with rounded letters, for example, can make the music feel more pleasant. Designers also match typefaces to the genre: curvy, playful fonts appear on hippy music covers, conveying joy and peace, while sharp, angular lettering is common on punk albums, signalling anger and aggression.

Sometimes we don’t know exactly why a font feels a certain way. In a 2023 article, I reviewed studies from the past century that asked people to rate how they perceived different typefaces.

This large collection of data revealed some surprising patterns. For example, condensed typefaces, which have letters packed closely together, tend to convey a sense of sadness more than other fonts.

Thick lines reliably signalled strength, but the opposite was not true: thin lines were not consistently judged as weak. Instead, perceptions of weakness were more strongly associated with irregular strokes and high contrast, features common in typefaces that resemble handwriting. Why do they do that? I am afraid I don’t have an answer.

Next time you pick up a book, scroll through a website or glance at a label, take a moment to notice the font. Those subtle lines and curves are doing more than you might think, shaping your experience in subtle ways.

Andrea Piovesan 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. It’s not you – some typefaces feel different – https://theconversation.com/its-not-you-some-typefaces-feel-different-270192

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Allen Gallagher, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Department of Health, University of Bath

The British Museum has ended its controversial 15-year sponsorship with Japan Tobacco International (JTI).

The sponsorship has attracted a lot of criticism in that time. In 2016, 1,000 public health experts wrote an open letter calling for London’s cultural institutions, including the British Museum, to end “morally unacceptable” sponsorship from tobacco sponsors.

Despite this, as reported in both 2023 and 2025 by our Tobacco Control Research Group at the University of Bath, the British Museum had continued to have a close relationship with JTI.

It is therefore welcome news that the UK government has finally intervened to end the partnership. It comes following a freedom of information request from the research and campaign organisation Culture Unstained. This revealed that the Department for Health had raised concerns about the partnership earlier this year to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport, the government department that funds the British Museum. As a result, the museum’s trustees decided not to continue the partnership upon its expiration in September.

This is long overdue. Many other cultural institutions in the UK have already ceased entering into agreements with such companies, given the immense damage tobacco products do to public health.

Tate, for example, stopped accepting all sponsorship from tobacco companies in 1991. The National Gallery, National Portrait Gallery and Victoria and Albert Museum each gradually did the same, leaving The British Museum as the only major UK national art museum still accepting money from a tobacco company.

The British Museum’s director, Nicholas Cullinan, previously argued there needed to be “very good, clear reasons for turning down money that would help keep the British Museum free to the public”.

Ties to a harmful industry

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) became a popular concept in the 1950s. It was originally interpreted as a positive development whereby companies committed resources to further societal gain instead of company profit. By the 1960s, however, more critical interpretations had emerged.

CSR began to be seen as “fundamentally subversive” by business researchers, and now it is commonly interpreted as a mechanism for large corporations to legitimise and consolidate power. For health-harming industries such as tobacco, CSR campaigns can help them “clean” their image by claiming to be investing in society, while simultaneously causing extensive public health harms.

Indeed, sponsoring cultural institutions is a well-documented tobacco industry tactic. Among public health practitioners and researchers, it’s widely seen as part of the industry’s efforts to improve its public image and achieve policy influence.

Viewed in this light, the British Museum’s sponsorship from JTI could be viewed as a deliberate effort by a harmful company to improve its own reputation by exploiting the reputation of a UK cultural institution.

Government funding of the British Museum during its tobacco sponsorship contradicts the world’s first public health treaty. The World Health Organization framework convention on tobacco control was adopted in 2003 and has been signed by over 182 countries and the EU as of 2025.

It aims to protect populations from the harms of tobacco through various measures to reduce tobacco consumption, such as preventing people from starting the habit and protecting them from the harm of secondhand smoke.

Article 5.3 of the treaty aims to protect policymaking from the vested interests of the tobacco industry, given the “fundamental and irreconcilable” conflict between the industry’s commercial interests and public health.

This article and its implementation guidelines stipulate that parties should aim to limit interactions with the tobacco industry. This includes rejecting all partnerships with tobacco companies and curbing their CSR activities.

The government’s financial support of the British Museum, while the museum received JTI sponsorship, was therefore problematic.

The future of sponsorship

Unfortunately, despite the welcome British Museum developments, the tobacco industry continues its connections to other UK cultural institutions. Both the London Philharmonic Orchestra and the Royal Academy of Arts continue to accept JTI sponsorship. Hopefully, the British Museum case will draw the attention of other institutions, encouraging them to follow suit.

Tobacco industry sponsorship of the British Museum has hopefully now become a thing of the past. However, it should be noted that the museum continues to accept sponsorship from other health-harming industries. Its ten-year partnership with oil producer BP, for example, has also come under scrutiny. As with the JTI sponsorship, the British Museum appears behind the curve. Other institutions like the Royal Opera House, National Portrait Gallery and Tate galleries have already cut ties with BP.

Time will tell whether the end of the JTI sponsorship will encourage other cultural institutions to reject tobacco industry sponsorship. We need to remain alert and vigilant regarding current and future partnerships entered into by the British Museum and other UK cultural institutions.

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This article is part of our State of the Arts series. These articles tackle the challenges of the arts and heritage industry – and celebrate the wins, too.

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Allen Gallagher receives funding from Bloomberg Philanthropies as part of the Bloomberg Initiative to Reduce Tobacco Use (www.bloomberg.org).

Duncan Thomas receives funding from Bloomberg Philanthropies as part of the Bloomberg Initiative to Reduce Tobacco Use (www.bloomberg.org).

Sophie Braznell receives funding from Bloomberg Philanthropies as part of the Bloomberg Initiative to Reduce Tobacco Use (www.bloomberg.org).

– ref. Why British Museum has ended 15-year Japan Tobacco deal – and what it means for future partnerships – https://theconversation.com/why-british-museum-has-ended-15-year-japan-tobacco-deal-and-what-it-means-for-future-partnerships-270598

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Louis Bayman, Associate Professor in Department of Film Studies, University of Southampton

Murder has never been as comforting as in the Knives Out series, whose third instalment, Wake Up Dead Man, is out now in cinemas and will be available to stream from December 12 as one of Netflix’s Christmas offerings. It clocks in at nearly two and a half hours of suspense, comedy and enough asides about religion and politics to get any traditional festive arguments going.

Daniel Craig’s quick-witted but laconic southern private investigator Benoit Blanc doesn’t show up until about an hour into proceedings. Narration is handed over instead to Father Jud (Josh O’Connor), a former boxer who became a Catholic priest after killing a man in the ring.

O’Connor carries the film, not to say this winter season more generally in cinemas, occupying the starring role in Kelly Reichardt’s arthouse heist film The Mastermind last month, and The History of Sound which will be out next month.

Father Jud recounts the events leading up to murder in a far-flung parish in upstate New York, where a small group of parishioners have fallen under the unorthodox preachings of the cultish Monsignor Jefferson Wicks (Josh Brolin).

To say much more would risk giving away some of the mystery that Wake Up Dead Man advertises in its title, so let’s just say that the set-up of a priest battling perdition and the weird parishioners he is stuck with make up a cast of characters who each have their reasons for murder.

This potential is amplified by the fiery sermons of the Monsignor, who is less a guiding shepherd to the credulous flock and more a vengeful wolf. He details his vivid fantasies in confession to the cringeing Jud, as the very definition of a loose canon.

Wake Up Dead Man is an engaging comic mystery with an all-star cast, with Craig, O’Connor and Brolin joined by Mila Kunis, Jeremy Renner, Kerry Washington, Andrew Scott and Glenn Close, who hams up the gothic elements of the script with relish. This is a “locked-room mystery”, a genre begun by Edgar Allan Poe’s 1841 short story The Murders in the Rue Morgue, where murder is committed in the apparently impossible conditions of a completely closed room. The film is then not only a whodunnit but a howdunnit.

Wake Up Dead Man is aware of its own literary inspirations, which if they weren’t already clear are listed as the subjects of the parish reading group. The film is set over Easter weekend, but the idea of a good murder has become staple Christmas fare, making it no surprise that Netflix has scheduled this film for the holiday market. But what is it in the genre that makes murder so Christmassy?

Death as a puzzle

Detective fiction is unique in the way it treats death. Unlike horror, it does not dwell on the terrifying vulnerability that is our mortal condition. And unlike the war film, death is not the price for adherence to a civilisational ideal. Nor is there much sense of the sacredness of life, for death in detective fiction is treated less as a tragedy to mourn than a puzzle to solve.

Detective fiction depicts a world where mystery is no longer proof of the ultimately unknowable workings of the divine. Mystery is instead a problem to be met by the calculations of logical deduction. But as the various lustful, greedy characters of detective fiction demonstrate, if rationality provides the only source of meaning, what is there to stop us from pursuing total amoral self-interest? What is there to stop us, indeed, from murder?

The shared narration between detective Blanc and Father Jud means that Wake Up Dead Man becomes an enquiry not only into a murder but the antagonism between reason and God. Blanc states his atheism as soon as he arrives at the church that is now a crime scene. But a heavenly light shines through its windows to brighten its gloom as Father Jud provides his justification for faith.

Wake Up Dead Man nicely satirises how charismatic leaders can elicit the irrational passions of their followers for self-interested ends, but the film is not itself a rejection of belief. Of course, the intensity of a closed setting, where a lifetime of stored resentments, jealousies and greed spill over into brutal hatred, may also be why murder mysteries seem so appropriate at Christmas.

My main disappointment with Wake Up Dead Man is how underused its supporting players are; the ensemble nature of the whodunnit works best when attention is divided among a cast of characters, each of whom could be a potential murderer. But its closing revelations layer twist upon twist with enough force to make for a satisfying ending to an entertaining story.

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Louis Bayman 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. Wake Up Dead Man: an enjoyable slice of murderous Christmassy fun – https://theconversation.com/wake-up-dead-man-an-enjoyable-slice-of-murderous-christmassy-fun-271001

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Gerlinde Bigga, Scientific Coordinator of the Leibniz Science Campus "Geogenomic Archaeology Campus Tübingen", University of Tübingen

The last two decades have seen a revolution in scientists’ ability to reconstruct the past. This has been made possible through technological advances in the way DNA is extracted from ancient bones and analysed.

These advances have revealed that Neanderthals and modern humans interbred – something that wasn’t previously thought to have happened. It has allowed researchers to disentangle the various migrations that shaped modern people. It has also allowed teams to sequence the genomes of extinct animals, such as the mammoth, and extinct agents of disease, such as defunct strains of plague.

While much of this work has been carried out by analysing the physical remains of humans or animals, there is another way to obtain ancient DNA from the environment. Researchers can now extract and sequence DNA (determine the order of “letters” in the molecule) directly from cave sediments rather than relying on bones. This is transforming the field, known as palaeogenetics.

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Read more:
When did kissing evolve and did humans and Neanderthals get off with each other? New research

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Caves can preserve tens of thousands of years of genetic history, providing ideal archives for studying long-term human–ecosystem interactions. The deposits beneath our feet become biological time capsules.

It is something we are exploring here at the Geogenomic Archaeology Campus Tübingen (GACT) in Germany. Analysing DNA from cave sediments allows us to reconstruct who lived in ice age Europe, how ecosystems changed and what role humans played. For example, did modern humans and Neanderthals overlap in the same caves? It’s also possible to obtain genetic material from faeces left in caves. At the moment we are analysing DNA from the droppings of a cave hyena that lived in Europe around 40,000 years ago.

The oldest sediment DNA discovered so far comes from Greenland and is two million years old.

Palaeogenetics has come a long way since the first genome of an extinct animal, the quagga, a close relative of modern zebras, was sequenced in 1984. Over the past two decades, next-generation genetic sequencing machines, laboratory robotics and bioinformatics (the ability to analyse large, complex biological datasets) have turned ancient DNA from a fragile curiosity into a high-throughput scientific tool.

Today, sequencing machines can decode up to a hundred million times more DNA than their early predecessors. Where the first human genome took over a decade to complete, modern laboratories can now sequence hundreds of full human genomes in a single day.

In 2022, the Nobel prize in physiology or medicine was awarded to Svante Pääbo, a leading light in this field. It highlighted the global significance of this research. Ancient DNA now regularly makes headlines, from attempts to recreate mammoth-like elephants, to tracing hundreds of thousands of years of human presence in parts of the world. Crucially, advances in robotics and computing have allowed us to recover DNA from sediments as well as bones.

GACT is a growing research network based in Tübingen, Germany, where three institutions collaborate across disciplines to establish new methods for finding DNA in sediments. Archaeologists, geoscientists, bioinformaticians, microbiologists and ancient-DNA specialists combine their expertise to uncover insights that no single field could achieve alone — a collaboration in which the whole genuinely becomes greater than the sum of its parts.

The network extends well beyond Germany. International partners enable fieldwork in
archaeological cave sites and natural caves all over the world. This summer, for example, the team investigated cave sites in Serbia, collecting several hundred sediment samples for ancient DNA and related ecological analyses. Future work is planned in South Africa and the western United States to test the limits of ancient DNA preservation in sediments from different environments and time periods.

A needle in a haystack

Recovering DNA from sediments sounds simple: take a scoop, extract, sequence. In reality, it is far more complex. The molecules are scarce, degraded and fragmented, and mixed with modern contamination from cave visitors and wildlife. Detecting authentic ice age molecules relies on subtle chemical damage patterns to the DNA itself, ultra-clean laboratories, robotic extraction, and specialised bioinformatics. Every positive identification is a small triumph, revealing patterns invisible to conventional archaeology.

Much of GACT’s work takes place in the caves of the Swabian Jura within Unesco World Heritage sites such as Hohle Fels, home to the world’s oldest musical instruments and figurative art. Neanderthals and Homo sapiens left behind stone artefacts, bones, ivory and sediments that accumulated over tens of millennia. Caves are natural DNA archives, where stable conditions preserve fragile biomolecules, enabling researchers to build up a genetic history of ice age Europe.

One of the most exciting aspects of sediment DNA research is its ability to detect species long gone, even when no bones or artefacts remain. A particular focus lies on humans: who lived in the cave, and when? How modern humans and Neanderthals use the caves and, as mentioned, were they there at the same times? Did cave bears and humans compete for shelter and resources? And what might the microbes that lived alongside them reveal about the impact humans had on past ecosystems?

Sediment DNA also traces life outside the cave. Predators dragged prey into sheltered chambers, humans left waste behind. By following changes in human, animal and microbial DNA over time, researchers can examine ancient extinctions and ecosystem shifts, offering insights relevant to today’s biodiversity crisis.

The work is ambitious: using sedimentary DNA to reconstruct ice age ecosystems and to understand the ecological consequences of human presence. Only two years into GACT, every dataset generates new questions. Every cave layer adds another twist to the story.

With hundreds of samples now being processed, major discoveries lie ahead. Researchers expect soon to detect the first cave bear genomes, the earliest human traces, and complex microbial communities that once thrived in darkness. Will the sediments reveal all their secrets? Time will tell – but the prospects are exhilarating.

Gerlinde Bigga 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. DNA from soil could soon reveal who lived in ice age caves – https://theconversation.com/dna-from-soil-could-soon-reveal-who-lived-in-ice-age-caves-270318

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Alaa Mohasseb, Senior Lecturer in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, University of Portsmouth

For many years, the US company Nvidia shaped the foundations of modern artificial intelligence. Its graphics processing units (GPUs) are a specialised type of computer chip originally designed to handle the processing demands of graphics and animation. But they’re also great for the repetitive calculations required by AI systems.

Thus, these chips have powered the rapid rise of large language models – the technology behind AI chatbots – and they have became the familiar engine behind almost every major AI breakthrough.

This hardware sat quietly in the background while most of the attention was focused on algorithms and data. Google’s decision to train Gemini on its own chips, called tensor processing units (TPUs) changes that picture. It invites the industry to look directly at the machines behind the models and to reconsider assumptions that long seemed fixed.

This moment matters because the scale of AI models has begun to expose the limits
of general purpose chips. As models grow, the demands placed on processing systems
increases to levels that make hidden inefficiencies impossible to ignore.

Google’s reliance on TPUs reveals an industry that is starting to understand that hardware choices are not simply technical preferences but strategic commitments that determine who can lead the next wave of AI development.

Google’s Gemini relies on cloud systems that simplify the challenging task of coordinating devices during large-scale training (improvement) of AI models.

The design of these different chips reflects a fundamental difference in intention. Nvidia’s GPUs are general purpose and flexible enough to run a wide range of tasks. TPUs were created for the narrow mathematical operations at the heart of AI models.

Independent comparisons highlight that TPU v5p pods can outperform high-end Nvidia systems on workloads tuned for Google’s software ecosystem. When the chip architecture, model structure and software stack align so closely, improvements in speed and efficiency become natural rather than forced.

These performance characteristics also reshape how quickly teams can experiment. When hardware works in concert with the models it is designed to train, iteration becomes faster and more scalable. This matters because the ability to test ideas quickly often determines which organisations innovate first.

These technical gains are only one part of the story. Training cutting-edge AI systems is expensive and requires enormous computing resources. Organisations that rely only on GPUs face high costs and increasing competition for supply. By developing and depending on its own hardware, Google gains more control over pricing, availability and long-term strategy.

Analysts have noted that this internal approach positions Google with lower operational costs while reducing dependence on external suppliers for chips. A particularly notable development came from Meta as it explored a multi-billion dollar agreement to use TPU capacity.

When one of the largest consumers of GPUs evaluates a shift toward custom accelerators, it signals more than curiosity. It suggests growing recognition that relying on a single supplier may no longer be the safest or most efficient strategy in an industry where hardware availability shapes competitiveness.

These moves also raise questions about how cloud providers will position themselves. If TPUs become more widely available through Google’s cloud services, the rest of the market may gain access to hardware that was once considered proprietary. The ripple effects could reshape the economics of AI training far beyond Google’s internal research.

What This Means for Nvidia

Financial markets reacted quickly to the news. Nvidia’s stock fell as investors weighed the potential for cloud providers to split their hardware needs across more than one supplier. Even if TPUs do not replace GPUs entirely, their presence introduces competition that may influence pricing and development timelines.

The existence of credible alternatives pressures Nvidia to move faster, refine its offerings and appeal to customers who now see more than one viable path forward.
Even so, Nvidia retains a strong position. Many organisations depend heavily on CUDA (a computing platform and programming model developed by NVidia) and the large ecosystem of tools and workflows built around it.

Moving away from that environment requires significant engineering effort and may not be feasible for many teams. GPUs continue to offer unmatched flexibility for diverse workloads and will remain essential in many contexts.

However, the conversation around hardware has begun to shift. Companies building
cutting-edge AI models are increasingly interested in specialised chips tuned to their exact needs. As models grow larger and more complex, organisations want greater control over the systems that support them. The idea that one chip family can meet every requirement is becoming harder to justify.

Google’s commitment to TPUs for Gemini illustrates this shift clearly. It shows that custom chips can train world-class AI models and that hardware purpose-built for AI is becoming central to future progress.

It also makes visible the growing diversification of AI infrastructure. Nvidia remains dominant, but it now shares the field with alternatives that are increasingly capable of shaping the direction of AI development.

The foundations of AI are becoming more varied and more competitive. Performance
gains will come not only from new model architectures but from the hardware designed to support them.

Google’s TPU strategy marks the beginning of a new phase in which the path forward will be defined by a wider range of chips and by the organisations willing to rethink the assumptions that once held the industry together.

Alaa Mohasseb 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. Google is relying on its own chips for its AI system Gemini. Here’s why that’s a seismic change for the industry – https://theconversation.com/google-is-relying-on-its-own-chips-for-its-ai-system-gemini-heres-why-thats-a-seismic-change-for-the-industry-270818

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Zahida Sultanova, Post Doctoral Research Fellow, School of Biological Sciences, University of East Anglia

The first step on the Moon was one of humanity’s most exciting accomplishments. Now scientists are planning return trips – and dreaming of Mars beyond.

Next year, Nasa’s Artemis II mission will send four astronauts to fly around the Moon to test the spacecraft before future landings. The following year, two astronauts are expected to explore the surface of the Moon for a week as part of Nasa’s Artemis III mission.

And finally, the trip to Mars is planned for the 2030s. But there’s an invisible threat standing in the way: cosmic rays.

When we look at the night sky, we see stars and nearby planets. If we’re lucky enough to live somewhere without light pollution, we might catch meteors sliding across the sky. But cosmic rays – consisting of protons, helium nuclei, heavy ions and electrons – remain hidden. They stream in from exploding stars (galactic cosmic rays) and our very own sun (solar particle events).

They don’t discriminate. These particles carry so much energy and move so fast that they can knock electrons off atoms and disrupt molecular structures of any material. That way, they can damage everything in their path, machines and humans alike.

The Earth’s magnetic field and atmosphere shield us from most of this danger. But outside Earth’s protection, space travellers will be routinely exposed. In deep space, cosmic rays can break DNA strands, disrupt proteins and damage other cellular components, increasing the risk of serious diseases such as cancer.

The research challenge is straightforward: measure how cosmic rays affect living organisms, then design strategies to reduce their damage.

Ideally, scientists would study these effects by sending tissues, organoids (artificially made organ-like structures) or lab animals (such as mice) directly into space. That does happen, but it’s expensive and difficult. A more practical approach is to simulate cosmic radiation on Earth using particle accelerators.

Cosmic ray simulators in the US and Germany expose tissues, plants and animals to different components of cosmic rays in sequence. A new international accelerator facility being built in Germany will reach even higher energies, matching levels found in space that have never been tested on living organisms.

But these simulations aren’t fully realistic. Many experiments deliver the entire mission dose in a single treatment. This is like using a tsunami to study the effects of rain.

In real space, cosmic rays arrive as a mixture of high-energy particles hitting simultaneously, not one type at a time. My colleagues and I have suggested building a multi-branch accelerator that could fire several tuneable particle beams at once, recreating the mixed radiation of deep space under controlled laboratory conditions. For now, though, this kind of facility exists only as a proposal.

Beyond better testing, we need better protection. Physical shields seem like the obvious first defence. Hydrogen-rich materials such as polyethylene and water-absorbing hydrogels can slow charged particles. Although they are used, or planned to be used, as spacecraft materials, their benefits are limited.

Particularly galactic cosmic rays, the ones that arrive from far exploding stars, are so energetic that they can penetrate through physical shielding. They can even generate secondary radiation that increases exposure. So, effective protection by using solely physical shields remains a major challenge.

Nature’s armour

That’s why scientists are exploring biological strategies. One approach is to use antioxidants. These molecules can protect DNA from harmful chemicals that are produced when cosmic rays hit living cells.

Supplementing with CDDO-EA, a synthetic antioxidant, reduces cognitive damage caused by simulated cosmic radiation in female mice. In the study, mice exposed to simulated cosmic radiation learned a simple task more slowly compared to unexposed mice. However, mice that received the synthetic antioxidant performed normally despite being exposed to simulated cosmic radiation.

Another approach involves learning from organisms with extraordinary abilities. Hibernating organisms become more resistant to radiation during hibernation. The mechanisms on how hibernation protects from radiation are not fully understood yet. Still, inducing hibernation-like conditions in non-hibernating animals is possible and can make them more radioresistant.

Tardigrades – microscopic creatures also known as water bears – are also extremely radioresistant, especially when dehydrated. Although we can’t hibernate or dehydrate astronauts, the strategies these organisms use to protect cellular components might help us preserve other organisms during long space journeys.

Microbes, seeds, simple food sources and even animals that could later become our companions might be kept in a protected state for a while. Under calmer conditions, they could then be brought back to full activity. Therefore, understanding and harnessing these protective mechanisms could prove crucial for future space journeys.

A third strategy focuses on supporting organisms’ own stress responses. Stressors on Earth, such as starvation or heat, have driven organisms to evolve cellular defences that protect DNA and other cellular components. In a recent preprint (a paper that is yet to be peer reviewed), my colleague and I suggest that activating these mechanisms through specific diets or drugs may offer additional protection in space.

Physical shields alone won’t be enough. But with biological strategies, more experiments in space and on Earth, and the construction of new dedicated accelerator complexes, humanity is getting closer to making routine space travel a reality. With current speed, we are probably decades away from fully solving cosmic-ray protection. Greater investment in space radiation research could shorten that timeline.

The ultimate goal is to journey beyond Earth’s protective bubble without the constant threat of invisible, high-energy particles damaging our bodies and our spacecraft.

Dr. Zahida Sultanova works for the University of East Anglia and is funded by the Leverhulme Trust. She is a member of European Society of Evolutionary Biology (ESEB) and Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Society of Turkey (EkoEvo).

– ref. Before trips to Mars, we need better protection from cosmic rays – https://theconversation.com/before-trips-to-mars-we-need-better-protection-from-cosmic-rays-268934

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Philip Murphy, Director of History & Policy at the Institute of Historical Research and Professor of British and Commonwealth History, School of Advanced Study, University of London

I sometimes think that my teenage fascination with the Beatles is what drew me to becoming a professional historian. Piecing together what I could find out about them in the years before the internet was a sort of gateway to the history of Britain and the world in the decade in which I was born – Carnaby Street, the Vietnam War, Richard Nixon and counter-cultural figures like Timothy Leary.

The original Beatles Anthology released in 1995 in the form of three albums and a documentary series was undoubtedly a treat for Beatles fans. Recently an updated version of the Anthology arrived in the shops. The new release includes a fourth CD of unreleased tracks.

It is always thrilling to hear iconic tracks at an earlier stage of their gestation. And this is essentially what the recently released additional material offers. However, the true obsessives among us have heard much of the Anthology material from bootleg collections. What does remain as hard to come by as ever are some of the films.

At a time when a fan had to be grateful for what they were given, I can still remember the excitement of learning that the BBC was planning to show all the band’s films over the Christmas of 1979. If we are, indeed, in the “barrel-scraping” phase, as one critic dubbed the new Anthology, of Beatles commemoration, it is surprising how difficult it now is to access some of those films.

In the last ten years some work has done to make some of the films more accessible. The band’s first movie, A Hard Day’s Night (1964), directed by Richard Lester, was re-released in cinemas in 2014 to mark its 50th anniversary. It is currently available on the BFI’s streaming service.

Their swan-song film, Let it Be (1970) was remastered for Disney+ in 2024 by Peter Jackson. Jackson had previously spliced together hours of unused footage from director Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s original recording sessions to create the 2021 documentary Get Back.

Although some are yet to be remastered. The band’s 1968 well-regarded animated movie Yellow Submarine, is still awaiting an authorised re-release, although no doubt this will come. Their dismal 1967 BBC Christmas special Magical Mystery Tour was notoriously dead-on-arrival and if there are commercial reasons for resuscitating it, there certainly aren’t any artistic ones.

But what about Help! (1965), the band’s second outing with Richard Lester? The film’s madcap plot involves the group being chased around the globe by the comically inept members of a religious cult keen to recover a sacred ring from the finger of the band’s drummer, Ringo Starr.

It is a far more accomplished piece of filmmaking than Magical Mystery Tour. Indeed, it was in many ways ground-breaking for pioneering the music video format and rock musicals. But the last DVD release of the movie was a 2007 two-disc set.

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Read more:
Anthology 4 shows there’s still more to discover about the Beatles

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The reason why the film has missed out on more recent celebratory repackaging isn’t difficult to surmise: it features three familiar European character actors – Leo McKern, Eleanor Bron and John Bluthal – adopting “brown-face” to portray Indian cult members. And their quest for the ring is in order to enable them to carry out a human sacrifice. No mention is made of any of this in the documentary series that accompanied the Anthology recordings, and which has also been re-released.

As the 1960s progressed, these sorts of crude orientalist stereotypes faced parody and criticism. But apologists for the movie would struggle to demonstrate that Help! is doing anything other than reinforcing those attitudes. Some contemporary critics have simply labelled it as racist.

I wonder if an attempt could be made to salvage Help! by re-releasing it with its own documentary package exploring the historical context of the film. If the choice is probably between either contextualisation or simply allowing the movie to languish in the far-corners of eBay to avoid offending global consumers, then I think we should go for the former.

While it would be difficult to make Help! genuinely palatable to contemporary viewers, it could be used as the starting point for a fascinating exploration of the ways in which Britain in the Swinging Sixties viewed its colonial past.

Some of the era’s more radical writers and filmmakers like Edward Bond and Tony Richardson were keen to question the values of their parents’ generation. But as Help! demonstrates, imperial assumptions of white racial superiority continued to permeate popular culture, not least in the area of comedy.

If the Beatles of 1965 had passively accepted the plot of Help!, the Beatles of the late 60s would almost certainly have baulked at it. George Harrison famously embraced Indian music, culture and religion. John Lennon would subsequently feature in another Richard Lester film, How I Won the War (1967), which mocked British jingoism and its rigid class system.

A year later, Lennon had to face racist abuse from the British press and fans when he left his wife for the Japanese artist, Yoko Ono. Also, the track Commonwealth, which surfaced in the 2021 documentary Get Back, is an improvisation satirising Enoch Powell’s Rivers of Blood speech, which was held responsible for inspiring a spate of racist attacks.

The Beatles were on a journey, and Help! deserves to be seen and discussed as part of that journey, rather than being hidden away.

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Philip Murphy has received funding from the AHRC and is a member of the European Movement UK.

– ref. The Beatles’ movie Help! featured crude racial stereotypes – but it shouldn’t be hidden away – https://theconversation.com/the-beatles-movie-help-featured-crude-racial-stereotypes-but-it-shouldnt-be-hidden-away-270526

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Anna Walker, Senior Arts + Culture Editor, The Conversation

Jane Austen’s Paper Trail is a podcast from The Conversation celebrating 250 years since the author’s birth. In each episode, we’ll be investigating a different aspect of Austen’s personality by interrogating one of her novels with leading researchers. Along the way, we’ll visit locations important to Austen to uncover a particular aspect of her life and the times she lived in. In episode 5, we look what kind of author Austen was, and what we can learn about her view of her profession through the pages of Northanger Abbey.

From a young age Jane Austen harboured lofty writerly ambitions. Her early works, known as juvenilia, are diverse in subject matter, reflecting her wide reading taste. As well as stories that parody some of her favourite novels, such as The History of Sir Charles Grandison by Samuel Richardson (1753), there are also witty takes on the essays of British politician Joseph Addison and writer Samuel Johnson, the author of the first English dictionary.

She even tried writing her own history of England. In this short text, 15-year-old Austen proudly declares herself a “partial, prejudiced and ignorant Historian”, eschewing dates and presenting information from historical fiction, such as Shakespeare’s plays, as fact.

Though she was always a writer, she wasn’t a published one until Sense and Sensibility appeared in 1811. By her death in 1817, Austen had published four of her six novels and earned nearly £700 – a modest fortune, but enough to grant a measure of independence to an unmarried woman otherwise reliant on her brothers.

Yet Austen’s grave in Winchester Cathedral, makes no mention that she was a writer. Publishing anonymously and disliking literary celebrity, she remained largely unknown as a writer in her lifetime despite occasional, reluctant contact with London’s literary circles.

Her fifth novel, Northanger Abbey – written in 1799 but published posthumously – clearly reveals her views on writing and reading books. It follows Catherine Morland, whose love of gothic fiction warps her sense of reality. It brims with Austen’s defence of the novel, dismissed at the time as frivolous women’s entertainment. It also reflects her juvenilia in its parody of gothic fiction – a genre Austen loved deeply, which is reflected in the bookshelves at her home in Chawton.

In the fifth episode of Jane Austen’s Paper Trail, Naomi Joseph visits Jane Austen’s House in Hampshire with Louise Curran, lecturer in 18th-century and Romantic literature. Curran is an expert in letter writing, the development of the novel and literary celebrity.

In the lovely red brick cottage where Austen wrote and revised all six of her novels, Curran explains why Austen shied away from the limelight: “You can sort of see it in the kind of writer she is, I guess. I think there is that tension for her really writing the kinds of novels that she wanted to write, that took, as she famously put it, those three and four families in a country village, and are involved with those sort of little matters.”

Later on, Anna Walker sits down with two more Austen experts – Kathryn Sutherland, emeritus professor of English at the University of Oxford, and Anthony Mandal, a lecturer in English literature at Cardiff University – to discover what Northanger Abbey reveals of Austen’s professional life.

As Mandal explains: “The decade [Austen] was publishing in was a heyday for women’s fiction. It was a period when women outnumbered men as novelists … but the reputation of the novel was really low. It was seen as this kind of distracting form of writing, and particularly of reading. It was a waste of time. It stopped you from being a dutiful daughter or wife or mother.”

Austen wasn’t convinced. Sutherland explains that the writer was “hugely ambitious for her own talent and she saw the novel as a moral force as well as a form of entertainment. And that’s essentially what Northanger Abbey is about … the power of the novel both to lead you into misinterpretation, but ultimately, if you become a good reader, to lead you into a wise judgement of the world around you.”

Listen to episode five of Jane Austen’s Paper Trail wherever you get your podcasts. And if you’re craving more Austen, check out our Jane Austen 250 page for more expert articles celebrating the anniversary.

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Disclosure statement
Kathryn Sutherland, Louise Curran and Anthony Mandal do 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.

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Jane Austen’s Paper Trail is hosted by Anna Walker with reporting from Jane Wright and Naomi Joseph. Senior producer and sound designer is Eloise Stevens and the executive producer is Gemma Ware. Artwork by Alice Mason and Naomi Joseph.

Listen to The Conversation Weekly via any of the apps listed above, download it directly via our RSS feed or find out how else to listen here.

– ref. Jane Austen shunned literary fame – but transformed the novel from the shadows – https://theconversation.com/jane-austen-shunned-literary-fame-but-transformed-the-novel-from-the-shadows-270590