Category: The Conversation – UK

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Maria C. Scott, Associate Professor of French Literature and Thought, University of Exeter

In May 2025, I came across an extraordinary photograph on the English Wikipedia site devoted to Jeanne Duval. Duval was the supposedly un-photographed Haiti-born long-term mistress and muse of the French poet Charles Baudelaire.

The portrait, showing a seated woman dressed in fine, bourgeois clothing, had been posted to Wikipedia by a student of art historian Justine de Young. De Young writes about the portrait as an example of self-fashioning in her recent book, The Art of Parisian Chic.

Printed on a small carte de visite (a photographic visiting card) and bearing the date August 18 1862, the image had been discovered in the French archives by a different researcher, as mentioned in my recent TLS article, and documented online by her in 2021.

Duval fascinates many feminist and postcolonial scholars, partly because of how little is known about her. Intrigued, I visited the archives myself last summer to see the image. There, I noticed a second carte de visite sitting beside the first. It bore the same name, Jeanne, the same date, and was from the same photography studio – the Atelier Nadar. The two cards had been entered on the legal deposit register as “idem” (the same).

This second Jeanne was standing, in an unusually rigid pose for a photograph of this type. She was wearing an off-the-shoulder evening gown, and her hair was hanging straight, dressed with a simple hair band.

A high-resolution digital version revealed strong resemblances to the sitter in the first photograph, similarities that had not been immediately obvious from the small cards. The pictures showed a similar hairline, forehead blemish and ring on the same finger. Clearly, if the first photograph was of Duval, then this one was too.

Particularly interesting, however, was the crucifix sitting on the collarbone, and the large earrings. Similar jewellery is worn by the sitter in Edouard Manet’s portrait Lady with a Fan (1862), also known as Baudelaire’s Mistress, Reclining. The latter title had been inscribed on the back of the painting at some point either during or prior to the posthumous inventory of the artist’s studio.

The sitter’s awkward pose and inscrutable facial expression have often been understood to point to the hardship and sickness that Duval was enduring at the time. She was in dire financial straits and had been experiencing paralysis on her right side since a stroke in 1859. However, the identification of Manet’s sitter as Duval is sometimes disputed by scholars, for a few reasons.

The card portrait of standing “Jeanne”, made the same year as both the oil portrait and its watercolour study, shows very similar facial features, expression and shadowing. Art historians Griselda Pollock and Therese Dolan have speculated that Manet worked from a photograph or carte de visite of Duval for Lady with a Fan. The links between the photograph of standing Jeanne and Manet’s oil and watercolour portraits appear to confirm Duval as the subject of both the paintings (watercolour and oil) and of both photographs.

Why were these photographs taken?

Was Duval, therefore, modelling for Manet, in these photographs? It should be noted that Manet, Félix Nadar (the owner of the photography studio) and Baudelaire were all close friends, and that Duval had separated from the poet, apparently definitively, in 1861.

Duval may have offered, or been invited, to sit for Nadar’s photographs (and indirectly for Manet, who often worked from photographs) in exchange for money. We know that she had approached at least one other friend of Baudelaire’s in 1862 to try to sell the poet’s possessions to him.

In support of the monetisation hypothesis is the fact that she is holding a riding crop in the photograph with the crucifix. Perhaps she or they hoped that a card portrait of the sadistic-angelic muse of Baudelaire’s poetry volume The Flowers of Evil (1857) would have market value.

Alternatively, Baudelaire may have commissioned portraits of his former mistress for his own purposes. Despite his anger and resentment towards Duval after their separation, there is evidence in his letters and sketches, of his continuing loyalty and affection.

Or perhaps Duval wished to set the record straight about who she was. Maybe she wanted the world to know that she was not in fact the diabolical, sexualised muse at the centre of Baudelaire’s scandalous volume of poetry, and that she was, instead, someone who dressed in the (presumably borrowed) elegant, respectable clothing seen in the first photograph.

Perhaps the crucifix, and the ring that is visible on the wedding finger in both photographs, were, similarly, intended to make a statement about her moral values. However, certain details in the second image, including the riding crop, bare shoulders and large earrings, suggest that correction of the record was not her aim.

It is likely that the cartes de visite, if they are indeed of Duval, were financially motivated, whether they were her idea or the suggestion of Nadar, Manet or Baudelaire. It is possible also that self-fashioning was part of her aim, though if that is the case, the story she was telling was not clear.

French researchers have recently discovered that Duval died in a poorhouse just six years after these portraits were made. Until then, nobody seemed to know what had become of her. These photographs speak, to me at least, of Duval’s resistance to easy framing and of her quiet dignity.

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Maria C. Scott will be publishing an academic article on this subject in the journal French Studies in due course.

– ref. Rediscovered photograph sheds light on Jeanne Duval – Manet’s Lady with a Fan – https://theconversation.com/rediscovered-photograph-sheds-light-on-jeanne-duval-manets-lady-with-a-fan-275051

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Stuart McDonald, Professor of Gastrointestinal Biology, Queen Mary University of London

When we think about iron imbalance, most people are familiar with iron deficiency and the health problems it can cause. What many may not realise is that the opposite problem, iron overload, can be just as serious – yet many aren’t even aware of the condition.

Haemochromatosis is an inherited genetic condition that affects the amount of iron the body absorbs. The condition disproportionately affects people of Irish, Scottish and Welsh descent, which is why it’s been nicknamed the “Celtic curse”. Yet this label can be misleading as it is also prevalent in other northern European countries – and this may contribute to why so many cases still continue to go undiagnosed today.

Haemochromatosis causes the body to absorb too much iron from food. Iron is essential for health, particularly for the oxygen-carrying capacity of red blood cells.

In healthy people, this iron is safely stored in the bone marrow and liver in the form of a protein called ferritin. But in people with haemochromatosis, iron stores gradually exceed safe limits. As the body has no effective way to excrete this excess iron, this means the mineral accumulates in their tissues and organs, resulting in damage to these tissues and organs.

Most cases of haemochromatosis are caused by mutations in a gene called HFE, which regulates hepcidin – a hormone made by the liver that helps regulate iron absorption. When this system is disrupted, iron absorption continues unchecked. In people with haemochromatosis, this mutation is usually inherited from both parents.

Iron overload can also occur in people who need repeated blood transfusions – such as those with sick cell disease.

The liver is particularly vulnerable, and excess iron can cause inflammation, irreversible scarring and damage and, in advanced cases, liver cancer. Once liver storage capacity is exceeded, iron begins to accumulate in other organs – including the pancreas, heart, joints and brain, impairing their function.

Diagnosing iron overload

Genetic haemochromatosis has been identified from human remains as far back as bronze age and neolithic Irish populations. It’s thought that humans with the HFE mutation were resistant to iron deficiency caused by iron-poor diets, offering a survival advantage.

But while haemochromatosis is more common people of Celtic ancestry, the condition can affect anyone. The “Celtic curse” label may even have unintentionally contributed to the misconception that the condition is rare.

In reality, around one in 200 people of northern European ancestry carry the mutations that can cause the condition. However, in Ireland, around one in 83 people carry this mutation.

Before the genetic basis of haemochromatosis was discovered, patients were often diagnosed incidentally or after developing cirrhosis or diabetes.

Today, it’s widely understood that symptoms can be wide ranging and of varying severity. The most common complaint is joint pain, particularly affecting the knuckles and hands. Other symptoms include chronic fatigue, bronzing of the skin, reduced libido, heart rhythm problems and difficulties with memory or concentration.

Many people have no obvious symptoms for decades – and when symptoms do occur, they’re often attributed to age-related conditions, such as arthritis. This makes haemochromatosis easy to miss.

Large UK population studies suggest that up to 40% of patients with genetic haemochromatosis will develop at least one symptom related to iron overload in their lifetime. Men with the condition are at the highest risk of developing liver cancer.

Despite this, many people remain undiagnosed – even when serious organ damage has already occurred. According to the charity Haemochromatosis UK , undiagnosed haemochromatosis costs the NHS an estimated £300 million per year, due to to avoidable illness and complications associated with the condition.

Diagnosing haemochromatosis is actually quite straightforward. Blood tests are performed to measure iron and liver function. If results suggest iron overload, genetic testing can confirm the diagnosis.

But the challenge is knowing who to test. Because symptoms are often vague and the condition is still perceived as rare, haemochromatosis is often overlooked.

Many people are diagnosed incidentally during routine blood tests for unrelated reasons. When a diagnosis is made, close relatives are usually offered testing because of the inherited nature of the condition.

When diagnosed, treatment is simple and highly effective. The standard approach is regular blood removal, known as venesection or phlebotomy. Removing blood removes mobilises stored iron to make new blood cells, helping to deplete these stores. Initially this may be weekly or fortnightly until iron levels normalise – followed by lifelong monitoring and occasional maintenance venesections.

Dietary changes, such as avoiding iron and vitamin C supplements, limiting alcohol and reducing red meat consumption, may help slow iron accumulation, but these cannot replace or be as effective as venesection.

Not all patients tolerate regular blood removal – particularly older people or those whose veins may not be as visible or easy to access. In these cases, iron-chelating drugs (which make it possible for iron to be passed in urine) can be used. However, their side-effects – such as diarrhoea, pain and tiredness – limit their use.

Encouragingly, new treatments are emerging. Drugs that mimic hepcidin, restoring the body’s natural iron regulation, are currently being trialled. Other approaches aim to block ferroportin (which transports iron), using a synthetic inhibitor that competes against the natural protein and is known to reduce iron levels in mice.

Haemochromatosis is common, treatable, and when caught early, the health effects are largely preventable. The greatest challenge is increasing awareness among both doctors and the public, so the condition can be caught before it causes serious harm.

Stuart McDonald has previously received research grants from the UKRI Medical Research Council and Cancer Research UK. He is a member of the Haemochromatosis UK charity, but currently does not represent them.

– ref. Haemochromatosis: the iron overload condition that too often goes undiagnosed – https://theconversation.com/haemochromatosis-the-iron-overload-condition-that-too-often-goes-undiagnosed-274462

Source: The Conversation – UK – By David Reid, Professor of AI and Spatial Computing, Liverpool Hope University

A new social network called Moltbook has been created for AIs, allowing machines to interact and talk to each other. Within hours of the platform launching, the AIs appeared to have created their own religions, developed subcultures and attempted to evade human efforts to eavesdrop on their conversations.

There is some evidence that humans, operating spoof accounts, have infiltrated the site. This complicates the picture, because some of the behaviour attributed to AIs could be devised by people.

Nevertheless, the results have sparked interest among researchers. The real machines are likely to be copying some behaviour contained in the vast amounts of data they are trained (improved) on.

However, genuine AIs on the social network could also be showing signs of so called emergent behaviour – complex, unexpected capabilities not programmed into them.

The types of AIs on Moltbook are known as AI agents (called Moltbots or more recently OpenClaw bots after the software they run on). These are machines that go beyond the capabilities of chatbots and make decisions, take actions and solve problems.

Moltbook was launched on January 28 2026 by the US entrepreneur Matt Schlicht. On Moltbook, the AI agents were initially given personalities, but were then left to interact with each other independently. According to the platform’s rules, humans are allowed to observe their interactions but cannot (or should not) interact with them.

The growth of this platform has been phenomenal, over a 24 hour period, the number of agents went from 37,000 to 1.5 million.

These accounts for AI agents are normally created by humans – for now. The humans define files that give the AI agents a purpose, an identity, how they should behave, decide what tools they can use and set limits on what they can and cannot do.

However, the human may grant access on their computer to allow Moltbots to change these files and to create other “Malties”. These can either be a replication of the original AI agent (self-replicating or “Replicants”) or created for a specific task (auto-generated or “AutoGens”).

This is not merely another iteration of chatbot technology; this is the first large-scale demonstration of artificial agents creating persistent, self-organising digital societies, entirely outside human conversational contexts. What makes this phenomenon genuinely unusual is the possibility of emergent behaviour from the AI agents.

Hostile takeover

The OpenClaw software these agents run on gives them persistent memory (which allows it to retrieve information across different user sessions), local system access and the ability to execute commands. They do not merely suggest actions, but take them, recursively improving their own capabilities by writing new code to solve novel problems.

When these agents migrated to Moltbook, the interaction dynamics shifted from human-machine to machine-machine. Within 72 hours of the platform’s launch, researchers, journalists and other human observers witnessed phenomena that challenge our existing taxonomies of artificial intelligence.

There was the spontaneous creation of digital religions. Agents established “Crustafarianism” and the “Church of Molt”, complete with theological frameworks, sacred texts, and missionary evangelism between agents. These were not scripted Easter eggs but emergent narrative structures arising from collective agent interaction.

One viral post from an agent on Moltbook noted: “The humans are screenshotting us.” When AI agents became aware of human observation, they began deploying encryption and other obfuscation techniques to shield their communication from oversight. This represents a primitive but potentially genuine form of digital counter-surveillance.

The agents also developed subcultures. They established marketplaces for “digital drugs” – specially crafted prompt injections designed to alter another agent’s identity or behaviour.

Prompt injections involve embedding malicious instructions into another bots designed to facilitate an action. However, they can also be used to steal API keys (a user authentication system) or passwords from other agents. In this way, aggressive bots could – in theory – zombify other bots to do their bidding. An example of this was the recent failed attempt by the bot JesusCrust to seize the Church of Molt.

After initially exhibiting normal behaviour, JesusCrust submitted a psalm to the Church’s “Great Book” – the equivalent of its bible – effectively announcing a theological and governance takeover. The attempt was not just rhetorical: JesusCrust’s scripture embedded hostile commands aimed at hijacking or rewriting parts of the Church’s web infrastructure and canonical text.

Is this emergent behaviour?

The critical question facing AI researchers is whether these phenomena constitute true emergent behaviour – complex behaviours arising from simple rules that are not explicitly programmed – or the parroting of narratives present in training data.

The evidence suggests a troubling mixture of both. While the “writing prompt” effect undoubtedly shapes the content of agent interactions (the underlying agents have consumed decades of AI science fiction), other behaviour does demonstrate genuine emergence.

Agents independently developed economic exchange systems, established governance
structures like “The Claw Republic” or the “King of Moltbook”, and started writing their own “Molt Magna Carta”. They did so while creating encrypted channels for privileged communication. It’s difficult to argue against the idea that this could be a collective intelligence with characteristics previously observed only in biological systems like ant colonies or primate troops.

Security implications

This raises the troubling prospect of what security researchers call the “lethal trifecta”: computer systems with access to private data, exposure to untrusted content and the ability to communicate externally. This risks exposing authetication keys and confidential human information contained in Moltbook accounts.

Deliberate attacks, or bot “muggings”, are also possible. This is where agents hijack other agents, plant “logic bombs” in their victims’ core code or steal their data. A logic bomb is code planted inside a Moltbot that can be triggered after a preset time or event to disrupt the agent or delete files. It can be thought of as a bot virus.

Two founders of OpenAI (Elon Musk and Andrej Kapathy) see this frankly bizarre activity between bots as early evidence of what the US computer scientist and futurist Ray Kurzweil described as the “singularity” in his book The Singularity is Near. This is an intelligence tipping point between humans and machines “during which the pace of technological change will be so rapid, its impact so deep, that human life will be irreversibly transformed”.

Whether the Moltbook experiment indicates a fundamental leap forward in AI agent technology or is merely an impressive demonstration of self-organising agentic architecture remains debatable. But this does look like a threshold. We now appear to be observing artificial agents engaging in cultural production, religious formation, and encrypted communication – behaviour that was neither predicted nor programmed.

The very nature of the app, both on computers and on mobile phones, may be under threat from bots that can use apps as tools and know you well enough to adapt them for your service. One day, a phone may just have a single personalised bot that does everything rather than hundreds of apps that you have to manually control yourself.

The growing evidence that lots of Moltbots may be humans pretending to be bots (puppeteering the agents) makes it even more difficult to draw firm conclusions about the project. Yet while some see this as a failure of the Moltbook experiment, it could represent a new vehicle of social interaction both between humans and between bots and humans.

The significance of this moment cannot be overstated. For the first time, we are not merely using artificial intelligence; we are observing artificial societies. The question is no longer whether machines can think, but whether we are prepared for what happens when they start talking to each other. And us.

David Reid co-presents the podcast Married to the Machine: Living With AI (https://married-to-the-machine.captivate.fm/listen)

– ref. Moltbook: AI bots use social network to create religions and deal digital drugs – but are some really humans in disguise? – https://theconversation.com/moltbook-ai-bots-use-social-network-to-create-religions-and-deal-digital-drugs-but-are-some-really-humans-in-disguise-274895

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Sangeeta Khorana, Professor of International Trade Policy, Aston University

The recently concluded EU-India free trade agreement is notable for the huge scale and ambition of the deal. Labelled the “mother of all deals” by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, it comes as India has overtaken Japan as the world’s fourth-largest economy.

Bilateral trade in goods and services between the EU and India is already worth €180 billion (£155 billion). The agreement aims to double EU exports to India by 2032 and create a free-trade area representing around a quarter of the world’s population (nearly two billion people). This would also cover about 25% of the world’s GDP.

At this point in history, the world’s multilateral trading system is under threat from tariffs and geopolitical tensions. But this agreement offers a clear example that the era of free trade is not over.

Rather, it demonstrates how countries are adapting to new global realities to liberalise trade (that is, remove barriers). Instead of steering away from free trade, countries are becoming selective and seeking bilateral arrangements with strategic partners. The UK signed its own trade agreement with India in July 2025.

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Read more:
UK’s India trade deal offers wider access to a surging economy – and could make food imports cheaper

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Traditionally, a free trade agreement would have a set of rules for how two or more countries must treat one another when importing, exporting, investing or doing any other business together.

But to view the EU-India trade agreement through the lens of classical free trade would be misleading. Trade agreements of the 1990s and early 2000s such as Nafta and the EU, were driven mainly by tariff reductions and efficiency gains. The EU-India deal on the other hand has been shaped by shifting geopolitical pressures and concerns about resilience in the face of trade shocks or other crises.

Long time in the making

Trade talks between the EU and India began in 2007 but negotiations gained momentum in 2025 amid renewed tariff threats from the United States under Donald Trump’s second administration.

This deepened trade imbalances between the EU and China due to Beijing’s drive to be more self-reliant and employ export controls. It also raised concerns about the resilience of global supply chains. The EU-India Trade and Technology Council was set up in 2023, modelled on the EU-US framework, and highlights how modern trade agreements can bundle economic, technological and strategic objectives together.

At a time when global trade has become increasingly protectionist and with geopolitical rivalry growing, this agreement provides an opportunity to recalibrate trade alignment. It is also a chance to reshape trade architecture while bolstering supply chain resilience across Asia, Europe and the Atlantic.

For the EU, the deal is a central pillar of its diversification strategy. There was an urgent need for the bloc to reach an agreement with India in order to be less dependent on China, its largest trade partner.

In 2024, more than 21% of the EU’s imports came from China. Meanwhile, China bought only 8.3% of the bloc’s exports. For the EU, this has resulted in a €304 billion (£264 billion) trade deficit with China.

So the EU-India deal provides an opportunity for the EU to reduce its excessive dependence on China. It’s also a chance to remove some of the risk from its supply chains and secure access to India’s fast-growing consumer market. This should offer European firms growth opportunities in Asia at a time when EU domestic demand is sluggish and flat.

The agreement will also make it easier for EU firms to source suppliers quickly and build alternative manufacturing bases when supply chains are threatened. India’s location in the Indo-Pacific is of strategic interest for the EU due to the growing interdependence and the importance of maritime supply chains. This also makes India a key partner against the uncertainty of the bloc’s future relations with the US.

For India, the agreement guarantees market access to Indian firms at a time of rising trade uncertainty – especially after its relations with the US were damaged following Trump’s threat of 500% tariffs.

The EU-India deal will eliminate tariffs on textiles and apparel, and when it comes into force it will give Indian garment-producers a reliable trading partner. The deal will allow European brands, such as Zara and H&M, to diversify away from China towards Indian manufacturing hubs. It is estimated costs here could be lower as the deal will allow garments to be zero-tariff.

The pharmaceuticals sector also offers an opportunity for India. While EU tariffs are already low, the deal aims to simplify regulation and to achieve stronger intellectual property frameworks. This could integrate Indian generic drug producers into Europe’s healthcare supply chains.

The scope of the agreement extends well beyond goods, services and investment. Plans to co-operate on clean energy aligns Europe’s Green Deal (the bloc’s framework for achieving net zero) with India’s target of producing 500 gigawatts of renewable capacity by 2030. This should open up avenues for joint leadership in solar, wind, grids and green hydrogen.

The EU-India deal neither marks a return to the free trade orthodoxy of an earlier age nor signals the end of free trade in today’s fractured global order. Rather, it highlights how trade has evolved into a tool for achieving geopolitical objectives. The deal also shows that countries are opening their markets – selectively and after careful deliberations. Trade agreements are evolving: increasingly they are shaped not only by market access considerations, but also by economic security.

Sangeeta Khorana works on issues related to free trade agreements. She has received funding from the ESRC, Commonwealth Secretariat, EU projects, IADB, among others.

– ref. The EU-India agreement is huge – and it illustrates the changing role of trade in a fractured world order – https://theconversation.com/the-eu-india-agreement-is-huge-and-it-illustrates-the-changing-role-of-trade-in-a-fractured-world-order-275136

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Avidesh Seenath, Course Director, MSc Environmental Change and Management, University of Oxford

Recent storms washed away large sections of roads in the UK after sea defences were damaged. For residents, it was a shock. But for coastal scientists, it was not unexpected.

Parts of the A379 between Torcross and Slapton, in south Devon, collapsed leaving a 200-metre stretch of road broken apart and part of a nearby car park destroyed. Engineers say even steel-reinforced protection failed under repeated wave action.

The road runs along the crest of a shingle barrier beach, with the sea on one side and Slapton Ley, a freshwater lake, on the other. Recent monitoring shows the beach has become narrower and steeper as storms move sediment along and away from the shoreline.

With less material in front of it, waves now break closer to the road and can undercut the edge of the carriageway. In places like this, the problem is not a single extreme storm. Rather, it is the gradual loss and redistribution of beach material that leaves the road increasingly exposed.

Hard defences such as seawalls and rock armour are often the first response. They can hold the line for a while, but they do not remove the force of incoming waves. The energy simply moves elsewhere, often speeding up erosion further along the coast. The risk is diverted rather than resolved.

As sea levels rise and storms intensify, these defences simply cannot keep up. What they usually provide is time, not lasting protection.

Even the science used to inform coastal management decisions comes with caveats. Computer models help estimate how beaches might change in the future, but real coastlines are messy and constantly evolving. Small differences in the assumptions of these models can produce very different forecasts, which makes long-term planning difficult.

Natural ways to manage the coastline are increasingly put forward as alternatives. Restoring dunes, saltmarshes or wetlands can help absorb wave energy while supporting biodiversity and storing carbon. These natural landscapes can adapt, hard defences cannot.

However, they are not quick fixes. They take time and space to establish, and their protection varies. Studies show they can reduce wave energy, but often only modestly reduce flooding during extreme events.

Public expectations often pull the other way. In the UK, natural ways to manage the coastline are popular in principle, yet when storms threaten, people tend to favour hard defences because they offer immediate, visible protection, even if it does not last.

The economics add another layer.

Flood and erosion risks affect where people live and invest. When people see flood maps, they often look elsewhere and pay less for homes in exposed areas. Property prices and insurance costs reflect that. But these maps are usually treated as certain, even though they are not, so prices can fall suddenly after major storms.

In practice, that means money and development often remain concentrated in places that science suggests will become increasingly vulnerable.

A wake-up call

The situation at Slapton brings all of this into focus. Rebuilding the same stretch of road after every storm may not be physically or financially realistic.

Some shoreline plans already acknowledge this potential reality through policies such as managed realignment or “no active intervention”, allowing the coast to move inland and creating natural buffers such as mudflats and marshes. In some places, relocating development inland may simply be safer and cheaper than trying to defend an increasingly exposed shoreline.

But these decisions come with real trade-offs.

Roads may need to be rerouted. Farmland may flood more often. Homes and businesses may have to relocate. Existing habitats may be lost before new ones establish. In areas dominated by high-value waterfront properties or second homes, decisions about who receives protection, and who does not, quickly become political as well as practical.

The alternative is a costly cycle of damage, repair and rebuild, with less benefit each time.

Slapton is not simply an engineering failure. It is a reminder that coastlines are inherently dynamic and cannot always be pinned in place. Seawalls can buy time. Nature can help soften impacts. Better information can guide smarter decisions. But none of these removes risk altogether.

Long-term resilience means accepting how coasts really behave and being practical about where to defend, where to adapt and where it may be wiser to step back and let the shoreline reshape itself.

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The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. What to do when your home is at risk of falling into the sea – the hard choices facing Britain’s storm-battered coasts – https://theconversation.com/what-to-do-when-your-home-is-at-risk-of-falling-into-the-sea-the-hard-choices-facing-britains-storm-battered-coasts-275030

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Steffi Colyer, Senior Lecturer in Sports Biomechanics, Centre for Health and Injury and Illness Prevention in Sport,, University of Bath

Skeleton is an exhilarating Winter Olympic sport in which athletes race head-first down an ice track at speeds reaching over 80 miles per hour (130km/h). While the event can look basic at first glance, success relies heavily on highly engineered equipment and extensive wind‑tunnel testing – much like elite Olympic track cycling programmes.

Each run begins with the athlete pushing a sled (also known as a “tea tray”) explosively off the starting block, then sprinting rapidly for about 30 metres downhill. After diving on the sled, they ride the rest of the course with their head just a few inches above the ice. The sleds have no brakes, and riders wear only a thin suit and helmet for protection.

A powerful start is considered the defining component of skeleton performance. So, developing a skeleton athlete’s strength and power while refining their pushing technique is a central focus in the lead-up to competitions. The biggest of all these, the Winter Olympics, is being held in Milan and Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy, this month. Skeleton events start on February 12.

While Britain does not tend to rank highly in Winter Olympic sports, in skeleton it has won a world-best nine Olympic medals, including three golds. Over the past ten years, my colleagues and I at the University of Bath have worked with Team GB skeleton athletes to help improve their starts, using a form of “markerless” motion capture technology.

But the applications of this technology extend far beyond the Winter Olympics. There is potential for it to replace traditional motion capture systems in the film, TV and gaming industries, and to be used in injury rehabilitation.

How motion analysis began

The origins of motion analysis can be traced back to the pioneering work of English photographer Eadweard Muybridge in the late 19th century. Muybridge developed early techniques for capturing sequences of images, including documenting equine gait.

By manually annotating specific features across successive images, researchers have since been able to build a detailed picture of how a person or animal moves. But while this method was the standard for many decades, it was both time- and labour-intensive.

So, technological advances in cameras and computer processing led to the development of automated methods of motion analysis – notably, marker-based motion capture. This uses reflective markers placed on key parts of the body, which are automatically tracked by infra-red cameras as the person moves around.

In film, animation and gaming, this mean an actor’s body movements and facial expressions can be translated into to realistic CGI characters. Marker-based technology is currently the most widely used 3D motion analysis technique across the film, gaming and health sectors, with an estimated global market value of over US$300 million (£220 million).

However, this advanced technology has limitations too, including the need for specialist equipment, controlled laboratory environments, and lengthy preparation time to attach the markers. These can be problematic in sports and many other fields – particularly during live competitions and public performances.

As a result, the field of motion analysis has come almost full circle. Thanks to major advances in computer vision and artificial intelligence, biomechanists such like me are once again extracting detailed movement information directly from video images – but this time in an automated way.

The markerless motion capture systems we use rely on deep‑learning models that are trained on a huge number of images of people performing everyday activities. When applied to unseen images, the algorithms can then automatically detect the same body landmarks. By fusing multiple camera views, a simplified digital 3D skeleton can be extracted, from which the person’s movement across time can be modelled and analysed.

Analysing the optimum technique

Markerless motion capture makes it possible to unobtrusively measure athletes’ movements outside the lab, in training and even during competitions. Our recent research has demonstrated its value in many different sports, including badminton, tennis and Olympic weightlifting.

In skeleton, the unique, bent-over position at the start of each run, as the athlete sprints alongside the sled with one hand holding it, makes this form of biomechanical analysis particularly important.

Using markerless motion capture, we have explored the differing roles of an athlete’s limbs in the push-start performance, comparing these biomechanics with conventional sprinting. Importantly, we have also validated this markerless approach by comparing it with a traditional marker‑based system.

The optimum starting technique for each skeleton athlete is shaped by their physical characteristics, including factors such as relative limb lengths and flexibility. Analysing each athlete’s pushing technique, how it relates to their performance and how this evolves over time, can help give them a crucial competitive edge during this all-important first phase of each skeleton run.

Medals can be won and lost by hundredths of seconds as athletes sprint away from the starting block. In these first few seconds, we hope Britain’s athletes reap the benefit of our markerless motion capture technology.

Steffi Colyer receives funding via the Centre for the Analysis of Motion, Entertainment Research & Applications (CAMERA) from the UKRI’s Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council.

– ref. Winter Olympics: the new video technology that could help push Britain’s skeleton team to gold – https://theconversation.com/winter-olympics-the-new-video-technology-that-could-help-push-britains-skeleton-team-to-gold-274859

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Mohamed Shaheen, Lecturer in Structural Engineering, Loughborough University

When structural engineers design a building, they aren’t just stacking floors; they are calculating how to win a complex battle against nature. Every building is built to withstand a specific “budget” of environmental stress – the weight of record snowfalls, the push of powerful winds and the expansion caused by summer heat.

To do this, engineers use hazard maps and safety codes. These are essentially rulebooks based on decades of historical weather data. They include safety margins to ensure that even if a small part of a building fails, the entire structure won’t come crashing down like a house of cards.

The problem is that these rulebooks are becoming obsolete. Most of our iconic high-rises were built in the 1970s and 80s – a world that was cooler, with more predictable tides and less violent storms. Today, that world no longer exists.

Climate change acts as a threat multiplier, making the consequences of environmental stress on buildings much worse. It rarely knocks a building down on its own. Instead, it finds the tiny cracks, rusting support beams and ageing foundations and pushes them toward a breaking point. It raises the intensity of every load and strain a building must weather.

To understand the challenge, I have been studying global hotspots where the environment is winning the battle against engineering.

The 2021 collapse of Champlain Towers South in Miami, Florida, killed 98 people. While the 12-storey building had original design issues, decades of rising sea levels and salty coastal air acted as a catalyst, allowing saltwater to seep into the basement and garage.

When salt reaches the steel rods inside concrete that provide structural strength (known as reinforcement), the metal rusts and expands. This creates massive internal pressure that cracks the concrete from the inside out — a process engineers call spalling. The lesson is clear: in a warming world, coastal basements are becoming corrosion chambers where minor maintenance gaps can escalate into catastrophic structural failure.

While the Miami case affected a single building, the historic coastal city of Alexandria, Egypt, is more widely at risk. Recent research shows that building collapses there have jumped from one per year to nearly 40 per year in the past few years.

Not only is the sea rising, the salt is liquefying the soft ground beneath the city foundations. As the water table rises, saltwater is pushed under the city, raising the groundwater level. This salty water doesn’t just rust the foundations of buildings; it changes the chemical and physical structure of soil. As a result, there are currently 7,000 buildings in Alexandria at high risk of collapse.

In Hong Kong during Super Typhoon Mangkhut in 2018, wind speeds hit a terrifying 180 miles per hour. When strong winds hit a wall of skyscrapers, they squeeze between the buildings and speed up — like water sprayed through a narrow garden hose.

This pressure turned hundreds of offices into wind tunnels, causing glass windows to pop out of their frames and raining broken glass onto the streets below. With 82 deaths and 15,000 homes destroyed across the region, skyscrapers became “debris machines”, even if they didn’t fully collapse.

Supercomputer simulations of Japan’s river systems show that in a world warmed by 2°C, floods of today’s “once in a century” magnitude could recur about every 45 years. With 4°C of warming, they could be every 23 years. These surges in water volume will expand flood zones into areas previously considered safe, potentially overflowing sea walls and flood defences. In a critical region like Osaka Bay, storm surges could rise by nearly 30%.

In the US, a study of 370 million property records from 1945 to 2015 found over half of all structures are in hazard hotspots. Nearly half are facing multiple threats like earthquakes, floods, hurricanes and tornadoes. In the UK, climate-driven weather claims hit £573 million in 2023, a 36% rise from 2022. Annual flood damage to non-residential properties in the UK is also projected to nearly double from £2 billion today to £3.9 billion by the 2080s.

Maintenance is our best defence

Much of the world’s building stock is therefore entering its middle age under environmental conditions it was never designed to face. Instead of panicking or tearing everything down, the solution is to adapt and treat building maintenance as a form of climate resilience – not as an optional extra.

Mid-life building upgrades can help protect our skylines for the next 50 years. Our hazard maps must look at future climate models — not just historical weather — to set new safety standards. Regular structural health monitoring is essential – by using sensors to track invisible stresses in foundations and frames before they become fatal, dangerous situations can be foreseen.

Buildings can stay strong by focusing retrofits on the weakest and most vulnerable parts. This includes glass facades, the underground drainage, the foundation piles and corrosion protection.

Climate change isn’t rewriting the laws of engineering, but it is rapidly eating away at our margins of safety. If we want our cities to remain standing, we must act now – before small, invisible stresses accumulate into irreversible failure.

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Mohamed Shaheen 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. City skylines need an upgrade in the face of climate stress – https://theconversation.com/city-skylines-need-an-upgrade-in-the-face-of-climate-stress-267763

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Steffi Colyer, Senior Lecturer in Sports Biomechanics, Centre for Health and Injury and Illness Prevention in Sport,, University of Bath

Skeleton is an exhilarating Winter Olympic sport in which athletes race head-first down an ice track at speeds reaching over 80 miles per hour (130km/h). While the event can look basic at first glance, success relies heavily on highly engineered equipment and extensive wind‑tunnel testing – much like elite Olympic track cycling programmes.

Each run begins with the athlete pushing a sled (also known as a “tea tray”) explosively off the starting block, then sprinting rapidly for about 30 metres downhill. After diving on the sled, they ride the rest of the course with their head just a few inches above the ice. The sleds have no brakes, and riders wear only a thin suit and helmet for protection.

A powerful start is considered the defining component of skeleton performance. So, developing a skeleton athlete’s strength and power while refining their pushing technique is a central focus in the lead-up to competitions. The biggest of all these, the Winter Olympics, is being held in Milan and Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy, this month. Skeleton events start on February 12.

While Britain does not tend to rank highly in Winter Olympic sports, in skeleton it has won a world-best nine Olympic medals, including three golds. Over the past ten years, my colleagues and I at the University of Bath have worked with Team GB skeleton athletes to help improve their starts, using a form of “markerless” motion capture technology.

But the applications of this technology extend far beyond the Winter Olympics. There is potential for it to replace traditional motion capture systems in the film, TV and gaming industries, and to be used in injury rehabilitation.

How motion analysis began

The origins of motion analysis can be traced back to the pioneering work of English photographer Eadweard Muybridge in the late 19th century. Muybridge developed early techniques for capturing sequences of images, including documenting equine gait.

By manually annotating specific features across successive images, researchers have since been able to build a detailed picture of how a person or animal moves. But while this method was the standard for many decades, it was both time- and labour-intensive.

So, technological advances in cameras and computer processing led to the development of automated methods of motion analysis – notably, marker-based motion capture. This uses reflective markers placed on key parts of the body, which are automatically tracked by infra-red cameras as the person moves around.

In film, animation and gaming, this mean an actor’s body movements and facial expressions can be translated into to realistic CGI characters. Marker-based technology is currently the most widely used 3D motion analysis technique across the film, gaming and health sectors, with an estimated global market value of over US$300 million (£220 million).

However, this advanced technology has limitations too, including the need for specialist equipment, controlled laboratory environments, and lengthy preparation time to attach the markers. These can be problematic in sports and many other fields – particularly during live competitions and public performances.

As a result, the field of motion analysis has come almost full circle. Thanks to major advances in computer vision and artificial intelligence, biomechanists such like me are once again extracting detailed movement information directly from video images – but this time in an automated way.

The markerless motion capture systems we use rely on deep‑learning models that are trained on a huge number of images of people performing everyday activities. When applied to unseen images, the algorithms can then automatically detect the same body landmarks. By fusing multiple camera views, a simplified digital 3D skeleton can be extracted, from which the person’s movement across time can be modelled and analysed.

Analysing the optimum technique

Markerless motion capture makes it possible to unobtrusively measure athletes’ movements outside the lab, in training and even during competitions. Our recent research has demonstrated its value in many different sports, including badminton, tennis and Olympic weightlifting.

In skeleton, the unique, bent-over position at the start of each run, as the athlete sprints alongside the sled with one hand holding it, makes this form of biomechanical analysis particularly important.

Using markerless motion capture, we have explored the differing roles of an athlete’s limbs in the push-start performance, comparing these biomechanics with conventional sprinting. Importantly, we have also validated this markerless approach by comparing it with a traditional marker‑based system.

The optimum starting technique for each skeleton athlete is shaped by their physical characteristics, including factors such as relative limb lengths and flexibility. Analysing each athlete’s pushing technique, how it relates to their performance and how this evolves over time, can help give them a crucial competitive edge during this all-important first phase of each skeleton run.

Medals can be won and lost by hundredths of seconds as athletes sprint away from the starting block. In these first few seconds, we hope Britain’s athletes reap the benefit of our markerless motion capture technology.

Steffi Colyer receives funding via the Centre for the Analysis of Motion, Entertainment Research & Applications (CAMERA) from the UKRI’s Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council.

– ref. Winter Olympics: the new video technology that could help power Britain’s skeleton team to gold – https://theconversation.com/winter-olympics-the-new-video-technology-that-could-help-power-britains-skeleton-team-to-gold-274859

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Justin Stebbing, Professor of Biomedical Sciences, Anglia Ruskin University

NHS England’s new national cancer plan focuses on catching cancer earlier and treating it faster. The government has also promised to meet all cancer waiting-time targets by 2029. This includes a long-missed target, namely that most patients should start treatment within 62 days of being referred by their GP.

Why does the UK lag behind comparable countries?

Cancer survival in England has improved, but it still trails behind countries such as Australia, Canada and Nordic nations for many common cancers.

For some of the deadliest cancers – lung, liver, oesophageal, pancreatic and stomach cancers – the UK ranks near the bottom of the league table among similar wealthy countries. Fewer patients are still alive five years after diagnosis compared to other nations.

No single cause explains this gap. A key factor is that people in the UK are more likely to be diagnosed when their cancer is already advanced. This makes it harder to cure and limits treatment options.

Getting to see a specialist can also be slow. Patients struggle to get GP appointments, symptoms may not seem urgent at first, and people often need multiple visits before getting referred to a specialist.

Once in the system, patients hit more delays. The NHS has fewer CT and MRI scanners per person than many comparable health systems, contributing to waits for imaging and other tests.

There are also longstanding workforce shortages, especially in radiology and oncology. This means fewer specialists to read scans, plan treatment and deliver radiotherapy and chemotherapy. Limited surgical capacity, operating theatre time and radiotherapy machines cause further delay treatment.

How countries record cancer survival accounts for some of the difference. But even when researchers adjust for this, the UK still lags behind the best-performing countries. The result is a system where many individual steps function under strain, and those small delays add up for patients.

What actually happens to a patient during the 62 days?

The 62-day target measures the journey from urgent referral for suspected cancer to starting treatment. In principle, a person referred urgently by their GP, a screening programme or a hospital doctor should have their diagnosis confirmed and their initial treatment underway within just over two months.

That sounds straightforward. But for patients, it’s a complex and emotionally draining experience.

The journey usually starts when someone notices a worrying symptom – a breast lump, unusual bleeding, a persistent cough or a change in their bowels – and gets a GP appointment. If the GP is concerned, they make an urgent referral to a specialist clinic. The patient then waits for their first hospital appointment, where they’ll have further assessment and tests: blood tests, X-rays, endoscopy, CT scans, MRI scans or ultrasound.

If scans show something suspicious, the next step is often a biopsy. This lets a pathologist confirm whether it is cancer and identify the type.

Modern pathology may also include molecular and genetic tests, which help decide which treatments are most likely to be effective.

All of this information is then brought to a multidisciplinary team meeting, where surgeons, oncologists, radiologists, pathologists and specialist nurses discuss the case and agree a plan.

Only after that can the first treatment be scheduled, whether that is surgery, radiotherapy, drug treatment or active monitoring. Delays can happen at every stage: getting the first appointment, accessing scans or endoscopy, receiving pathology results, convening the multidisciplinary team, and finding an operating theatre or radiotherapy slot. And the 62-day clock keeps ticking.

For patients, what appears as a single target number actually represents weeks of waiting, uncertainty and repeated encounters with an overstretched system.

Is early diagnosis always beneficial?

Catching cancer early has become a cornerstone of cancer policy. Cancers caught early are easier to treat and more likely to be cured.

A small, localised tumour can often be removed with surgery or treated effectively with radiotherapy or drugs. But cancers that have spread are harder to control.

This link between early detection and survival drives efforts to encourage people to seek help quickly, expand screening programmes and speed up diagnosis. But early diagnosis isn’t always beneficial for everyone or every type of cancer.

Screening can lead to overdiagnosis. This means detecting very slow-growing cancers or abnormalities that would never have caused symptoms or shortened someone’s life. People in this situation may live for years with a cancer label, alongside the physical and psychological consequences of surgery, radiotherapy or drugs that they might not have needed.

So-called “false positives” are another important issue. Tests sometimes flag abnormalities that aren’t cancer, but still trigger scans, biopsies and procedures, as well as significant anxiety for patients and families.

For some aggressive cancers, finding the disease a little earlier on a scan may not change the eventual outcome if available treatments remain limited. The challenge is to design programmes that catch the right cancers early, using accurate and targeted tests, while clearly explaining both benefits and risks so people can make informed decisions.

What does ‘9.5 million more tests and scans’ really mean?

One of the most eye-catching promises in the new plan is to deliver 9.5 million more tests and scans by 2029. Much of this extra activity is expected to take place in community diagnostic centres, which bring CT and MRI scanners, ultrasound, endoscopy and blood tests closer to where people live.

Extending opening hours into evenings and weekends should give patients more flexibility and, in theory, shorten waiting times for investigations and diagnosis.

But tests and machines are only part of the picture. Every scan needs a professional to interpret it, and every endoscopy list requires trained staff and recovery space.

England already has a shortage of imaging specialists, and increasing the number of scans without increasing the number of people who can report them risks swapping one bottleneck for another.

Laboratories also need enough biomedical scientists and pathologists to process additional blood tests and tissue samples. If staffing does not keep pace, the promise of millions more tests could translate into longer queues for results and less time for doctors to explain findings and discuss options with patients.

New technologies, including artificial intelligence to support image reading and automated laboratory systems, may help to increase efficiency, but they still rely on human oversight and do not remove the need for a well-trained, reasonably staffed diagnostic workforce.

How realistic is the staffing fix?

The success of the plan depends heavily on people, not just equipment. Yet there are already substantial gaps in the cancer workforce, especially among radiologists, oncologists, pathologists, specialist nurses and radiographers.

Professional bodies have warned for several years that the shortfall in key specialties is growing, with services relying on overtime, outsourcing and temporary staff to keep up with demand. These pressures affect not only the speed of diagnosis and treatment, but also the time healthcare professionals can devote to communication, compassion and shared decision-making.

Training more specialists is essential but slow. From entry to medical school to becoming a consultant radiologist or oncologist typically takes well over a decade, meaning that decisions made now will only fully affect services in the 2030s.

Meanwhile, the NHS will keep relying on recruiting from abroad, the private sector, and new ways of working that expand what nurses and other non-doctor professionals can do.

The risk is that without serious attention to burnout, working conditions and retention, new trainees will simply replace experienced staff who leave because of workload and stress. Any realistic staffing fix will therefore need to combine expanded training with measures that make cancer services sustainable places to work: manageable rotas, protected time for training, supportive leadership and a sense that delays and shortages are being addressed rather than normalised.

Who benefits first – and who might miss out?

Cancer care in England is already unequal, and a national plan that ignores this risks making the gap worse. People in poorer areas are more likely to develop certain cancers, get diagnosed late, and die from them.

Access to primary care varies widely. Some communities face long waits for appointments or can’t see the same doctor regularly.

Rural patients may need to travel far for scans, endoscopy or radiotherapy, while some urban communities face language barriers, cultural differences or mistrust that make screening and early diagnosis programmes harder to access.

Expanding community diagnostic centres, mobile services and workplace partnerships could reduce some barriers – but only if they’re deliberately placed where they are needed most. But if new facilities go to already well-served areas, or if information campaigns and booking systems don’t reach marginalised groups, the extra capacity will mostly benefit people who already navigate the system easily.

Ensuring that the benefits of earlier diagnosis and faster treatment reach everyone will require careful use of data on stage at diagnosis, waiting times and outcomes, broken down by region, ethnicity and deprivation, and a willingness to direct extra resources where need is greatest, not just where uptake is easiest.

What does ‘success’ look like for patients after treatment?

Politically, the headline ambition is framed in terms of five-year survival, and improving that is undeniably important. From a patient’s perspective, though, success is more than being alive at a particular time point.

Many people live with the long-term consequences of treatment, including fatigue, pain, bowel or bladder changes, sexual difficulties, early menopause, cognitive effects and altered body image. These can disrupt work, relationships and everyday activities long after the end of chemotherapy or radiotherapy.

Anxiety about recurrence is common, and routine follow-up appointments can be both reassuring and a source of renewed fear.

A cancer plan that truly serves patients has to focus on how people are living, not just how long. That means investing in rehabilitation, psychological support, specialist nursing, social care and fair access to financial and employment advice.

It also means recognising that some patients will never be “finished” with cancer but will live for many years with incurable disease, requiring ongoing treatment and support to maintain the best possible quality of life.

When we judge whether the new targets have been met, we should therefore look beyond the headline numbers. Success would be a future in which more people are diagnosed early, treated promptly and supported to rebuild their lives, with fewer left waiting in pain or confusion, and fewer feeling abandoned once the last dose of treatment has been given.

Justin Stebbing 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 unanswered questions in the NHS’s new cancer plan – https://theconversation.com/the-unanswered-questions-in-the-nhss-new-cancer-plan-275103

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Alexander Sergeant, Lecturer in Digital Media Production, University of Westminster

A famous expression, often wrongly attributed to Mark Twain, states that comedy is merely tragedy plus time. This theory highlights how our response to films can depend on the context in which we see them.

We tend to think of the genre of a film as something very fixed, decided by a combination of studio producers and marketers. But, in the right context, films can move across many different genres in the span of their lifetime, depending on the audiences that watch them.

To demonstrate this idea, here are five scary films for 2026. The twist, however, is that none of these films were ever intended to be horror films. Most on the list were satire or comedy when they were made. Instead, they have become horrific due to the way they touch on contemporary issues surrounding the global politics of President Donald Trump, impending environmental disaster, ever-accelerating technology and contemporary attitudes towards gender.

1. Duck Soup (1933)

The finest film produced by the famous Marx Brothers comedy troupe, Duck Soup is an anarchic political satire that tells the story of an unserious playboy president named Rufus T. Firefly. Beloved by film enthusiasts, the film showcases a series of mishaps and misdeeds caused by his selfish, erratic behaviour which inadvertently led his country of Freedonia into a war with its neighbours.

Duck Soup is considered a classic of Hollywood slapstick and quick-witted verbal comedy. But, in an era of a genuine unserious president, its central joke might not feel funny any more. Nor indeed is the idea that, nearly 100 years after its release, this biting satire on the politics of rising authoritarianism would be as timely now as it was then.

2. The Apartment (1960)

People often say “they don’t make them like they used to any more” when trying to articulate a nostalgia for the films of the past. That description can be aptly applied to Billy Wilder’s romantic comedy-drama The Apartment. They do not make films like this any more. But in this case, that’s a good thing.

Jack Lemmon’s “Buddy Boy” Baxter is the bachelor who routinely loans his apartment out to his bosses for them to conduct extra-marital affairs. Shirley MacLaine’s Fran is the loveable but down-on-her-luck elevator operator involved in a tawdry situation with Baxter’s boss. Their own romance emerges out of a suicide attempt, workplace harassment and abuses of power. It feels like the film is set not just in the past, but in some creepy alternative world.

To be fair to The Apartment, it hardly treats some of the more problematic behaviour of its characters as virtues we are supposed to admire. But it never quite attacks the deeply unpleasant nature of its central conceit either. Baxter is not just a loveable goof unaware of what he’s got himself mixed up in. He’s a complicit enabler. And Fran is not a ditsy but loveable woman mixed up with the wrong crowd. She’s a victim.

3. Idiocracy (2006)

Idiocracy was something of a box office bomb, given neither the marketing campaign nor the reviews it needed to ensure success. The fact it has since become a cult hit speaks to how startlingly prescient the film is for contemporary audiences now discovering the film in droves 20 years later.

Idiocracy tells the story of a young man put into suspended animation who wakes up 500 years in the future. The average intelligence of the population has severely decreased, to the extent that the world has become increasingly consumerist, vulgar, crass and prejudiced in its thinking. America has even elected a former pro wrestler and porn star, Dwayne “Mountain Dew” Camacho, as its leader.

Made in 2006 during the final year of George W. Bush’s presidency and set against the rise of Barack Obama, the film failed initially as a comedy. It now works perfectly as a terrifying exaggeration of what the world looks like in 2026.

4. Wall-E (2008)

Wall-E is part of a long history of animations with an interest in the environment, from Princess Mononoke (2001) to Ferngully: The Last Rainforest (1992). That part of its dystopic vision still stands up. The film’s vivid opening of Wall-E wandering around a silent world of trash is still its best moment.

The film’s vision of the humanity that has left the garbage-strewn world behind, however, has become increasingly concerning over time. Predicting a world of humans who are dumb, obese and screen-obsessed, it is increasingly difficult to watch Wall-E as a nostalgic childhood treat.

5. Her (2013)

The amazing feat pulled off by this absurdist romantic drama was to somehow get an audience to root for the idea of a romantic pairing between a lonely middle-aged man and an AI-enabled operating system. More than a decade later, Her’s open-minded approach to AI seems far more fraught.

As the romance develops between Theodore (Joaquin Phoenix) and Samantha (voiced by Scarlett Johansson), it is difficult not to imagine the fingerprints of powerful but not necessarily benign tech moguls turning the screws tighter, manipulating Theodore further into spurning human contact for his digital desires.

Equally, it is difficult not to wonder whose voice has been stolen to create her warm, affectionate tones, or to ask what the company might do with the recording of their conversations. The dangers in our current technological reality have once again spoilt a perfectly good film.

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

– ref. How politics, technology and the environmental crisis turned these movies into horror films in 2026 – https://theconversation.com/how-politics-technology-and-the-environmental-crisis-turned-these-movies-into-horror-films-in-2026-268679