Three scientists have been awarded the 2025 Nobel prize in physiology or medicine for discovering how the body stops its own immune system from turning against itself.
Shimon Sakaguchi from Osaka University in Japan, Mary E. Brunkow from the Institute for System Biology and Fred Ramsdell from Sonoma Biotherapeutics, both in the USA, identified specialised “security guard” cells that keep our immune system in check. These discoveries have been important for understanding how to treat and prevent autoimmune conditions. The trio will share a prize sum of 11 million Swedish Kronor (£870,000).
An effective immune system is critical. It sculpts tissues as they grow and clears away old cells and debris. It also eliminates dangerous viruses, bacteria and fungi, keeping us healthy.
But the immune system faces a delicate challenge: it must attack thousands of different invading microbes each day, many of which have evolved to look remarkably similar to our own cells – yet it must never mistake our own tissue for the enemy.
So how does the immune system know what cells it should attack and which ones it shouldn’t?
This question has been studied by immunologists for decades. But it was the groundbreaking work by this year’s Nobel laureates that led to the discovery of the specialised immune cells – called regulatory T cells – which prevent immune cells from attacking our own body and keep the immune system running as it should.
For decades, immunologists weren’t certain why some immune cells functioned as they should, and why others went rogue and attacked the body’s own tissues. When this happens, it can result in autoimmune conditions – such as type 1 diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis and multiple sclerosis.
For a long time, scientists believed the thymus – a small gland in the chest – was solely responsible for immune tolerance. Immune cells (specifically a type of cell called a T lymphocyte) that recognised the body’s own proteins too strongly were initially thought to be eliminated in the thymus in early life. Those immune cells that only showed mild reactivity were then released into the bloodstream to patrol the body.
But work conducted in the 1980s and 1990s by Sakaguchi showed that there was a specialised class of immune T cells that played a critical role in suppressing immune responses and preventing the immune system from attacking the body’s tissues.
In Sakaguchi’s first experiment, he surgically removed the thymus organ from newborn mice, then injected T cells into them from genetically similar mice. He hypothesised that the mice would have a weaker immune system and develop fewer T cells.
Instead, he discovered that there appeared to be T cells that protected the mice from developing autoimmune diseases.
Over the next decade, Sakaguchi set out to uncover whether there were different types of T cells that played different roles in immune response. In 1995, Sakaguchi published the paper that detailed a new class of T cell, called a “regulatory T cell”. It showed that T cells carrying a specific type of protein on their surface actually eliminated harmful T cells.
There was initial scepticism among scientists about the existence of regulatory T cells. But work from Brunkow and Ramsdell published in the 1990s and early 2000s showed how regulatory T cells work.
Brunkow and Ramsdell’s research showed that regulatory T cells prevent immune cells from attacking the body by secreting immune dampening proteins or by directly delivering anti-inflammatory signals.
They also discovered a specific protein that identified these regulatory T cells (called FoxP3). This meant scientists could work out when a cell was regulatory and also isolate them for study.
These discoveries showed how important regulatory T cells (also called T-regs for short) are in regulating other inflammatory immune cells in the body.
The work of this year’s Nobel laureates has also massively opened up the field of immunology, going far beyond merely understanding the process of immune tolerance.
Their work has revealed that immunity and inflammation is actively regulated. It has provided a raft of new ideas to control inflammatory disease, whether caused by infection, allergens, environmental pollutants or autoimmunity.
It has even provided new ideas to prevent rejection of transplants and has opened up new ways of improving immune responses to cancer treatments and vaccines.
Tracy Hussell is affiliated with the British Society of Immunology as President
Source: The Conversation – UK – By Gulnaz Anjum, Assistant Professor of Climate Psychology, Centre for Social Issues Research, Department of Psychology, University of Limerick
When the daytime air feels like an oven and night brings no relief, people in Karachi, Pakistan, say the heat “goes straight to the head”. They mean more than dizziness or sweat.
It’s the creeping panic of a body that cannot cool down: restless nights, frayed tempers, a household on edge. Here, a heatwave is not simply a matter of high temperatures. It’s a public health emergency that seeps into every corner of life: physical health, sleep, mood and the invisible care work that keeps families and neighbours alive.
For families living on informal and unstable incomes and in fragile housing, such heat is not just uncomfortable; it can be deadly.
Heatwaves occur when temperatures push daily highs past 40 °C inland and above 35 °C on the coast. In 2015, a single heatwave killed more than 1,200 people in Karachi during just one week in June. But the quieter psychological toll which is rarely counted in official statistics builds with every wave of extreme heat.
In our research, residents describe lying awake in stagnant air, waking drenched in sweat and starting the next day already exhausted. Sleeplessness makes emotions harder to manage, fuelling conflict in homes stretched thin. Many, especially women, speak of a sense of suffocation and dread; fearing their bodies won’t cope or that a loved one will collapse. For people with asthma or anxiety the symptoms are magnified, and mothers often feel an acute worry for children and elderly relatives.
This mental strain is no overreaction, it reflects harsh realities. Outdoor workers lose wages when extreme heat makes it unsafe to stay on the job. At the same time, food and water prices climb as supply chains falter and demand spikes, just as family incomes shrink. Hospitals and clinics can be difficult to reach because high temperatures often lead to power cuts, overloaded transport systems and an increase in heat-related illness, all of which slows emergency care.
Women often shoulder the heaviest burden because in many households, especially in low- and middle-income countries, domestic and caregiving duties still fall largely to them. Social norms often expect women, not men, to stay home with children, care for older relatives and organise water or food supplies. When a heatwave strikes, those tasks become more physically demanding and more time-consuming: fanning overheated children through sleepless nights, checking constantly on elderly neighbours, and answering calls for help.
In low- and middle-income countries, women also face disproportionate health risks from climate change, particularly during extreme heat, precisely because these gendered roles and socio-cultural expectations expose them to greater stress. The unpaid labour that holds households together – caring, fetching water, preparing food – is carried mainly by women. As one Karachi resident explained, on the hottest days she and her neighbours watch over pregnant women:
Women here may be poor, but they support each other, sharing water, looking after each other’s children and cooking for each other. It’s our way of surviving…
Such neighbourly care surfaces again and again. Families pool money to buy safe drinking water when supplies run short. In some informal settlements, one of the most immediate ways people cope with rising heat is by increasing their reliance on water, often through hand pumps that serve as vital lifelines during prolonged heatwaves. Neighbours check on older people during power cuts. Women take turns cooking when kitchens become unbearable for elderly or pregnant relatives. These are not feel-good tales of “bouncing back,” but acts of collective survival: immediate, exhausting and often invisible. They reveal how vulnerability is shaped by poor housing, patchy healthcare and weak governance – factors that leave people exposed when crises strike.
Extreme heat also compounds heat related health risks and financial costs. In crowded settlements and displacement camps, food spoils quickly, appetites wane and clean water becomes harder to find and more expensive to acquire. Pregnant and breastfeeding women struggle to maintain nutrition. International research shows that heat stress can deplete micronutrients, hinder growth and increase the risk of early labour and premature childbirths. When these pressures collide with poverty and displacement, the dangers of malnutrition and long-term harm can only grow.
Residents’ requests are strikingly simple. They want electricity that stays on through the night, clean water that they can afford and clinics that remain open when symptoms worsen. These are not luxuries. They are the difference between anxiety and peace of mind, between starting the day rested or already exhausted.
Even small interventions help: a working fan, a shaded community space, advice on hydration and sleep. Women-led groups already organise water-sharing, neighbour check-ins and shaded play areas. Strengthening these networks, and centring polices on women’s health could save lives and protect mental health during future heatwaves.
Counting only hospital admissions or heat-stroke cases misses what people say matters most: a child kept hydrated, a safe place to sleep, the absence of panic on the hottest days and nights of the year. These everyday markers of dignity and survival are where real adaptation begins. As one resident put it: “We cannot stop the sun. But we can stop each other from being alone in the heat.”
Gulnaz Anjum is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Psychology, University of Limerick.
Mudassar Aziz 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.
Source: The Conversation – UK – By Daniel O’Brien, Lecturer, Department of Literature Film and Theatre Studies, University of Essex
Earlier this year I created a video essay about Arnold Schwarzenegger. While making it, I realised that Commando, Schwarzeneggers’ most excessive one-man-army film, was about to turn 40 – so I decided to rewatch it.
I found that the film’s mature age contrasts with its juvenile absurdity, which I absorbed all too easily when I first saw it, far too young, as a pre-teen. It was one of the few VHS tapes I had access to (thanks to an older sibling) and I watched it more than I should probably admit.
By the time The Matrix arrived in 1999, it took genuine effort for me to separate it from Schwarzenegger’s Commando character, John Matrix, the musclebound soldier saving his kidnapped daughter from terrorists, which was deeply etched in my brain. If that setup sounds familiar, you might also be thinking of Liam Neeson’s character in Taken (2008) – a film for which Commando is an obvious blueprint.
Beyond inspiring a wave of rogue hero revenge movies, Commando became a key cultural touchstone for kids on the cusp of adolescence. The film is pretty much the celluloid equivalent of playing with G.I. Joe action figures, only to put them down when you discover computer games.
The author’s Schwarzenegger video essay.
In The Terminator (1984), Schwarzenegger played a cyborg from the future sent to the present. Meanwhile, Conan the Barbarian (1982), Conan the Destroyer (1984) and Red Sonja (1985) all situated him in the distant, fantastical past of sword-and-sorcery epics. Commando, by contrast, was the first film to present him as a native inhabitant of a recognisably modern setting.
In the film he navigates suburban America, shopping malls and airports – albeit all with his signature ability to casually lift and rip a phone booth out of a wall with someone in it, and jump from a moving plane during its ascent.
Toy soldiers
Commando deliberately introduces Schwarzenegger through his body before anything else. The opening sequence is a montage of close-ups – bulging biceps, ropey veins – before revealing Matrix moving through the woods. He has an entire tree trunk balanced on one shoulder and a chainsaw hanging from the other hand.
Body and machinery appear before character – a choice that feels like a deliberate echo of The Terminator. Schwarzenegger’s expression is almost like an automaton at first, and his movements mechanical, until his daughter Jenny appears and the hardness dissolves instantly into playful melodrama.
That the film’s opening foregrounds Schwarzenegger’s body (returned to again in later scenes) is significant for several reasons. One is that it recalls Thomas Edison’s 1894 “actuality films” of German strongman Eugen Sandow, where the display of muscle wasn’t just part of the film – it was the entire attraction.
Footage of Eugen Sandow.
The treatment of Schwarzenegger’s body as spectacle is also a reminder of the exaggerated physiques of 1980s toy action figures. Commando arrived just as Mattel’s Masters of the Universe line (1982–present) reached peak popularity, with He-Man, Skeletor and most of the range sharing the same hyper-muscular form.
There’s a persistent misconception that the Masters of the Universe toy line began as a Conan the Barbarian tie-in, hastily reworked once the film was deemed too adult for children. In reality, events unfolded differently. While the Conan film’s rights holders did approach Mattel about a toy line, Masters of the Universe was reportedly developed independently, drawing only loose inspiration from Conan Properties Inc – which was already in the public domain – rather than the Conan movie.
Even so, the overlap led to legal trouble and in 1982 the film’s rights holders sued Mattel for infringement, a case dismissed in 1989. Regardless of the legal grey area, the cultural link between Schwarzenegger’s physique and the action figure aesthetic was firmly cemented.
Another strong link between Commando and 1980s play can also be seen in the rise of arcade video gaming and later, home consoles. One striking example is Capcom’s Commando, released just months before the film. Like the movie, the game drops the player into enemy territory as a lone soldier armed with an assault rifle and limitless ammunition, mowing down wave after wave of faceless, expendable enemies.
In the film, close-ups of Matrix’s body and face, combined with over-the-shoulder camera angles, draw the viewer into this perspective, which at times seems to anticipate the immersive framing of first-person shooters, later popularised by id Software’s Wolfenstein 3D (1992), Doom (1993) and many more.
The trailer for Commando.
Commando never takes itself seriously and is all the stronger for it. Instead, the film embraces its reflexive absurdity like a badge of honour, serving as a template for the blend of action and comedy that would come to define much of Schwarzenegger’s later career.
Commando’s humour also owes much to Rae Dawn Chong’s performance as Cindy, a reluctant partner to Matrix. Through her incredulous reactions to the escalating mayhem, she grounds Matrix’s over the top rampage and frames the chaos as part of the joke, inviting the audience to revel in the film’s outrageous excess, or add some of her own with a mishap with a rocket launcher.
Add to that the comically menacing turns from Bill Duke and David Patrick Kelly, the endless one-liners, the A-Team-style montage sequences and James Horner’s steel-drum score, and there’s more than enough reason to revisit this cult classic.
So let off some steam, rewatch Commando, and drive back into the world of John Matrix – an action-figure-avatar, who could take down an entire army with punches, and entire audiences with punchlines.
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Daniel O’Brien 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.
Once synonymous with hippies and hallucinatory experiences, psychedelic drugs are now being explored for their medical potential. The stigma of that era resulted in research being suppressed by drug laws, yet with mental health treatments hitting limits, scientists have returned to this controversial corner of medicine.
Substances like psilocybin (found in magic mushrooms) and ayahuasca are now being taken seriously by scientists and doctors, not for the visions they induce, but for the healing potential they possess.
Initially, this focused on treating mental health conditions like depression, where currently prescribed drugs only help a minority of patients. But these investigations have now expanded to include diseases driven by inflammation, which psychedelic drugs may help reduce by calming down the immune system.
In both human cells grown in laboratory dishes and animal studies, psychedelic drugs like DMT, LSD, and a compound called (R)-DOI can block the release of inflammatory molecules called cytokines. These protein molecules fuel conditions like rheumatoid arthritis, asthma and even depression, as well as increasing brain damage following traumatic brain injury.
Advantage over steroids
But these drugs have a considerable advantage over typical anti-inflammatory medications like steroid drugs because psychedelics appear to work without suppressing healthy immune function, which is a major problem with steroids.
Significantly, these laboratory findings are beginning to be confirmed in studies in humans. Evidence is growing that psychedelics could hold the key to managing inflammation, one of the body’s central drivers of many chronic diseases, including depression, arthritis and heart conditions.
Take psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms. In a study involving 60 healthy participants, just one dose was enough to significantly lower levels of two key inflammatory molecules – TNF-alpha and IL-6 – over the following week.
However, not all studies have shown the same clear results. Some only had a few participants and others were complicated by the fact that some participants had previous drug experience, which could affect the results.
One big challenge with studying psychedelics in medical research is that it’s very hard to hide who got the real drug and who got a placebo. When someone has a strong psychedelic experience, it’s obvious they didn’t just take a sugar pill.
That makes it challenging to interpret the results, especially for aspects like mood, which can be significantly influenced by expectations. Even changes in the body, such as inflammation, might be affected by this placebo effect.
Meanwhile, the powerful Amazonian brew ayahuasca, which contains the psychedelic drug DMT, showed promising results in both healthy people and patients with hard-to-treat depression. In one study, those given ayahuasca had reduced levels of an inflammatory marker called CRP.
The bigger the drop in CRP, the greater their mood improvements. This suggests that reducing inflammation may play a role in improving mental health and adds to growing evidence that conditions like depression and schizophrenia are connected to inflammation in the body.
Scientists think psychedelics mainly work by acting on something called the 5-HT2A receptor, a part of brain cells that usually responds to serotonin, often nicknamed the “happy hormone”.
This receptor sets off a chain of chemical reactions inside cells. But here’s the surprising part: the anti-inflammatory effects of psychedelics might not rely on the same processes that cause the mind-altering experiences, such as certain calcium signals and other well-studied pathways. Indeed, researchers believe different, less-understood mechanisms may be involved – though they haven’t figured out exactly what those are yet.
In one animal study of asthma, a chronic inflammatory condition, two drugs with similar psychedelic effects, (R)-DOI and (R)-DOTFM, had vastly different anti-inflammatory results. The first drug completely reversed inflammation, while the other did nothing. This further suggests that anti-inflammatory effects may be separate from psychedelic effects, potentially opening the door to developing safer medication.
The next generation of anti-inflammatory treatments may come from what I call Pipi drugs – psychedelic-informed but psychedelic-inactive compounds. These are medications designed to mimic the therapeutic benefits of psychedelics without causing hallucinations.
Several such drugs have now been identified, such as DLX-001 and DLX-159, which are being developed by Delix Therapeutics, an American pharmaceuticals company. These experimental drugs show responses indicating antidepressant effects without causing a “trip”. This could transform how we treat a host of conditions tied to inflammation, without the regulatory complications or patient reluctance often associated with psychedelics.
Although research is still in the early stages, evidence is building that psychedelics – or new drugs developed from them – could become an entirely new type of anti-inflammatory treatment. As studies begin to include people with long-term inflammatory illnesses and use more rigorous and innovative placebo-controlled designs, we may find that the mind-bending world of psychedelics holds unexpected tools for fighting disease.
The potential to separate the healing properties from the hallucinogenic effects could revolutionise treatment for countless patients suffering from conditions where inflammation plays a central role.
Nicholas Barnes owns shares and is a Director of Celentyx Ltd; a pharmecuetical R&D company that performs research aimed at identifying new and improved ways to treat diseses involving the immune system.
Source: The Conversation – UK – By John Kenny, Research Fellow (Public Engagement with Climate Change), School of Environmental Sciences, University of East Anglia
To keep global warming below 1.5°C, greenhouse gas emissions had to peak no later than 2025. That was a key finding of the IPCC’s most recent major report on the topic, published a few years ago. Yet when we surveyed UK MPs and members of the public in four countries, fewer than 15% could identify this deadline correctly.
This matters. If politicians and voters underestimate how urgently we have to fight climate change, they are less likely to back the tough policies needed. Instead, they risk assuming we have more time, all while climate change targets slip further out of reach.
Our study, published in the journal Communications Earth and Environment, found that across Britain, Canada, Chile and Germany, about one-third of respondents thought emissions only had to peak by 2040 or later. In the UK, we also surveyed MPs. We found Labour politicians were more likely than Conservatives to answer correctly, but overall awareness was low in both groups.
Among the public, younger people, those worried about climate change, and those less prone to believing conspiracy theories were the most likely to know the right answer. But overall, the pattern was clear: most people – and most MPs – don’t grasp the urgency of the situation.
The distribution of responses was remarkably similar across the four countries. Kenny and Geese (2025)
Why awareness matters
Knowing the scientific facts does not automatically spur action. But political priorities are shaped by what MPs or their constituents consider as urgent (MPs sometimes cite a lack of urgency from constituents as an excuse for not taking climate actions even when they are concerned about it).
If neither MPs nor their voters realise how pressing the problem is, climate change risks being overlooked in favour of other issues. That MPs were largely not aware that much more immediate action was required may help explain why, by mid-2024, the UK was already behind the pace required to meet its own emissions reduction targets.
Partisan divides reinforce the problem. In our survey, 2019 Labour voters were more likely to know the correct 2025 deadline than those who voted Conservative. Political differences in knowledge were greater than the gap between MPs and the public, suggesting that party identity or political ideology, not just parliamentary expertise, is a factor in level of awareness.
Many of those Conservative MPs were replaced by new Labour MPs in the 2024 election, so perhaps a repeat survey today would show greater awareness of climate change among parliamentarians. But even Labour MPs are still not very likely to appreciate the urgency.
Labour-Tory was a bigger divide than public-politician. Kenny and Geese (2025)
The communication challenge
The IPCC and other big institutions produce authoritative reports, but they are not always written in a manner accessible to non-specialists. Policymakers are inundated with these reports and are expected to absorb huge amounts of information, digest it, and act on it. Crucial findings can get lost in the detail. If the urgency of climate action is not communicated clearly and memorably, it is less likely to be a factor in forming policy.
In the UK, scientists have long made “global greenhouse gases need to peak by 2025 for 1.5°C” a centrepiece of public and political communications. For example, it is there in the slogan of the Tyndall Centre, the major climate research hub where we work, that this is a Critical Decade for Climate Action.
But our findings suggest this message is not cutting through, with either politicians or the public. If deadlines are misunderstood, policies will inevitably not go far enough.
Make timelines impossible to ignore
The science is clear: emissions really did need to peak this year for a chance of staying within 1.5°C. A number of studies suggest this target is now effectivelyunreachable given the lack of substantial progress in recent years, but the urgency remains.
To close the gap between science and politics, communications must be sharper. Reports need to highlight timelines and consequences in ways that are impossible to ignore. Politicians and the public need to understand not just the scale of the climate crisis, but how immediate it is.
John Kenny receives funding from the European Research Council (via the DeepDCarb Advanced Grant 882601). He is an affiliate member of the Centre for Climate Change and Social Transformations (CAST).
Lucas Geese receives funding from the European Research Council (via the DeepDCarb Advanced Grant 882601). He is an affiliate member of the Centre for Climate Change and Social Transformations (CAST).
Source: The Conversation – UK – By Matthew Flinders, Founding Director of the Sir Bernard Crick Centre for the Public Understanding of Politics, University of Sheffield
Keir Starmer’s legacy in British politics is already assured. No one in modern British history had managed to come to power with a massive majority and then become the least popular prime minister on record in just over a year.
As the Institute for Government’s report The Precarious State of the State underlined at the time of the last general election, whoever claimed the keys to No 10 was going to inherit a complex set of tricky challenges – creaking public services, fragile public finances, a longstanding productivity problem. The list went on.
The Labour government’s response was to dampen public expectations, blame the previous government, emphasise the existence of a financial black hole and generally sink into a funk of doom and gloom. This miserablism was never going to be a winning strategy.
Looking back, the government’s honeymoon-period focus on “fixing the foundations” encapsulated what has, over time, come to be known as Starmerism. Policies emphasised long-term technocratic fixes, reflecting a pragmatic worldview (digital identity cards, one-in-one out pilot immigration projects with France, artificial intelligence as the answer to everything, etc). But these fail to resonate with the emotionally charged short-term demands of large sections of the British public.
Miserablism, coupled with the air of incompetence wrought by various policy U-turns and self-inflicted injuries , has been a highly effective strategy for one party leader: Nigel Farage. Recent polling places Reform on the brink of a majority and suggests disaster for the Labour party.
This really is Starmer’s last chance. And how did he respond in his annual party conference speech? By trying to promote positivity in an age of despair, talking of “renewal” and attacking the pessimism of populist politics – “when was the last time you heard Nigel Farage say anything positive about Britain’s future?”
“Britain stands at a fork in the road,” said Starmer. “We can choose decency or division. Renewal or decline.” Reform was condemned for promoting a polarising form of grievance politics; as little more than “a competition of victims”.
But having built an expectation that he was about to present his long-awaited positive and principled vision for Brtain, the high rhetoric about “our age of insecurity” dropped to a more familiar focus on rather mechanical matters: “we do need a more muscular state”, “growing our economy from the grassroots”, “asset bubbles”.
The mass ranks of Labour ministers, neatly corralled on the front rows, all looked slightly confused.
And the big positive vision? Industrial policy: “government and business bringing the future closer” – a highpoint strapline that sent dull thuds echoing around the conference hall. The pause for applause lasting what felt like an eternity as the audience digested the full force of their leader’s visionary focus.
This is not intended to be a flippant point.
Economic growth is central to the United Kingdom’s focus. An effective industrial strategy can undoubtedly play a role in delivering growth. It’s also important to acknowledge that the role of the prime minister has arguably grown to become an impossible office. There is also a need to avoid the boosterism and bullshit that defined the performative repertoire of certain former prime ministers.
But there is a politics of positivity that Keir Starmer possibly needs to understand, and which explains why Nigel Farage’s Reform party is hoovering up support. Humans are hardwired to focus on failure.
This negativity bias (or “negativity effect”) has been demonstrated by a range of disciplines in relation to individual and group behaviour. It ensures that negative events, threats and risks tend to have a far greater effect on attitudes than positive events, achievements and opportunities. So when it comes to generating interest, controlling the agenda or shifting emotions, bad is stronger than good.
This helps explain the success of populism’s generally negative and crisis-laden discourse. The repeated recourse to narratives of crisis, failure and collapse. Promoting fear and loathing and engaging in grievance politics sparks a defensive reaction amongst sections of society who already feel overlooked or left behind.
The paradox is that the Labour government can claim several successes – from securing contracts to save shipyards and steelworks through to increasing free childcare and cutting NHS waiting lists. But shifting public opinion and working against the intensity of the negativity bias demands far more than Starmer has so far proved able to provide.
It demands a clear, simple and positive vision of where the country is going and why. Even just a three-word tagline that sets out unifying principles that bind each separate project into a unified project would be more effective – finances, fairness and families. But that’s just not Starmer’s style. And maybe that’s the problem. It’s not easy promoting positivity in an age of despair.
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Matthew Flinders 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.
Part of the ancient lake delta in Jezero Crater on Mars.JPL-Caltech
Recently, Nasa revealed exciting details of new findings from Mars. Scientists have
discovered tiny patterns of unusual minerals in the clay-rich rocks on the edge of
Jezero Crater – an ancient lake once fed by Martian river systems, and the
exploration site of the Nasa Perseverance Rover.
The jury is still out on whether these are actually signs of life, but this discovery has reignited the discussion about the previous existence of life on Mars, and the possibility that it could still survive there today.
We’ll need many different lines of evidence to answer this question, but there is precedence for considering certain Martian environments as currently habitable.
Early Earth and early Mars were relatively similar, but this similarity didn’t last long. Both had atmospheres and magnetic fields that offered some protection from harmful radiation originating from the Sun, along with bodies of liquid water on their surface. We know that these conditions led to the origin of life on Earth, so it is possible that the same could have happened on Mars.
While life on Earth was beginning to thrive, Mars lost its magnetic field as its core cooled. This exposed the planet to harmful solar rays which began to erode the
atmosphere. As the atmosphere disappeared, the Martian surface became colder
and drier, eventually becoming the freezing desert we know today.
This is why many scientists don’t expect to find living organisms on the surface of
Mars – it is simply too inhospitable for life as we know it. Instead, the hope lies in uncovering microbial life hidden in protected underground or icy regions.
Where could life survive on Mars?
Possible locations for Martian microbial life include caves, inside or underneath ice sheets at the poles, or deep underground. All of these environments have analogues (environments with certain similarities) on Earth that host microorganisms. So it is not much of a stretch to consider that if life began on Mars, it could still be holding on in these extreme niches.
Perhaps the most plausible of these is underground – the Martian subsurface. Extending from a few metres to several kilometres deep, it is thought to be the planet’s most stable and long-lived potential habitat.
While the surface has been cold, dry, and generally inhospitable for much of Martian history, the deep subsurface may have offered more favourable conditions. On Earth, the deep biosphere – the life that survives beneath the surface – provides a useful comparison.
A substantial amount of Earth’s microbial life exists underground, surviving in cracks within rocks. These ecosystems are dominated by lithoautotrophs – microbes that get energy by feeding on those rocks. Methane, a potential byproduct of some
lithoautroph feeding habits, has even been detected on Mars. But there are many
ways to generate methane underground without life, so right now this doesn’t tell us much.
The potential for a deep biosphere hinges on factors including the availability of
liquid water, a source of energy, space to live in, and tolerable temperatures. There is possible evidence for the existence of liquid water below the surface of Mars, but this is still under debate.
This would facilitate chemical reactions known as water-rock reactions which generate energy for microbes to live on. Because of its weaker gravity, rocks on Mars may be less compressed than those on Earth and remain more porous at depth, providing space for microbes to live in.
At the same time, Mars produces less heat from its interior, which means temperatures suitable for life could extend nearly twice as deep underground as they do on Earth.
Scientists spend a lot of time analysing places on Earth – Mars analogues – to try to understand the possibilities for past and present life on Mars. These environments are not identical to Mars, but they share at least one important feature such as extreme dryness, high salt levels, or high UV exposure.
Earth’s deep subsurface is one example, and others include the Atacama Desert in South America, sediments at Lake Salda in Turkey, and salts found in Utah’s Pilot Valley. Researchers around the world are investigating these sites on Earth to better understand how Martian conditions might affect life and its preservation. As no one location on Earth could possibly match all Martian conditions, scientists also run controlled laboratory experiments.
An example of this is the use of specialised “Mars chambers” to reproduce Martian environmental conditions such as its atmosphere, radiation exposure, and temperature. All of these investigations combined help us to better understand the potential for life to exist on Mars.
The Mars chamber at Nasa’s Goddard Space Flight Center.
Signs of life today?
Right now there is no conclusive evidence of life on Mars past or present. Nasa’s
“leopard spots” are the most promising signs we have, but these are still
inconclusive. If life exists on Mars today, it is almost certainly not widespread like on Earth – our probes and rovers would have seen it.
However, important opportunities lie ahead. The upcoming European Space Agency (Esa) ExoMars Rosalind Franklin rover will be able to drill up to two metres below the Martian surface. This will give us a chance to study the shallow subsurface of Mars which may contain living microorganisms. But this is only the start—most scientists agree that we will need to go deeper.
Drilling deep on Earth is still a huge challenge and there is so much we don’t know about our own subsurface life. Probing the deep subsurface of Mars will be a major scientific and engineering challenge, but one that may hold the key to finding existing Martian life.
Seán Jordan receives funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 1101114969) and from Research Ireland (Pathway award 22/PATH-S/10692). He is affiliated with the Research Ireland Centre for Applied Geosciences (iCRAG).
Devyani Jambhule receives funding from the Research Ireland Pathway Award ((22/PATH-S/10692). She is affiliated with the Origin of Life Early-career Network (OoLEN).
Research by charity End Sexism in Schools has found that over half of history lessons delivered to children aged 11 to 14 in England feature no women at all. With the government set to allocate funding to boost the provision of school libraries, here are some books – for a range of ages – to open young eyes to women’s lives, experiences and marginalisation in our past.
Books that strike a balance between being age appropriate, featuring rich, well-researched context and capturing the attention are top of my list. If they focus on lesser-known women in history, all the better.
For primary school children, biographical collections dominate the field. Take Kate Pankhurst’s Fantastically Great Women Who Changed the World. This book introduces young historians to a host of inspiring women from different ethnicities and backgrounds, while carefully setting out the circumstances and barriers that each woman faced in her time and place. The cartoon illustrations and accessible format of the text are a sure-fire classroom pleaser.
Kay Woodward’s What Would She Do? Advice from Iconic Women in History does a similar job for children aged around nine upwards, but with an added participatory element. It presents readers with the real-life dilemmas that the iconic women faced and encourages empathetic problem solving – what would she do? It also underscores the importance of resilience.
Vashti Harrison’s Little Leaders. Bold Women in Black History is an excellent choice. Meanwhile Rachel Ignotofsky’s Women in Science introduces young readers to women of diverse backgrounds, from antiquity to the 20th century, who have made their mark in maths, science and technology.
Biography anthologies introduce children to a wide range of historical figures. Twinsterphoto/Shutterstock
Along with the books compiling sketches of notable women’s lives, there are growing numbers of detailed biographies for primary school children that illuminate women’s place in the past. In the mainstream, there’s the Little People, Big Dreams series. My favourites feature architect Zaha Hadid, singer Aretha Franklin and artist Louise Bourgeois.
Particularly engaging historical biographies for children include Counting on Katherine, the story of Katherine Johnson, an African-American mathematician whose orbital calculations were instrumental in early US space missions. Kathleen Krull’s inspirational story of American lawyer and Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg also deserves a mention, along with Haydn Kaye’s book on the British suffragist pioneer Emmeline Pankhurst.
Women’s rights
My own research includes a focus on early 20th-century feminist activism. I’ve read Kay Barnham’s Women’s Rights and Suffrage with my six year old. It examines women’s historical legal status and political resistance from a global perspective. Then there’s David Roberts’ beautifully illustrated Suffragette: The Battle for Equality and Susan Campbell Bartoletti’s How Women Won the Vote. These books document the key ideologies and objectives of Edwardian British suffragism.
But what about the ordinary women of history, those of us who did not crusade or trailblaze – or at least not in public? Sadly, few books aimed at primary school children address this question head on. However, there is hope on the horizon for teens.
My 13-year-old daughter’s current favourite book is the teen edition of Philippa Gregory’s Normal Women. Making History for 900 Years. Gregory gives a detailed account of the lives of a diverse array of women over this broad time period in English history, highlighting the role of patriarchy and women’s subjugation in everyday life. With accessible language, relatable stories and illustrations, Normal Women is a surefire hit with older children trying to make sense of their place in the world.
Kate Mosse’s Feminist History for Every Day of the Year is also a captivating read, supplementing the multi-biography of notable women format with relative unknowns, for an older audience.
This kind of work, which goes beyond celebrating the famous few and sets out to write women back into the past, represents real progress in historical works for the next generation.
Rachael Attwood 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.
Source: The Conversation – UK – By Christopher Watson, Professor, Astrophysics Research Centre, School of Mathematics and Physics, Queen’s University Belfast
On October 6 1995, at a scientific meeting in Florence, Italy, two Swiss astronomers made an announcement that would transform our understanding of the universe beyond our solar system. Michel Mayor and his PhD student Didier Queloz, working at the University of Geneva, announced they had detected a planet orbiting a star other than the Sun.
The star in question, 51 Pegasi, lies about 50 light years away in the constellation Pegasus. Its companion – christened 51 Pegasi b – was unlike anything written in textbooks about how we thought planets might look. This was a gas giant with a mass of at least half that of Jupiter, circling its star in just over four days. It was so close to the star (1/20th of Earth’s distance from the Sun, well inside Mercury’s orbit) that the planet’s atmosphere would be like a furnace, with temperatures topping 1,000°C.
The instrument behind the discovery was Elodie, a spectrograph that had been installed two years earlier at the Haute-Provence observatory in southern France. Designed by a Franco-Swiss team, Elodie split starlight into a spectrum of different colours, revealing a rainbow etched with fine dark lines. These lines can be thought of as a “stellar barcode”, providing details on the chemistry of other stars.
What Mayor and Queloz spotted was 51 Pegasi’s barcode sliding rhythmically back-and-forth in this spectrum every 4.23 days – a telltale signal that the star was being wobbled back and forth by the gravitational tug of an otherwise unseen companion amid the glare of the star.
After painstakingly ruling out other explanations, the astronomers finally decided that the variations were due to a gas giant in a close-in orbit around this Sun-like star. The front page of the Nature journal in which their paper was published carried the headline: “A planet in Pegasus?”
The discovery baffled scientists, and the question-mark on Nature’s front cover reflected initial skepticism. Here was a purported giant planet next to its star, with no known mechanism for forming a world like this in such a fiery environment.
While the signal was confirmed by other teams within weeks, reservations about the cause of the signal remained for almost three years before being finally ruled out. Not only did 51 Pegasi b become the first planet discovered orbiting a Sun-like star outside our Solar System, but it also represented an entirely new type of planet. The term “hot Jupiter” was later coined to describe such planets.
This discovery opened the floodgates. In the 30 years since, more than 6,000 exoplanets (the term for planets outside our Solar System) and exoplanet candidates have been catalogued.
Their variety is staggering. Not only hot but ultra-hot Jupiters with a dayside temperature exceeding 2,000 °C and orbits of less than a day. Worlds that orbit not one but two stars, like Tatooine from Star Wars. Strange “super-puff” gas giants larger than Jupiter but with a fraction of the mass. Chains of small rocky planets all piled up in tight orbits.
The discovery of 51 Pegasi b triggered a revolution and, in 2019, landed Mayor and Queloz a Nobel prize. We can now infer that most stars have planetary systems. And yet, of the thousands of exoplanets found, we have yet to find a planetary system that resembles our own.
The quest to find an Earth twin – a planet that truly resembles Earth in size, mass and temperature – continues to drive modern-day explorers like us to search for more undiscovered exoplanets. Our expeditions may not take us on death-defying voyages and treks like the past legendary explorers of Earth, but we do get to visit beautiful, mountain-top observatories often located in remote areas around the world.
We are members of an international consortium of planet hunters that built, operate and maintain the Harps-N spectrograph, mounted on the Telescopio Nazionale de Galileo on the beautiful Canary island of La Palma. This sophisticated instrument allows us to rudely interrupt the journey of starlight which may have been travelling unimpeded at speeds of 670 million miles per hour for decades or even millennia.
Each new signal has the potential to bring us closer to understanding how common planetary systems like our own may (or may not) be. In the background lies the possibility that one day, we may finally detect another planet like Earth.
The origins of exoplanet study
Up until the mid-1990s, our Solar System was the only set of planets humanity ever knew. Every theory about how planets formed and evolved stemmed from these nine, incredibly closely spaced data-points (which went down to eight when Pluto was demoted in 2006, after the International Astronomical Union agreed a new definition of a planet).
All of these planets revolve around just one star out of the estimated 10¹¹ (roughly 100 billion) in our galaxy, the Milky Way – which is in turn one of some 10¹¹ galaxies throughout the universe. So, trying to draw conclusions from the planets in our Solar System alone was a bit like aliens trying to understand human nature by studying students living together in one house. But that didn’t stop some of the greatest minds in history speculating on what lay beyond.
The ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus (341-270BC) wrote: “There is an infinite number of worlds – some like this world, others unlike it.” This view was not based on astronomical observation but his atomist theory of philosophy. If the universe was made up of an infinite number of atoms then, he concluded, it was impossible not to have other planets.
Epicurus clearly understood what this meant in terms of the potential for life developing elsewhere: “We must not suppose that the worlds have necessarily one and the same shape. Nobody can prove that in one sort of world there might not be contained – whereas in another sort of world there could not possibly be – the seeds out of which animals and plants arise and all the rest of the things we see.”
In contrast, at roughly the same time, fellow Greek philosopher Aristotle (384-322 BC) was proposing his geocentric model of the universe, which had the Earth immobile at its centre with the Moon, Sun and known planets orbiting around us. In essence, the Solar System as Aristotle conceived it was the entire universe. In On the Heavens (350BC), he argued: “It follows that there cannot be more worlds than one.”
Such thinking that planets were rare in the universe persisted for 2,000 years. Sir James Jeans, one of the world’s top mathematicians and an influential physicist and astronomer at the time, advanced his tidal hypothesis of planet formation in 1916. According to this theory, planets were formed when two stars pass so closely that the encounter pulls streams of gas off the stars into space, which later condense into planets. The rareness of such close cosmic encounters in the vast emptiness of space led Jeans to believe that planets must be rare, or – as was reported in his obituary – “that the solar system might even be unique in the universe”.
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But by then, understanding of the scale of the universe was slowly changing. In the “Great Debate” of 1920, held at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History in Washington DC, American astronomers Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis clashed over whether the Milky Way was the entire universe, or just one of many galaxies. The evidence began to point to the latter, as Curtis had argued for. This realisation – that the universe contained not just billions of stars, but billions of galaxies each containing billions of stars – began to affect even the most pessimistic predictors of planetary prevalence.
In the 1940s, two things caused the scientific consensus to pivot dramatically. First, Jeans’ tidal hypothesis did not stand up to scientific scrutiny. The leading theories now had planet formation as a natural byproduct of star formation itself, opening up the potential for all stars to host planets.
Then in 1943, claims emerged of planets orbiting the stars 70 Ophiuchus and 61 Cygni c – two relatively nearby star systems visible to the naked eye. Both were later shown to be false positives, most likely due to uncertainties in the telescopic observations that were possible at the time – but nonetheless, it greatly influenced planetary thinking. Suddenly, billions of planets in the Milky Way was considered a genuine scientific possibility.
For us, nothing highlights this change in mindset more than an article written for the Scientific American in July 1943 by the influential American astronomer Henry Norris Russell. Whereas two decades earlier, Russell had predicted that planets “should be infrequent among the stars”, now the title of his article was: “Anthropocentrism’s Demise. New Discoveries Lead to the Probability that There Are Thousands of Inhabited Planets in our Galaxy”.
Strikingly, Russell was not merely making a prediction about any old planets, but inhabited ones. The burning question was: where were they? It would take another half-century to begin finding out.
The Harps-N spectrograph is mounted on the Telescopio Nazionale de Galileo (left) in La Palma, Canary Islands. lunamarina/Shutterstock
How to detect an exoplanet
When we observe myriad stars through La Palma’s Italian-built Galileo telescope using our Harps-N spectrograph, it is amazing to consider how far we have come since Mayor and Queloz announced their discovery of 51 Pegasi b in 1995. These days, we can effectively measure the masses of not just Jupiter-like planets, but even small planets thousands of light years away. As part of the Harps-N collaboration, we have had a front-row seat since 2012 in the science of small exoplanets.
Another milestone in this story came four years after the 51 Pegasi b discovery, when a Canadian PhD student at Harvard University, David Charbonneau, detected the transit of a known exoplanet. This was another hot Jupiter, known as HD209458b, also located in the Pegasus constellation, about 150 light years from Earth.
Transit refers to a planet passing in front of its star, from the perspective of the observer, momentarily making the star appear dimmer. As well as detecting exoplanets, the transit technique enables us to measure the radius of the planet by taking many brightness measurements of a star, then waiting for it to dim due to the passing planet. The extent of blocked starlight depends on the radius of the planet. For example, Jupiter would make the Sun 1% dimmer to alien observers, while for Earth, the effect would be a hundred times weaker.
In all, four times more exoplanets have now been discovered using this transit technique compared with the “barcode” technique, known as radial velocity, that the Swiss astronomers used to spot the first exoplanet 30 years ago. It is a technique that is still widely used today, including by us, as it can not only find a planet but also measure its mass.
A planet orbiting a star exerts a gravitational pull which causes that star to wobble back and forth – meaning it will periodically change its velocity with respect to observers on Earth. With the radial velocity technique, we take repeated measurements of the velocity of a star, looking to find a stable periodic wobble that indicates the presence of a planet.
These velocity changes are, however, extremely small. To put it in perspective, the Earth makes the Sun change its velocity by a mere 9cm per second – slower than a tortoise. In order to find planets with the radial velocity technique, we thus need to measure these small velocity changes for stars that are many many trillions of miles away from us.
The state-of-the-art instruments we use are truly an engineering feat. The latest spectrographs, such as Harps-N and also Espresso, can accurately measure velocity shifts of the order of tenths of centimetres per second – although still not sensitive enough to detect a true Earth twin.
But whereas this radial velocity technique is, for now, limited to ground-based observatories and can only observe one star at the time, the transit technique can be employed in space telescopes such as the French Corot (2006-14) and Nasa’s Kepler (2009-18) and Tess (2018-) missions. Between them, space telescopes have detected thousands of exoplanets in all their diversity, taking advantage of the fact we can measure stellar brightness more easily from space, and for many stars at the same time.
Despite the differences in detection success rate, both techniques continue to be developed. Applying both can give the radius and mass of a planet, opening up many more avenues for studying its composition.
To estimate possible compositions of our discovered exoplanets, we start by making the simplified assumption that small planets are, like Earth, made up of a heavy iron-rich core, a lighter rocky mantle, some surface water and a small atmosphere. Using our measurements of mass and radius, we can now model the different possible compositional layers and their respective thickness.
This is still very much a work in progress, but the universe is spoiling us with a wide variety of different planets. We’ve seen evidence of rocky worlds being torn apart and strange planetary arrangements that hint at past collisions. Planets have been found across our galaxy, from Sweeps-11b in its central regions (at nearly 28,000 light years away, one of the most distant ever discovered) to those orbiting our nearest stellar neighbour, Proxima Centauri, which is “only” 4.2 light years away.
Illustration of Proxima b, one of the exoplanets orbiting the nearest star to our Sun, Proxima Centauri. Catmando/Shutterstock
Searching for ‘another Earth’
In early July 2013, one of us (Christopher) was flying out to La Palma for my first “go” with the recently commissioned Harps-N spectrograph. Keen not to mess up, my laptop was awash with spreadsheets, charts, manuals, slides and other notes. Also included was a three-page document I had just been sent, entitled: Special Instructions for ToO (Target of Opportunity).
The first paragraph stated: “The Executive Board has decided that we should give highest priority to this object.” The object in question was a planetary candidate thought to be orbiting Kepler-78, a star a little cooler and smaller than our Sun, located about 125 light years away in the direction of the constellation Cygnus.
A few lines further down read: “July 4-8 run … Chris Watson” with a list of ten times to observe Kepler-78 – twice per night, each separated by a very specific four hours and 15 minutes. The name above mine was Didier Queloz’s (he hadn’t been awarded his Nobel prize yet, though).
This planetary candidate had been identified by the Kepler space telescope, which was tasked with searching a portion of the Milky Way to look for exoplanets as small as the Earth. In this case, it had identified a transiting planet candidate with an estimated radius of 1.16 (± 0.19) Earth radii – an exoplanet not that much larger than Earth had potentially been spotted.
I was in La Palma to attempt to measure its mass which, combined with the radius from Kepler, would allow the density and possible composition to be constrained. I wrote at the time: “Want 10% error on mass, to get a good enough bulk density to distinguish between Earth-like, iron-concentrated (Mercury), or water.”
In all, I took ten out of our team’s total of 81 exposures of Kepler-78 in an observing campaign lasting 97 days. During that time, we became aware of a US-led team who were also looking for this potential planet. In true scientific spirit, we agreed to submit our independent findings at the same time. On the specified date. Like a prisoner swap, the two teams exchanged results – which agreed. We had, within the uncertainties of our data, reached the same conclusion about the planet’s mass.
Its most likely mass came out as 1.86 Earth masses. At the time, this made Kepler-78b the smallest extrasolar planet with an accurately measured mass. The density was almost identical to that of Earth’s.
But that is where the similarities to our planet ended. Kepler-78b has a “year” that lasts only 8.5 hours, which is why I had been instructed to observe it every 4hr 15min – when the planet was at opposite sides of its orbit, and the induced “wobble” of the star would be at its greatest. We measured the star wobbling back and forth at about two metres per second – no more than a slow jog.
Kepler-78b’s short orbit meant its extreme temperature would cause all rock on the planet to melt. It may have been the most Earth-like planet found at the time in terms of its size and density, but otherwise, this hellish lava world was at the very extremes of our known planetary population.
Illustration of the Kepler-78b ‘lava world’ – similar in size and density to Earth. simoleonh/Shutterstock
In 2016, the Kepler space telescope made another landmark discovery: a system with at least five transiting planets around a Sun-like star, HIP 41378, in the Cancer constellation. What made it particularly exciting was the location of these planets. Where most transiting planets we have spotted are closer to their star than Mercury is to the Sun (due to our detection capabilities), this system has at least three planets beyond the orbital radius of Venus.
Having decided to use our Harps-N spectrograph to measure the masses of all five transiting planets, it became clear after more than a year of observing that one instrument would not be enough to analyse this challenging mix of signals. Other international teams came to the same conclusion and, rather than compete, we decided to come together in a global collaboration that holds strong to this day, with hundreds of radial velocities gathered over many years.
We now have firm masses and radii for most of the planets in the system. But studying them is a game of patience. With planets much further away from their host star, it takes much longer before there is a new transit event or the periodic wobble can be fully observed. We thus need to wait multiple years and gather lots of data to gain insight in this system.
The rewards are obvious, though. This is the first system that starts resembling our Solar System. While the planets are a bit larger and more massive than our rocky planets, their distances are very similar – helping us to understand how planetary systems form in the universe.
The holy grail for exoplanet explorers
After three decades of observing, a wealth of different planets have emerged. We started with the hot Jupiters, large gas giants close to their star that are among the easiest planets to find due to both deeper transits and larger radial velocity signals. But while the first tens of discovered exoplanets were all hot Jupiters, we now know these planets are actually very rare.
With instrumentation getting better and observations piling up, we have since found a whole new class of planets with sizes and masses between those of Earth and Neptune. But despite our knowledge of thousands of exoplanets, we still have not found systems truly resembling our solar system, nor planets truly resembling Earth.
It is tempting to conclude this means we are a unique planet in a unique system. While this still could be true, it is unlikely. The more reasonable explanation is that, for all our stellar technology, our capabilities of detecting such Earth-like planets are still fairly limited in a universe so mind-bogglingly vast.
The holy grail for many exoplanet explorers, including us, remains to find this true Earth twin – a planet with a similar mass and radius as Earth’s, orbiting a star similar to the Sun at a distance similar to how far we are from the Sun.
While the universe is rich in diversity and holds many planets unlike our own, discovering a true Earth twin would be the best place to start looking for life as we know it. Currently, the radial velocity method – as used to find the very first exoplanet – remains by far the best-placed method to find it.
Thirty years on from that Nobel-winning discovery, pioneering planetary explorer Didier Queloz is taking charge of the very first dedicated radial velocity campaign to go in search of an Earth-like planet.
A major international collaboration is building a dedicated instrument, Harps3, to be installed later this year at the Isaac Newton Telescope on La Palma. Given its capabilities, we believe a decade of data should be enough to finally discover our first Earth twin.
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Christopher Watson receives funding from the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC).
Annelies Mortier receives funding from the Science and Technology Facilities council (STFC) and UK Research and Innovation (UKRI).
Source: The Conversation – UK – By Rod Thornton, Senior Lecturer in International Studies, Defence and Security., King’s College London
Five Nato countries neighbouring Russia or its ally, Belarus, have announced that they are to opt out of the Ottawa treaty of 1997.
This treaty bans the use by signatories of anti-personnel (AP) landmines. These states – Poland, Finland, Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia – now have plans to create a 2,000-mile stretch of mined areas as part of a defensive effort against any possible attack from Russia.
The move to create such minefields comes as the result of both a recognition of the perceived growing threat from Russia and of the important defensive effect – as proved during the current Ukraine war – that both AP and anti-tank (AT) landmines can generate.
AT mines are not covered by the Ottawa treaty and all countries are free to use them. AT mines target only vehicles (the weight of a human cannot set them off). The main issue with AP mines, which target humans, is that they can be set off by civilians as well as soldiers.
As such, they are deemed to be not only indiscriminate weapons but also those whose “persistence” means that they can remain a danger long after any conflict is over. Their banning is seen by many as an “ethical imperative”.
In the current era of military development dominated by the introduction of high-tech weapons systems, it appears that the low-tech, unsophisticated and relatively cheap landmine – which can be laid in their millions – can have a significant role to play in modern warfare.
Minefields have proved very effective as a defensive tool in the current Ukraine war because of their ability to disrupt enemy assaults. This recognition has, for these five Nato states, meant that their adherence to the Ottawa treaty had to end, despite its grounding in humanitarian concerns.
The Narva bridge forms the border between Estonia and Russia. Estonia is one of the countries planning to add more fortifications along its border. Alexandre.ROSA/Shutterstock
These five states have been criticised by human rights organisations for withdrawing from the treaty. The UK was also a signatory in 1997 and still remains bound by its stipulations. The US, Russia and China didn’t sign in the first place.
The role of landmines
Landmines have proved a significant defensive tool in the Ukraine war. In the initial days of Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022, the Ukrainian side was very quick to deploy some of its stockpile of Soviet-era AT mines.
These were very effective in restricting the early advance of Russian armoured columns (the term “armour” covering both tanks and other armoured vehicles) on Kyiv. These mines created disruption as Russian forces were either stopped or had to find other routes around the minefields.
The delays allowed time for Ukrainian forces to set up firm defensive positions that eventually halted the Russian columns and led to their being turned back before reaching Kyiv.
Ukrainian forces then launched their own armoured offensive in the summer of 2023. These forces, by now trained and equipped by Nato states and using trademark Nato combined arms manoeuvre warfare techniques, were also held up in dense Russian minefields. Their advance ground to a halt.
The presence of vast fields of both AP and AT mines meant that the supposedly war-winning principal of “manoeuvre warfare”, which relies on movement, initiative and surprise, and which the Ukrainians had been taught by Nato instructors, became impossible to conduct. The Russians call their defensive minefields “insurmountable”.
Given the power of minefields, both sides came ultimately to understand that their presence had to mean a rethink of how the war should be conducted. Mines led to a change in tactics.
Both sides had to adopt much more attritional approaches. Outcomes would now largely be dictated by the weight of artillery fire and not by manoeuvre. It is minefields that form the basis for the Ukrainian forces’ “fortress belt” across much of the Donbas region.
Russian use of landmines slowed down a Ukrainian counter attack.
Despite Kyiv having itself signed the Ottawa treaty in 2005, it was clear that its forces were making considerable use of banned AP mines along with the “legal” AT mines.
The Russian defensive arrangements like those of Ukrainian forces make considerable use of mines. The Russian side is able to draw on what is perceived to be the world’s largest stockpile of, in particular, AP mines (said to be amount to some 26.5 million). Zelensky has accused Russia of using AP mines “with extreme cynicism”, (referring to the alleged booby trapping of dead Russian soldiers with AP mines).
Old tech with big impact
What is interesting here is that the very old technology of landmines is being combined with the far newer one of drones. Minefields can now be laid far more efficiently by using drones to plant them rather than, as has been the norm, by hand. The drones have changed how mine warfare is carried out.
Given what is happening in Ukraine, it is now well understood that mines can do more than help decide the course of mere tactical military engagements; they can create strategic outcomes. They can, in essence, decide the outcome of wars.
It is with this understanding in mind that these five Nato states have withdrawn from the Ottawa treaty. AP mines are patently needed on today’s battlefields. They are seen as an essential addition to the AT mines. Each type has their defensive role to play.
AP and AT mines have both proved themselves to be essential tools of modern warfare. Today, the war in Ukraine is characterised and dominated, due to the presence of mines, by defence and not offence. Frontlines are largely static. Humble, cheap and simple they may be, but landmines do, it seems, have a crucial role to play in modern warfare.
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.
