Category: The Conversation – UK

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Philip Broadbent, Wellcome Multimorbidity PhD Fellow & Public Health Registrar, University of Glasgow

Healthy life expectancy in the UK – the years we can expect to live in good health – has fallen by more than two years over the past decade, according to a new Health Foundation analysis published.

The decline has been larger for women than for men – a finding the report says raises “concerns about the worsening trend of women’s health”. Of 21 high-income countries, the UK has fallen from 14th to 20th on this measure over the same period; only the US now ranks lower.

The aggregate matters, but so does the distribution. The gap in healthy life expectancy between the most and least deprived areas of England is now 20.3 years for women.

A girl born today in Hartlepool can expect to live just 51.2 years of good health; in Richmond-upon-Thames, 70.3. Translate that into time spent unwell and women in the poorest areas can expect roughly three decades of life in poor health, against around 13 years for the most affluent. In Wales, female healthy life expectancy fell by 3.7 years over the decade alone.

Why women in particular?

Men in deprived areas suffer too, but not in the same way and not for the same reasons. Three factors compound disproportionately for women.

The first is unpaid care. Women are 29% more likely than men to be unpaid carers, and almost twice as likely to provide 35 hours or more of unpaid care per week. Forty-two per cent of carers say their physical health has suffered as a consequence of providing care, and 74% report stress and anxiety. Caring falls disproportionately on the same low-income women whose paid work is already physically demanding.

That leads to the second reason: the labour market. Some 78% of social care staff are women; women make up around 59% of minimum-wage workers, concentrated in care, cleaning, hospitality and retail. These are the sectors most likely to involve shift work, zero-hour contracts, physically demanding work and exposure to violence, and least likely to offer sick pay or flexibility when long-term illness inevitably arrives.

The third is diagnostic delay and dismissal. Women in the UK now wait an average of nine years for an endometriosis diagnosis, and the waiting list for a gynaecology appointment is now close to a quarter of a million.

Women’s pain is more likely to be reframed as anxiety than properly worked up, and just 2% of UK health research funding goes to reproductive health and childbirth, despite maternal mortality sitting at its highest level in 20 years.

A strategy that doesn’t match the scale

This is the context in which health secretary Wes Streeting’s renewed women’s health strategy lands. Launched on April 15 with a pledge to end “medical misogyny” and the “gaslighting” of women, it has been welcomed in principle. But it contains £5 million of additional investment, against the £8 million in the men’s health strategy unveiled in November.

Look closer and the women’s headline figures shrink fast. The £1 million for menstrual education in schools works out at roughly £300 per state secondary, or about two hours of workshops per school year.

The £5 million for a maternity care bundle averages around £42,000 per trust (or the equivalent of one midwife’s annual salary). The £2.6 million for osteoporosis scanners buys roughly 33 machines, two-thirds of them replacing outdated ones. There is no ring-fenced funding for gynaecology, despite the unprecedented backlog.

Funding is not evidence, but it is the clearest policy signal of political priority. It is difficult to see how a 20-year healthy life expectancy gap for women in deprived areas closes on a per-school spend that wouldn’t cover a supply teacher.

What should be done?

Healthy life expectancy is not a measure of behaviour or individual lifestyle choices. It is the measurable end product of the cumulative conditions in which women grow up, work, give birth and grow old. The decline since 2012 maps, with depressing predictability, onto a decade of austerity, rising child poverty and stagnant real wages – pressures that fall hardest on the women already doing most of the unpaid work to hold their households together.

A serious response would ring-fence women’s health funding, match rhetoric on medical misogyny with sustained investment in gynaecology, maternity and reproductive research and recognise, as has been argued for more than 15 years, that the “causes of the causes” sit upstream of the NHS.

The Health Foundation has called this report a watershed. It will only become one if the policy response is built to the scale of the problem.

Philip Broadbent receives funding from The Wellcome Trust 223499/Z/21/Z

– ref. Healthy life expectancy falls in the UK – and the decline is worse among women – https://theconversation.com/healthy-life-expectancy-falls-in-the-uk-and-the-decline-is-worse-among-women-281563

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Tracy Hussell, Director of the Lydia Becker Institute of Immunology and Inflammation, University of Manchester

The reliable supply of drugs is fundamental to any healthcare system, yet shortages remain a persistent problem.

Disruptions arise from a range of causes: manufacturing failures, fluctuating demand, regulatory changes and wars. Around 60% of drug shortages are linked to manufacturing bottlenecks, while insufficient reserves of both finished products and raw ingredients continue to leave health systems like the NHS exposed.

The seriousness of the issue has prompted intervention at the highest levels. In the UK, a recent House of Lords report called for more strategic leadership on medicine supply, warning of inadequate oversight and a failure to treat shortages as a matter of national security, despite the clear risks to public health.

Existing government measures – including the National Supply Disruption Response protocol
– aim to mitigate the effect of these drug shortages. Pharmacists and GPs are allowed to dispense alternative medicines where appropriate, and doctors may avoid initiating new patients on drugs in short supply. These measures, however, manage scarcity rather than prevent it.

Compounding the problem is the reality that many patients remain on prescriptions they may no longer need. Under pressure, NHS services often lack the capacity to review and safely reduce medications. Such “de-prescribing” must be gradual to avoid withdrawal effects, meaning this potential reserve of medicines cannot be mobilised quickly enough to address shortages.

The UK’s reliance on overseas manufacturing, adds a further layer of vulnerability. A significant proportion of essential medicines are made abroad, often concentrated in a handful of countries such as India, Israel and Ireland. This lack of diversity leaves supply chains fragile, particularly in times of global disruption.

Recent shortages have affected a wide range of treatments, including Ritalin (methylphenidate), used to treat ADHD, propranolol used to treat angina, heart arrhythmia, high blood pressure and anxiety, and medicines used in hormone replacement therapy, diabetes and epilepsy. There are about 120 drugs in short supply in the UK today.

Using equivalent drugs is not straightforward

GPs and pharmacists are empowered to use alternative medicines in a shortage. Some are structurally similar to the missing version. However, differences in how they are produced and how they are delivered in the body mean they aren’t necessarily equivalent.

For example, immediate-release versions of drugs produce sharper peaks and are cleared quickly by the body, leading to a rapid decrease in drug concentration levels in the blood. This creates gaps in symptom control, particularly overnight.

Extended-release versions, by contrast, provide more stable and consistent coverage. Although the total dose may be similar, differences in how the drug is absorbed can affect both how well the drug works and side-effects.

Patients are often on medicines for a long time – sometimes for life – and adapt to them specifically. Adding even a slightly different version is not necessarily tolerated and the patient may be faced with withdrawal or side-effects.

GPs and pharmacists need better information about which medicines can be used when supplies run short. They should discuss these options with patients so they understand what to expect.

Side-effects are easier to manage when patients know they are caused by the medicine, not by their condition getting worse or a new illness. Ideally, patients would receive an identical replacement, but this is not always possible.

Fixing drug shortages will take sustained investment in domestic manufacturing and genuine political will to treat the problem as a long-term priority. Where UK production isn’t viable, the NHS must urgently diversify their overseas suppliers.

In the meantime, frontline staff need the resources to navigate shortages confidently – and patients deserve clear, honest information about any changes to medication.

Tracy Hussell 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. Shortages, substitutes and uncertainty: the new reality of drugs supplies – https://theconversation.com/shortages-substitutes-and-uncertainty-the-new-reality-of-drugs-supplies-281192

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Oula Kadhum, Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow in the Department of Politics and International Studies, SOAS, University of London

You could be forgiven for thinking everyone in Russia either supports the war in Ukraine or is too scared to do anything about it. A dominant narrative is that Russian civil society is passive, complicit or has been quashed to the point of being neutralised.

Some elements of this may be true. Following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Russian citizens criticising the war or expressing an anti-war position have faced severe prison sentences. These fall under expanded war censorship laws that target the spread of alleged “false information” or the “discrediting of the army”. But this is not the full picture.

For the past two years, I have been researching Russian anti-war resistance. This has involved conducting interviews with activists and other people who left Russia following the outbreak of war and are now scattered across the world. Instead of disappearing into exile, many of these people are mobilising to voice their opposition to the war and resist the regime in Moscow.

Some exiled Russians are sending money and letters of solidarity to political prisoners in Russia and their families. Others have coordinated legal aid to support anti-war defendants inside Russia and are lobbying western governments to distinguish between the Kremlin and Russian civil society.

At the same time, elite exiled Russian opposition figures including Garry Kasparov, Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Vladimir Kara-Murza, have worked to form the Platform for Dialogue with Russian Democratic Forces. This is a consultative body in the parliamentary arm of the Council of Europe that, established in 2026, aims to give Russia’s opposition an international voice.

During my research, I have also come across exiled Russians who have been running independent Russian-language media through Telegram channels and YouTube. Though in recent months, Russia’s telecommunications regulator, Roskomnadzor, has severely restricted access to these platforms. It has done so in an attempt to censor outside information and force Russians to adopt the state-controlled Max app.

I have encountered instances of anti-war Russians abroad helping people inside the country escape mobilisation by offering shelter and safe routes out of Russia. One of my interviewees, a 22-year-old Russian now living abroad, had even established transnational networks across Europe, the Caucasus and Russia to help criminally prosecuted anti-war Russians flee the country before standing trial.

Indigenous diaspora networks have also informed local communities in regions of Russia where there are large ethnic minority populations such as Tuva, Tatarstan, Buriyatia and Chelyabinsk about the realities of the war. These include the use of underage soldiers and heavy recruitment from ethnic minority regions.

But they also include the extent of Russian and Ukrainian casualties, which Russia’s government has provided almost no official data on. The Center for Strategic and International Studies, an American thinktank, said in early 2026 that Russian forces had suffered nearly 1.2 million casualties since the start of the war.

These Indigenous networks have posted videos on platforms such as Instagram, YouTube and Facebook, as well as messages on Telegram and Signal, to counter official state narratives about the war. Moscow has justified its war in Ukraine by saying it is protecting Russian-speaking citizens there, standing up to western expansionism and returning Russia to its former great power glory.

Meanwhile, anti-LGBTQ+ laws introduced in December 2022 have prohibited any perceived propaganda about non-traditional relationships in Russia. This was followed by a Russian supreme court decision in 2023 to designate the “international LGBT movement” as an extremist organisation. This ruling has made any association or support for LGBTQ+ communities a criminal offence.

In response to this clampdown, exiled Russians have stood in solidarity with LGBTQ+ compatriots inside the country who have faced discrimination. My research has uncovered cases of people providing shelter and safe routes out of the country, creating digital safe spaces for Russian LGBTQ+ communities and lobbying for the protection of these communities in European countries.

Russian resistance

Russians do not fall into a single, neat, complicit mass. Since the start of the war, a diverse resistance movement has worked to counter the Kremlin’s authoritarian practices and propaganda. It reflects a broader variety of voices, values and stances than is currently possible in Russia, offering a crucial insight into the future political aspirations and hopes of ordinary Russians.

This movement will not overthrow the Russian government. But the ability to deliver regime change should not be the only measure of resistance. The movement is challenging the narrative that all Russians support the war, while also helping keep democratic political ideas alive for Russians inside the country for when change becomes possible.

As one of my respondents told me: “We have to stay in touch with supporters in Russia and plan for transition. There will be no time to strategise, so the plan has to happen now. We try to do as much as possible to be prepared.”

The resistance of exiled Russian dissidents matters not just for understanding Russia today. It also tells us how opposition survives in authoritarian regimes more broadly, highlighting the role that diasporas can play in sustaining democratic civil society transnationally.

Dissent does not disappear when it is crushed at home. It relocates, adapts and reconfigures across borders.

Oula Kadhum receives funding from The Leverhulme Trust

– ref. The Russian resistance no one is talking about – https://theconversation.com/the-russian-resistance-no-one-is-talking-about-257501

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Renaud Foucart, Senior Lecturer in Economics, Lancaster University Management School, Lancaster University

With oil prices skyrocketing following the US and Israel’s bombing of Iran, and the subsequent closure of the Strait of Hormuz, motorists around the world have been looking for ways to save money.

Improvements in electric vehicle (EV) technology, combined with the high price of oil, mean that the tipping point at which most consumers start ditching their petrol cars for electric ones may well have been reached.

Given the nature of that market where more EV users means better infrastructure to support them, there will be no turning back. As it becomes easier to charge a car than to find petrol stations, and as battery technology continues to improve, the relative advantages of EVs will become impossible to match.

For countries like the UK, where renewable sources are producing more electricity, mass adoption of EVs cannot come fast enough. And this is not just for the obvious reasons of improving air quality or reducing reliance on dictators and US foreign policy.

While the oil price shock may be what finally tips consumers towards EVs, adoption provides part of the answer to a different and lasting problem: the cost of electricity in the UK and other countries where investment in wind and solar has so far failed to bring prices down.

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Read more:
The Strait of Hormuz shows how everything is now about leverage

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The UK pays more for electricity than most comparable countries. Gas sets the price of electricity too often. And a relative lack of sun means the UK misses out on the full benefits of solar – the renewable technology that has become cheapest.

What’s more, demand for electricity has been falling as machinery and appliances become more efficient, and as the country moved away from industry and towards services. This means that all the fixed costs of maintaining the energy grid must be shared between fewer users.

How EVs can help

On sunshine, there is not much to be done – the UK will not become Spain. But on the other two problems, the case is strong.

Take gas first. The reason gas sets the price of electricity so often is not that the UK lacks renewable capacity. The country builds plenty of wind farms. The problem is that it cannot always use the energy produced – a lot of it is wasted because there is nowhere to store it. So the fallback is gas whenever there is a need for a lot of electricity, or when there is no wind or sun.

But electric cars can be connected to the electricity grid. When you are not driving and do not need a full battery, intelligent systems can sell electricity back to the market when demand is high or supply is low, and buy it back when it is cheap. The supplier Octopus already offers this in the UK to drivers of certain cars, promising hundreds of pounds of annual savings while giving consumers a choice of when they need to refill their battery.

The scale is striking. Energy regulator Ofgem estimates that putting half of projected EVs on this vehicle-to-grid system by 2030 could provide around 16GW of flexible capacity to the grid. Average demand in Great Britain is around 30GW.

This means that discharging all batteries to the grid at the same time would produce the same flow of electricity as if all offshore wind turbines ran at full capacity simultaneously. Or five times what the new nuclear power plant Hinkley Point C – which is projected to start producing electricity in 2030 – will produce.

But crucially, it would be available on demand and not just when the wind blows.

At the European level, researchers estimate that the same 50% vehicle-to-grid penetration could fully cover EU stationary storage needs (the capacity to store surplus electricity and release it when demand peaks) by 2040. The intermittency problem, which underpins most of what makes electricity expensive and difficult to manage as countries wean themselves off fossil fuels, largely goes away when storage is not a problem.

In terms of demand, EVs will help simply by increasing it. The problem is not that the UK cannot produce electricity. The issue is intermittency, and the failure to invest in managing it.

EVs, like heat pumps, are far more energy-efficient than the systems they replace. Heat pumps are three to five times more efficient than gas boilers. Demanding more electricity means demanding less gas – even accounting for the gas used to generate some of that electricity. It also means spreading fixed costs across more users, and making households less exposed to the next energy shock.

The UK has cut its emissions by 54% since 1990, but the politics of net zero have become somewhat toxic. High electricity prices feed the narrative that going green means getting poorer. However, transport – the sector where emissions have barely moved – is also where the next wave of decarbonisation will lower bills.

Unlike authoritarian countries like China, which can simply impose the change on citizens, democracies depend on people actually wanting to switch. This has been harder than it should be. If you bought an electric car expecting everyone to follow in the next five years, every time car lobbies negotiated to keep producing petrol vehicles, it probably felt like a betrayal.

People will not buy an EV to fix the electricity market. They will buy one because petrol has become unaffordable and because this alternative is cheap and convenient.

The oil price spike may very well be remembered as the moment when most drivers finally made the switch. But its lasting legacy may be something less obvious: that by filling driveways with connected batteries, drivers quietly helped to solve a problem that had been making electricity bills unnecessarily high for years.

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

– ref. High petrol prices are fuelling interest in EVs. Here’s how this could bring down electricity bills – https://theconversation.com/high-petrol-prices-are-fuelling-interest-in-evs-heres-how-this-could-bring-down-electricity-bills-280954

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Eerke Boiten, Professor of Cybersecurity, Head of School of Computer Science and Informatics, De Montfort University

Palantir, a US data analytics company backed in its early years by In-Q-Tel, now plays a central role in the NHS’s £330 million Federated Data Platform. Supporters say it could improve planning and efficiency, while critics have raised questions about governance, transparency and trust. Here’s what you need to know.

1. What is Palantir and what does it do?

Palantir is a large American technology company, specialising in storing large data collections and providing tools to manage the data, in particular artificial intelligence (AI) to ask questions of it. It provides decision-making platforms, such as Foundry, which government organisations and businesses use to uncover patterns, manage operations, and support planning and decision-making.

The company’s chairman, Peter Thiel, is known for his controversial views. At the Oxford Union in 2023, he said that the NHS makes people ill and should be privatised.

2. Why is a private American company involved in managing NHS medical records?

That’s not how Palantir views it. It sees itself as providing a platform on which the NHS can store and analyse NHS medical records. And that wouldn’t be exceptional. A large amount of data from across society is stored on cloud platforms provided by American companies.

Some of the discussion is about whether Palantir is really less trustworthy than, say, Microsoft, Google or Amazon.

3. Who gave Palantir this contract, and was it put out to open tender?

The governments of Boris Johnson (2020) and Rishi Sunak (2023) awarded Palantir the contracts.

Palantir had been lobbying to get access to NHS data for a while when it offered to build a COVID data store for £1 in early 2020; there was no open competition under emergency COVID procurement rules. The data store combined patient-level data from many sources, as well as operational data from hospitals and other sources.

The initial three-month contract was only made public under legal pressure, and the deal was then renewed for £23 million, again without evidence of competition.

The latest version of this deal, the Federated Data Platform, was awarded competitively in December 2023 to a Palantir-led consortium. Having had the deal previously will have been a big advantage for Palantir – a phenomenon known as “vendor lock-in”.

4. Can Palantir use my data for its own commercial purposes or share it with the US government?

Palantir’s role is as a “data processor”, which means it is not legally allowed to make its own decisions about what to do with the data – only the “data controllers” (NHS organisations) can.

There is some grey area on what Palantir is allowed to do with the data that is “necessary to provide products or services … under the Agreement”. It has been claimed that this includes using NHS data for AI models, but the original contract does not really suggest this. Unhelpfully, in the publicly available version of the latest contract, nearly all the data protection text (three pages) is redacted.

So it is not legally allowed to use NHS data for their own purposes. And although UK regulators, such as the Information Commissioner’s Office, have oversight powers, some critics question how effectively large multinational technology providers can be audited in practice.

Trust plays an important role, particularly at a time when we have seen US government appropriating databases relating, for example, to health, mobile phone location and car number plates, for immigration enforcement. Under the US Cloud Act, American authorities can, under certain legal conditions, request data from US-based companies, which has raised concerns among privacy advocates about potential cross-border access.

5. What is the Federated Data Platform, and what is it supposed to do for the NHS?

There has long been an NHS England ambition to have a central place to store “all” NHS data. The core of this was effectively realised quickly during COVID, under special legislation, in two forms with slightly different targets.

The first was the NHS COVID-19 Data Store, which has grown into the Federated Data Platform, and is targeted more towards planning. The second is OpenSafely, which provides research access to unified NHS datasets using strong privacy protections.

6. Has the system improved NHS care, and is the taxpayer getting value for money?

The UK government has already made claims of significant improvements due to Palantir. But researchers have raised doubts both about the research methods used to quantify such successes and about the personal connections of the people involved in these.

7. What is Palantir’s track record — who else does it work for, and should that concern me?

Palantir was initially funded by In-Q-Tel, the non-profit venture capital arm of the CIA, and has been working with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which has been criticised by civil liberties groups.

It works with several other UK government organisations, including the army. The Israeli army reportedly used Palantir for AI-based targeting in the war in Gaza, which is a main reason Amnesty International campaigned against Palantir within the NHS.

8. Can I opt my data out? If so, how?

You can opt out of your GP practice sharing your health data, or separately out of NHS England and others sharing it for research and planning.

Unfortunately, this would affect beneficial uses of your health data too, including by making the overall dataset less comprehensive and representative. This is part of why the medical community worries about the Palantir effect.

9. Why are so many doctors, nurses and campaigners opposed to this — and should I be worried too?

There is a wide range of concerns. Palantir’s political positioning, including opposing the NHS in its current form, as well as the more controversial political views expressed by some of its leaders, means many people don’t trust it with their health data.

There is a technological concern over concentrating NHS data processing with a single supplier, possibly replacing working solutions with inferior ones. For some people, Palantir’s activity with ICE and allegedly in Gaza makes them morally unacceptable.

10. Could the government cancel the contract, and what would happen to the data Palantir already holds if it did?

There is a break clause in the current contract coming up, so yes, it can. The contract says Palantir needs to lose all access to the data when the contract ends.

Responding to Conservative MP Wendy Morton’s call for more scrutiny of Palantir’s ability to protect data, Louis Mosley, Palantir UK’s executive vice-chair, told the BBC that he welcomed scrutiny and was confident the firm was delivering value for money for NHS patients.

Mosley went on to say that Palantir has no interest in patient data in the UK. “It’s not our business model,” he said. “It’s not the legal basis on which we operate, in the same way that Microsoft Excel or Microsoft Word or email is used in the NHS and again that is NHS data, Microsoft doesn’t have access to it, nor do we to NHS data.”

Eerke Boiten has previously received funding from several research funding organisations, including for research on privacy preserving data processing, but none of this directly related to this article.

– ref. Palantir and the NHS – 10 things you need to know – https://theconversation.com/palantir-and-the-nhs-10-things-you-need-to-know-281165

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Michelle Spear, Professor of Anatomy, University of Bristol

My husband was recently describing something that happened on a past holiday. It wasn’t a significant event, but it sounded pleasant. I, however, had no recollection of what he was telling me. He couldn’t quite believe it.

We know that “recollections may differ”, but how can it be so different? And why do I not have this memory? I’m busy at work – have I simply run out of space?

It’s a tempting explanation. We talk about “full heads”, “information overload”, and “too much to take in” as though the brain were a container that eventually reaches capacity. But the brain does not fill up. Instead, it filters.

At any given moment, far more information is available to us than we could ever realistically store. The sights, sounds and conversations of even a single day would overwhelm any system that attempted to record them in full. Instead, the brain relies on selection. Attention determines what is noticed. Emotion helps determine what matters. Then, structures such as the hippocampus decide what is worth committing to longer-term memory.

If your attention is elsewhere, the process falters at the first step.

On that holiday, my husband may have paused long enough to register the moment. I may have been thinking about where we were going next, checking timings, or simply moving through the day without stopping to take it in. The difference is subtle, but it matters. Without focused attention, experiences are only weakly encoded, if at all. In that sense, the memory was not lost. It was never fully formed.

Even when memories are successfully encoded, they are not stored as fixed records. Each time we recall an event, we reconstruct it, drawing on fragments of sensory detail, prior knowledge and expectation. With repetition – through conversation, reflection or retelling – those reconstructions become stronger and more coherent. Over time, they can feel increasingly vivid and certain.

This helps explain why shared experiences can diverge so dramatically. We assume that living through the same moment should produce the same memory, but the brain does not work that way. It does not passively record experience. It actively selects, prioritises and, just as importantly, discards.

The feeling that our brains are “full” arises not because we have run out of storage, but because we have reached the limits of what we can process at once. Attention is finite. Working memory – the small amount of information we can actively hold in mind – is even more limited. When these systems are saturated, new information struggles to gain a foothold. This is the mental equivalent of too many tabs open: nothing has been permanently lost, but everything becomes harder to manage.

Where the computer analogy breaks down

Computing analogies are useful up to a point. If working memory resembles RAM – fast, temporary, limited – then long-term memory is often compared to a hard drive. But this is where the parallel breaks down. A hard drive stores files in fixed locations, retrievable in exactly the same form in which they were saved. The brain does not work this way.

Memories are not stored as discrete files. They are distributed across networks of neurons, overlapping, reshaped, and reassembled each time they are recalled. New experiences do not simply add to what is already there – they interact with it, altering both the new and the old.

Attempts have been made to estimate how much the brain could theoretically hold. One widely cited figure from the Salk Institute puts it at around a petabyte – roughly equivalent to hundreds of years of continuous video. It is an impressive number, but also a somewhat misleading one. It implies a storage system that fills up over time, when in reality the brain is constantly reorganising itself. Capacity is not fixed, and information is not stored in isolation. It is integrated, modified, and, when no longer useful, allowed to fade.

Which raises a slightly uncomfortable question: what happens to the memories we would like to keep?

Some of them will fade – not because the brain has run out of space, but because they are not continually reinforced. Memory is not preserved simply because it matters to us. It is preserved when it is revisited, retold, or reconnected to other experiences. Without that reinforcement, even meaningful moments can become harder to access over time.

What is lost, in most cases, is not the memory itself but our ability to retrieve it. A familiar smell, a piece of music, or an unexpected detail can bring something back that seemed entirely gone. The trace remains, but it has slipped out of reach. And the absence of a memory is rarely evidence of a system at capacity – more often, it is the trace of a moment that was never fully stored, or one that has simply not been called upon.

Michelle Spear 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. Headspace: can our brains get full? – https://theconversation.com/headspace-can-our-brains-get-full-279173

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Benedict Carpenter van Barthold, Lecturer, School of Art & Design, Nottingham Trent University

“Most artists work alone, with little to steer them save crummy ‘how to’ guides.” So writes author and curator Hettie Judah in her new book, How to Enter the Art World.

At first glance, the book’s presentation might mislead the reader into believing it to be another giant crumb from the loaf of bad guidance. The title is set out in an authoritative, broadsheet newspaper font, the sort with decorative feet attached to the longer strokes: a font of wisdom. Dashed beneath this is an apparently hand-scrawled note: “AFTER a late start, a first career, illness, raising children, a crisis of confidence, leaving it in disgust…”

Throughout, the book is punctuated with day-glow reminders of the complexity of life. These break the book into bite-size chunks and, I imagine, establish rapport. This softening of authority’s edges, metaphorically the transition from serif to scrawl, can also be detected in occasional parenthetical discursions and statements of bland goodwill:

It’s brutal out there. I would wish for all artists to be able to support themselves through their art, whatever it may involve. (OK, perhaps not forgery. Or photorealism.)

Don’t be put off. The design, illustrations and occasional digressions notwithstanding, the book is a smørgasbord of sagacity.

Anyone in a hurry for insight on a given topic will be aided by a decent index and a clear structure. Chapters are short, descriptively titled and broken further into choppy sections. While it reads a little bit like an inventory at times, Judah deftly plots a middle course between being comprehensive and concise.

The scale of the book is like a medieval map: most of the known art world is there and there is room for the occasional outsized creature to loom into view, like the rollcall of gallerists we meet in part seven, The Sell. But a lot of detail is necessarily missing. This is not a deficiency so much as a feature. There is space in this book for the artist to find themselves and see clearly the options before them. But it is not Judah’s job to tell them what to do.

A springboard, not a manifesto

There are several features that distinguish How to Enter the Art World from other “how tos”. Like most opportunities for artists, advice is generally aimed at the young. But Judah does not imagine her reader to be a blank tablet. She writes assuming that her reader already has a life. Less likely a student than someone “at a transitional point as an artist”, perhaps a parent, changing career, or returning to something that they once loved after a necessary career or lifetime of care. This is a book that takes the complex needs of older artists seriously.

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Read more:
Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood by Hettie Judah celebrates the craft and chaos of mother artists

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The second point of distinction is that Judah expects her reader to have the character and disposition of an artist.

This sounds like it should be a given. However, as she puts it: “Career advice doled out to artists tends to favour those who are extroverted, charismatic and socially adept … The trouble is that very few artists take naturally to such upfront behaviour, and many are actively terrified of it.” In other words, the solutions offered to artists are often those that they will not – or cannot – follow.

In my experience, it is exactly these idiosyncrasies that lead many artists to follow a creative path in the first place. Why should artists be expected to leave their professionally introverted bent at home and hustle like a silicon valley bro? This is a book that meets artists where they are. Part nine, Misfits Among Misfits, presents strategies sourced from interviews with 50 artists, which are creative and practical. One artist describes “a very simple trick. I intentionally became my ‘dog self’ during events and then retreated to my normal ‘cat self’ afterwards.”

Finally, this book does not prefigure what success might mean to the reader. Neither does it anticipate that success, once attained, will be consummate. The art world is not a singular thing. It is a collection of multiple, overlapping and sometimes contradictory forms of association and practice, a “multiverse”. Success is something that artists have to negotiate, and that changes throughout life:

By mid-career, after witnessing or experiencing burnout, many would consider themselves successful if they could support themselves through their work or afford decent time in the studio. Later in life, thoughts turn to legacy.“

How To Enter The Art World is a well structured guide to professional artistic practice. It is a useful resource for teaching professional practice in art school, or as a touchstone for artists wanting to develop their career.

It is a springboard, not a manifesto. Artists are as varied as the art world is multifarious. It would be a mistake to be prescriptive. However, there are a few moments when Judah lets herself give direct advice. Take yourself seriously. Set your own agenda. Be generous. And, if you happen to be one of the rare artists who can hustle, “do try not to be a total wanker”.

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

Benedict Carpenter van Barthold 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 to Enter the Art World by Hettie Judah offers a smørgasbord of sage advice – https://theconversation.com/how-to-enter-the-art-world-by-hettie-judah-offers-a-smorgasbord-of-sage-advice-281390

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Dipa Kamdar, Senior Lecturer in Pharmacy Practice, Kingston University

For a medicine so commonly found in bathroom cabinets and high street pharmacies, codeine has a surprisingly complicated story. It sits at the intersection of pain relief, genetics, public health and regulation. As the UK continues to tighten rules around opioid use, codeine offers a useful case study in how a drug can be both helpful and potentially harmful, depending on who takes it and how it is used.

Codeine is an opioid used to treat mild to moderate pain. In some formulations, it is also used to suppress coughing. Over-the-counter products typically combine it with paracetamol, as in co-codamol, or ibuprofen, while stronger doses are available only on prescription.

Codeine itself is a weak opioid. Its analgesic effect is about one tenth that of morphine. Once swallowed, it is metabolised by enzymes in the liver, with some of it converted into morphine. That morphine then produces pain relief by acting on opioid receptors in the brain. For most people, the body makes enough morphine to ease symptoms. For others, the same dose can be ineffective or unexpectedly strong.

One of the most striking features of codeine is how differently people process it. The enzyme mainly responsible for converting codeine into morphine, CYP2D6, varies significantly between people. Most metabolise codeine at an expected rate, but some carry genetic variants that alter the process.

A small proportion of the population are ultra-rapid metabolisers, thought to make up around 1% to 2% of people. They convert codeine into morphine much faster than average. This trait is more common among people of North African and Middle Eastern backgrounds, for whom even standard doses can produce unexpectedly high morphine levels, increasing the risk of severe drowsiness, breathing difficulties and other serious side effects.

Around 2% to 11% of people are intermediate metabolisers. Their CYP2D6 enzyme works more slowly or less effectively, so codeine may provide only limited benefit.

At the other end of the spectrum are poor metabolisers, estimated to make up 5% to 10% of the population. They convert very little codeine into morphine, so the drug may offer little or no pain relief. Poor metabolism is more common in people of white European descent. In these cases, it may make more sense to prescribe a different painkiller rather than rely on a drug the body cannot use efficiently. This wide variation makes codeine far less predictable than many people assume.

That unpredictability matters because low-dose codeine does not always offer much in return. Research suggests that many over-the-counter codeine products provide little proven benefit for pain relief, particularly at doses below 10mg, while still carrying the risk of side effects. A review found that low-dose codeine combinations gave only modest relief for short-term pain, such as dental pain, episiotomy pain or pain after minor surgery, and many of the underlying trials were small.

By contrast, combinations such as ibuprofen 400mg with higher-dose codeine, between 25mg and 60mg, appear to provide more reliable relief. Even so, studies suggest that simple combinations such as paracetamol plus ibuprofen can match or outperform low-dose codeine products without the risks associated with opioids.

Common side effects include constipation, nausea, dizziness and drowsiness. At higher doses, codeine can slow breathing and impair coordination. It can also interact with other medicines that cause sedation, including some antiepileptic drugs. Certain antidepressants can block the enzyme that converts codeine into morphine, making it less effective.

Like other opioids, codeine can also become less effective with repeated use. This process, known as tolerance, happens when the brain’s opioid receptors adapt to the drug. People may then need higher doses to achieve the same effect. Even when taken as directed, tolerance can develop within days, and as doses rise, so does the risk of physical dependence.

Stopping suddenly after regular use can trigger withdrawal symptoms such as restlessness, sweating, anxiety and poor sleep. This is why health professionals advise using codeine for the shortest possible time and tapering the dose if it has been taken for longer periods.

Concerns about misuse, addiction and accidental harm have prompted tighter regulation in the UK. The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency has introduced clearer warnings on packaging about addiction risk and limited over-the-counter pack sizes to a maximum of 32 tablets or capsules. Non-prescription codeine-containing products are now intended for use for no more than three days. Stronger codeine tablets, including 30mg formulations, have long been prescription-only.

Some products have faced even stricter controls. Codeine linctus, once widely used as a cough suppressant, was reclassified as prescription-only in 2023 because of growing concerns about misuse and diversion. It has been used in “purple drank”, a recreational mixture of codeine cough syrup with soft drinks and sometimes alcohol. Its opioid effects can lead to dependence, breathing difficulties and overdose, especially when combined with other sedatives.

Codeine remains a useful option for short-term pain when other medicines are unsuitable or insufficient. But its effectiveness, safety and potential for dependence vary far more than many people realise.

In a landscape where medicines are often judged by how familiar they feel, codeine is a reminder that common does not always mean simple. Used carefully, it can help. Used carelessly, it can cause problems that last long after the pain itself has passed.

Dipa Kamdar 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. Codeine: why one person’s painkiller can be another person’s problem – https://theconversation.com/codeine-why-one-persons-painkiller-can-be-another-persons-problem-276137

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Haosu Tang, Climate Scientist, University of Sheffield

In the middle of the Antarctic winter, during months of darkness when temperatures often dip below −30°C, the continent warmed dramatically.

In July and August 2024, temperatures in parts of East Antarctica rose by up to 28°C above average and stayed high for more than two weeks. To put that in perspective, a similar anomaly in the UK would push January temperatures into the mid-30°Cs.

In a recent study, colleagues and I show the Antarctica heatwave was not simply unusual weather. It was a rare atmospheric disturbance, amplified by human-caused climate change, offering a glimpse of what could become more common in the decades ahead.

This was not an isolated event. It followed a heatwave in March 2022, when temperatures in some Antarctic areas soared by nearly 40°C above average – one of the largest temperature anomalies ever recorded anywhere on the planet.

Together, these events point to a clear shift: extreme warming is no longer confined to traditionally vulnerable regions.

How the heatwave unfolded

In 2024, the extraordinary winter heat began with a weakening of the Antarctic polar vortex – a band of strong winds high in the atmosphere that usually keeps cold air locked over the continent. In July 2024, this vortex became distorted, allowing unusual warming in the stratosphere, where temperatures rose by more than 15°C in early July, with another surge in early August.

These changes in the upper atmosphere set the stage for what followed.

A persistent high-pressure system developed over East Antarctica, opening a pathway for a long, narrow plume of warm, moisture-rich air – known as an atmospheric river – to move deep into the continent. This air mass transported heat from lower latitudes into the Antarctic interior – something that rarely happens in winter.

Clouds associated with the system acted like a blanket, trapping heat near the surface and preventing it from escaping back into space. Instead of a brief spike, the result was a prolonged and widespread heatwave.

At the same time, Antarctic sea ice was near record lows and the surrounding Southern Ocean was unusually warm, likely linked to the same large-scale atmospheric conditions and helping to sustain the flow of heat into the continent.

A warning signal from the coldest place on Earth

Natural variability helped trigger this heatwave. But it unfolded in a climate system already altered by human activity.

Our analysis, using computer simulations to compare today’s climate with a world without human influence, shows climate change made the 2024 winter heatwave both stronger and more likely. Such extreme weather would have been exceptionally rare in the past, but today it is already significantly more likely – and could become up to 20 times more frequent by the end of the century under high emissions.

A heatwave in Antarctica might seem remote from everyday life. But what happens there has global consequences.

Antarctica holds most of the world’s freshwater, locked in vast ice sheets. Even short-lived warming events can influence snowfall, surface melt and the stability of floating ice shelves that hold back glaciers. When these ice shelves weaken, glaciers can accelerate into the ocean, contributing to sea level rise that affects coastlines worldwide.

Perhaps most importantly, the 2024 heatwave shows how climate change is transforming not just average temperatures, but extremes. Atmospheric processes that have always existed can now have a far greater impact in a warmer world.

This is why Antarctic heatwaves matter. Even the most remote and coldest parts of the planet are being transformed by global warming. And what happens there – through rising seas and shifting climate patterns – has consequences way beyond the poles.

Haosu Tang’s study is supported by the UK’s Natural Environment Research Council.

– ref. How Antarctica warmed by 28°C in the depths of winter – and what it signals for the decades ahead – https://theconversation.com/how-antarctica-warmed-by-28-c-in-the-depths-of-winter-and-what-it-signals-for-the-decades-ahead-281418

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Paul Whiteley, Professor, Department of Government, University of Essex

UK prime ministers today are about as secure in their jobs as football managers. In the nearly three decades between 1979 and 2005, Britain had just three prime ministers: Margaret Thatcher, John Major and Tony Blair. From 2005-2015, we again had three: Blair, Gordon Brown and David Cameron.

But from then on we have had no less than six: Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, Rishi Sunak and now Keir Starmer, currently fighting to retain his job and explaining to parliament why he supported Peter Mandelson for a key ambassadorship.

Prime ministers usually resign after serious political failures – from May failing to get a Brexit deal through parliament after losing her working majority, to a series of scandals under Johnson leading to a mass resignation of his ministers. Truss was evicted in record time after her mini-budget, proposing large unfunded tax cuts, crashed the financial markets.

But prime ministers have always faced problems in the past and survived, so why is it proving fatal to their incumbency now?

One explanation is that it reflects the increasing fragmentation of the British party system. In the 1987 general election, Labour and the Conservatives took 73% of the total vote. In the 2024 election, they took 57%. In particular, when prime ministers can’t get a working majority, something which happened in 2010 and again in 2017, they are quick to be blamed by their supporters when things go wrong.

Another explanation is that while all prime ministers face failures, the massive shocks to the political system and the economy in quick succession since 2015 are really unusual. The Brexit vote, the COVID pandemic, Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine and now the war in the Middle East, all rank highly on the scale of political crises.

Arguably, no political leader can cope with such a litany of events, when the public directly feel (and blame them for) the consequences of these shocks such as higher inflation. Coping has been made more difficult for Starmer by having to deal with an irrational and unpredictable American president, whose tariff wars have directly affected the British economy.

There is also an increasingly large gap between the vote shares and the seat shares in general elections produced by the first-past-the-post system. In the 2024 election, Labour took less than 34% of the vote, but over 63% of the seats in the House of Commons. This means that the party lacks legitimacy in the eyes of many voters who did not support it, resulting in a short honeymoon.

Again, this makes the leader’s position vulnerable, and their approval ratings more susceptible to a volatile public. Starmer’s favourability ratings are currently very negative, though not quite as bad as Johnson, Sunak or Truss before they resigned.

A less-recognised reason for the high PM turnover is evident in data from successive Ipsos monthly polls over a nearly 30-year period.

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From the Labour landslide victory in 1997 up to the end of 2025, satisfaction with both the government and the prime minister have declined, while dissatisfaction has increased. Regardless of their party affiliations, voters are increasingly fed up with the governments and leaders.

Not surprisingly, the two figures track each other quite closely. But it is interesting that the prime ministerial series is consistently more positive than the government series. It appears that the public are a bit more likely to blame the government of the day for problems than the prime minister. This means that replacing the prime minister does little to change the standing of the governing party. This did make a difference in the past, such as when Major replaced Thatcher as prime minister, but it is unlikely to succeed now. At the time of writing, Starmer’s approval is ahead of the government’s – but not by much.

Average satisfaction ratings for prime ministers and governments (1997-2015)

The dynamics of decline

While there is clear evidence of a decline in the public’s satisfaction with leaders and governments, this decline is not uniform. We can observe a relatively sharp break in the satisfaction ratings for prime ministers by looking at the performance of all eight of them since 1997.

Blair had the highest average satisfaction ratings over this period, at 44%. In contrast, Brown was caught by the financial crash which started the year he took over as prime minister. Cameron and May did quite well, even though they ended up having to resign for Brexit-related political reasons (being on the losing side of the referendum and failing to get a deal through parliament, respectively).

Even Johnson’s ratings were not much different from his immediate predecessors, since he was popular at the time of the 2019 general election. His reputation only really soured when the evidence about Partygate and lying to the House of Commons fully emerged in 2022.

Truss appears to be the turning point, with satisfaction with the prime minister really collapsing after she became leader, even though she was in office for only a month and a half. The longstanding fallout from the economic crisis which her mini-budget provoked has been much discussed.

But the data suggests that the political fallout from her brief premiership has lasted beyond her resignation. Sunak and now Starmer have subsequently followed in her footsteps with low positive ratings overall. This enduring crisis of leadership in Britain applies both to Conservative and Labour prime ministers. The public appears to have a lower tolerance for political failings – with a loss of trust in politicians generally this is not surprising.

The cumulative impact of the economic and political shocks to the system, the crumbling of the traditional party system and the repeated failures of recent prime ministers on a scale not seen before may have created a trend. The potential failure of all prime ministers, regardless of their party, is likely to continue until the turmoil created by recent events dies down.

Paul Whiteley has received funding from the British Academy and the ESRC

– ref. Prime ministers have always faced political scandals – so why can’t they weather them now? – https://theconversation.com/prime-ministers-have-always-faced-political-scandals-so-why-cant-they-weather-them-now-281357