Category: The Conversation – UK

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Reetika Revathy Subramanian, Senior Research Associate, Global Development, University of East Anglia

Anusuyabai Pandekar and her daughter-in-law Mandabai sit facing each other beside a stone grindmill. The mill is still. No grain rests between its stones. No flour gathers at the edges. Instead it sits between them like an object from another time.

One of the women begins to sing. The other joins. The melody carries the rhythm of a labour no longer being done, cyclical and without clear beginning or end:

It is raining heavily, let the soil become wet.

Women go to the fields, carrying baskets of bhakri (bread).

The pre-monsoon rain is beating down on the fields.

Under the jasmine tree, the ploughman is working with the drill-plough.

Scenes like the one this song describes, once common across rural western India, now belong increasingly to the archive. Hand-grinding has given way to electric mills. The work that once informed these songs has thinned out, leaving behind recordings, fragments and memory.

Accounts of drought and environmental change rarely include such voices. In official records and news reports, what is measured often overshadows what is lived. Climate change is typically explained through numbers, including emissions targets, temperature thresholds and rainfall variability. This data is necessary. But it cannot capture how change is inhabited: how it settles into bodies, reshapes routines and presses into everyday life.

Long before climate science named the crisis, women were registering these shifts in another language – song.

Climate, labour and everyday life

Across the world, women’s work songs function as informal archives of environmental change. Emerging from repetitive labour – including grinding, pounding, planting and carrying – they register shifts in seasons, resources and survival long before these enter formal records.

I began to understand this during my doctoral work in 2020 and 2021. I was researching labour arrangements within the sugar industry in drought-affected regions of western India. Policy reports described rainfall deficits, groundwater depletion and crop loss. But women spoke instead of work – walking further for water, delaying planting and stretching food across uncertain seasons.

Their voices extended beyond conversation into an unexpected archive – The Grindmill Songs Project. First documented in the 1990s and now hosted by the People’s Archive of Rural India, the project brings together around 100,000 songs organised by people, places and themes. I used this archive alongside ethnographic interviews to trace labour, marriage and drought in the sugarcane industry, where women’s voices were largely absent from official records.

Here, labour and environmental strain were articulated with a precision often absent from formal accounts. Climate was not abstract; it was embedded in the rhythms of work.

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The climate crisis has a communications problem. How do we tell stories that move people – not just to fear the future, but to imagine and build a better one? This article is part of Climate Storytelling, a series exploring how arts and science can join forces to spark understanding, hope and action.

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The water-guzzling sugarcane crop, around which the region’s economy turns, surfaced repeatedly in both speech and song. It appeared as a metaphor for happiness, for domestic violence, even for dowry; a substance moving between fields and households, binding labour, desire and coercion. Environmental stress did not stand apart from these concerns, but moved through them. As one song goes:

A daughter’s existence is like a sack of sugar

Father got his daughter married, he became a merchant

Another describes married life through the language of extraction:

Father says, daughter, how are you treated by your in-laws

Like a 12-year-old sugarcane crushed in the sugar-mill

A broader pattern emerges from this context. Across regions, environmental change is first encountered through its effects on labour, and only later abstracted into data. Comparable dynamics appear elsewhere. In west African farming communities, songs synchronise collective labour while expressing shared experience of seasonal uncertainty. In Malawi, during famine, women sang:

Koke kolole … pull, pull hard, pull the clouds –

why does the rain not come?

Our dead fathers, what have we done?

Forgive us … do you want us to die?

Send us rain.

Here, ecological crisis is framed as a breakdown within a moral and social order. Such songs interpret environmental failure through relationships between the living and the dead and between obligation and neglect.

On the Swahili coast, fishing songs similarly accompany sailing and net-making, embedding weather knowledge, labour discipline and social commentary within everyday maritime life. These songs accompany work, but they also organise it, giving rhythm to collective effort while encoding knowledge about seasons, risk and survival.

This relationship between labour and environment extends across very different histories. In the Caribbean, work songs bear the imprint of plantation economies shaped by extraction and environmental vulnerability. In Latin America, women’s traditions carry histories of colonial labour within their rhythms.

In Colombia’s San Basilio de Palenque, women still sing as they coax peanuts from rain-softened soil, gathering food, language and memory in the same gesture. Elsewhere, songs track movement itself: young men leaving with the dry-season wind, rivers in flood separating families.

Along cold North Sea coasts, herring workers, known as the “gutters”, sang Gaelic work songs in the 19th century while gutting fish at speed, their rhythms coordinating labour under harsh conditions. Beyond work, women also composed laments that dwelt on separation from men at sea.

Listening to climate differently

These songs describe hardship. But they also make it perceptible, situating environmental stress within labour, social relations and obligation. Climate change follows existing inequalities. In many contexts, its earliest effects are absorbed through women’s work, through longer hours, shifting responsibilities and increased strain.

Importantly, these songs were not intentionally composed as records of environmental change. They emerge from labour, relationships and survival. Yet because women’s work is so closely tied to land, water and season, environmental shifts are registered within them, often indirectly, as part of their lived experience.

Work songs therefore offer a distinct kind of record. Against archives that have historically privileged elite and male voices, they preserve forms of knowledge grounded in everyday labour.

But the conditions that sustained such singing are fading. Mechanisation and the decline of collective work have reduced the spaces in which these songs were produced and shared, with many now confined to ritual settings such as weddings and childbirth gatherings. As these practices decline, so too do the forms of knowledge embedded within them.

Listening to these songs does not replace data-driven, scientific knowledge about climate change. It complements it by making visible dimensions of change that are otherwise difficult to capture, including the reorganisation of labour, the strain on relationships and the uncertainty of survival.

Reetika Revathy Subramanian received funding from the Gates Cambridge Trust for her doctoral research at the University of Cambridge Centre for Gender Studies (2019–2024), on which this article primarily draws.

– ref. What women’s work songs reveal about the changing climate – https://theconversation.com/what-womens-work-songs-reveal-about-the-changing-climate-280964

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Trudy Meehan, Lecturer, Centre for Positive Psychology and Health, RCSI University of Medicine and Health Sciences

My ex once told me, mid-argument, that I was the most unempathetic person he’d ever met. It was a low blow. I’m a clinical psychologist. Empathy is literally my job.

What he probably didn’t know – and I was too “flooded” to explain at the time – is that when we argue with people we love, our brains can briefly turn against us.

Researchers call it emotional flooding or diffuse physiological arousal. Your heart hammers. You flush, sweat and shake. Adrenaline surges through you as though you are being chased by something that wants to eat you.

Lisa Feldman Barrett, a professor of psychology at Northeastern University in the US, describes the brain as being “locked in a dark, silent box” (your skull) with no direct access to the outside world. It can only work with signals from your senses, and it uses past experience to predict what those signals mean. So when my partner looked away during an argument – eyes down, head turned – my brain didn’t just register disconnection. It reached into my past and found my father, largely absent, largely disengaged and screamed – a threat.

If you’ve experienced a lot of conflict, rejection or trauma, your brain becomes a hair-trigger prediction machine, interpreting interpersonal friction as danger even when you’re perfectly safe. It’s trying to protect you. The problem is that once you tip into that negative emotional state, you also shift from “we” thinking to “me” thinking – fast. Empathy evaporates. You’re in survival mode, not relationship mode.

It would be convenient to blame all of this on my neurology, or on my ex for arguing in ways that made me feel threatened. But that’s not quite how it works. Our physiological states don’t exist in isolation. We regulate each other, pulling one another up or dragging each other under. Which means we carry some responsibility for what happens in each other’s nervous systems.

This gets particularly charged in the parent-child relationship. Parents are already stretched. When a child acts out, the most useful response is curiosity: what is this behaviour trying to communicate? But a flooded parent is far more likely to react harshly or defensively than with the openness a child actually needs.

So what can we do when the flood waters rise? The first thing is to get to know your own internal state in real time. Awareness alone can slow emotional reactivity. It won’t happen overnight, but learning to notice the early physical signs of flooding – the heat, the racing pulse – gives you a tiny window of choice before your brain takes over.

The second tool is what psychologists call cognitive reappraisal: consciously inserting a different story between the trigger and your response. When a colleague sighs and says: “Do we really need a meeting about this?”, your brain will offer you one interpretation immediately. Reappraisal asks: what else might be true here? This isn’t about suppressing your feelings – suppression actually increases flooding – it’s about widening the range of possible responses available to you.

When all else fails, the most powerful intervention is also the simplest: leave the room. Not by stonewalling or slamming doors, but by agreeing in advance on a word or phrase that means: “I need a break. I’m not abandoning you.”

The 20-minute rule

The break needs to be real – at least 20 minutes – long enough for your body to return to baseline, and spent doing something genuinely distracting rather than replaying the argument in your head. This works for parents too. Stepping away briefly and explaining to a child that you’re not punishing them but regrouping is a far better model than pushing through while flooded.

For those who find it hard to read their own physiological state, biofeedback can help. The researchers John and Julie Gottman, who have spent decades studying couples in conflict, used simple fingertip pulse oximeters (devices that measure pulse rate and blood oxygen levels) in their lab to track what was happening to people’s bodies during arguments. They went on to recommend using the same tools at home, as a concrete way of learning to self-soothe before the flooding takes hold.

None of this is about avoiding conflict. Friction is part of human relationships in every form – romantic, familial, professional – and trying to eliminate it entirely would be both exhausting and counterproductive. The goal is to stay present enough, and regulated enough, to keep hold of your empathy even when your brain is telling you to run.

My ex wasn’t entirely wrong. In that moment, flooded and frightened, I probably wasn’t empathetic. But I’d like to think I understand why, and that understanding, at least, is a start.

Trudy Meehan 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. Why your brain turns against you during arguments – and what to do about it – https://theconversation.com/why-your-brain-turns-against-you-during-arguments-and-what-to-do-about-it-280538

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Manal Mohammed, Senior Lecturer, Medical Microbiology, University of Westminster

Bacteriophages, or phages, are viruses that infect and kill bacteria. These microscopic predators are found everywhere from soil and water to food and the human gut. Because they attack only specific bacteria, researchers are increasingly exploring them as tools for reducing harmful bacteria in humans and animals without disturbing helpful microbes.

That makes them especially interesting at a time of rising antimicrobial resistance. This is when bacteria evolve ways to survive drugs designed to kill them. It’s a global health threat driven in part by the overuse of antibiotics in medicine and agriculture. Unlike broad-spectrum antibiotics, which kill many different kinds of bacteria and can also disrupt helpful gut microbes, research has shown that phages may be able to remove harmful bacteria with less disruption to the wider microbiome.

This has led researchers to investigate phages both as nutraceuticals, dietary supplements intended to promote health, and as feed additives in livestock production. In both cases, the aim is similar: reduce harmful bacteria, support gut health and potentially cut reliance on antibiotics.

How phages work

Phages work very differently from antibiotics. Rather than killing a broad range of bacteria, each phage typically infects only particular bacterial species or closely related types of bacteria.

When a phage encounters its target bacterium, it attaches to the cell and injects its genetic instructions. The virus then replicates inside the bacterium until the cell bursts. This releases new phage particles that go on to infect other bacteria.

This precision is one reason phages are attracting attention as a possible way to fight harmful bacteria. Unlike broad-spectrum antibiotics, which can disrupt entire communities of microbes, phages may be able to remove particular harmful bacteria without the same wider effects on the microbiome, according to studies of phage-microbiome interactions and research on antibiotic-associated microbiome disruption.

That raises the possibility that phages could be used not simply to kill bacteria, but to shape communities of microbes in ways that support health. Researchers have explored their potential in food safety, agriculture and human health.

In recent years, researchers and biotechnology companies have begun exploring phages as dietary supplements for humans. The idea is that people could ingest phages to reduce harmful gut bacteria in the hope of restoring balance in the gut microbiome, the community of microbes that lives in the digestive system.

Early findings are encouraging, though still preliminary. For example, one human clinical study found that a commercially available phage product targeting E. coli reduced levels of the bacteria in the gut without causing major disruption to the rest of the microbiome.

Other work has examined phage products designed to support digestive health by targeting bacteria associated with digestive discomfort or dysbiosis, an imbalance in gut microbes. A randomised controlled trial of a phage-based supplement reported improvements in digestive symptoms among participants with mild digestive issues.

This is still an emerging field, and the evidence remains limited. But the results so far suggest phage-based nutraceuticals could eventually form part of diet-based approaches to improving gut health.

There are already signs of commercial interest. In the US, phage products have been approved for certain food safety uses, such as reducing bacterial contamination on foods. Phage-containing supplements are already on sale.

Public acceptance, however, may prove just as important as scientific progress. Because viruses are usually associated with disease, researchers and manufacturers will need to explain clearly why these “good viruses” are different. They occur naturally, they are highly specific and they target bacteria rather than human cells.

Improving animal health through feed additives

Phages may also have an important role to play in livestock production. Farm animals often carry disease-causing bacteria such as Salmonella, Campylobacter and harmful strains of E. coli. These bacteria can harm animal health and contaminate food products. They can contribute to food-borne illness in humans.

Phage-based feed additives are being developed to target these bacteria in livestock. By incorporating phages into feed or drinking water, farmers may be able to reduce harmful bacteria while preserving beneficial microbes that support digestion and the immune system.

Experimental studies have produced promising results. In poultry, phage supplementation has been shown to reduce the presence of Salmonella and Campylobacter, two of the most common causes of food-borne infection worldwide. Research in pigs has also found that phage treatments can reduce harmful E. coli infections, improving gut health and growth.

Phages are also being investigated as alternatives to antibiotic feed additives used to prevent diseases such as liver abscesses – pockets of infection in the liver – in cattle. Because phages replicate only when their target bacteria are present, their effects may naturally taper off once those bacteria are gone, making them a potentially useful way to control infection.

Despite promising research, bacteriophage supplements are not yet widely authorised as feed additives in the UK. Regulators require extensive evidence of safety, stability and effectiveness. Because phages are biological entities that can evolve alongside bacteria, agencies must also consider whether they remain genetically consistent over time and what effects they might have on other microbial communities in the environment.

Even so, regulatory progress is emerging elsewhere. Phage-based food safety products targeting disease-causing bacteria such as Listeria monocytogenes and Salmonella have already been approved in several countries. This includes the US, where they are already being used in food safety applications.

More recently, European regulators authorised the first bacteriophage-based feed additive designed to reduce Salmonella in poultry. That marks an important step towards broader adoption of the technology.

Interest in bacteriophages reflects a wider shift in how microbes are understood in relation to health. If research continues to advance, and regulation keeps pace, phage-based nutraceuticals and feed supplements could become part of a new generation of more targeted ways to shape the microbiome, supporting both human health and more sustainable agriculture.

Tiny though they are, these bacterial viruses may end up playing a significant role in how we manage harmful bacteria.

Manal Mohammed 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. Bacteriophages: meet the viruses that hunt superbugs – https://theconversation.com/bacteriophages-meet-the-viruses-that-hunt-superbugs-278440

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Lucy Bray, PhD Candidate and Public Health Registrar, University of Southern Denmark

When we think about the causes of climate change, the usual suspects often come to mind: coal-fired power plants, traffic-choked roads, industrial agriculture. Rarely do we picture hospitals.

Yet if global healthcare were a country, it would be one of the world’s top five greenhouse gas emitters. With healthcare responsible for about 5% of total global emissions. This puts it on par with some of the most polluting industries on earth.

The far-reaching consequences of climate change are increasingly recognised as the greatest threat to human health in the 21st century.

Rising temperatures and environmental disruption are already harming on human health. Indeed, this can be seen in the increase in heart and lung disease, the spread of infectious diseases carried by insects, heat-related illness, injuries from extreme weather events and worsening mental health. And then there are issues of disrupted access to clean water, food and shelter.

This reveals an uncomfortable truth: healthcare is both a protector of health and a contributor to one of its greatest threats.

Inside hospital emissions

One of the most surprising aspects of healthcare’s carbon footprint is where most of the emissions come from. While hospitals themselves use large amounts of energy, most emissions – up to 70% – actually arise from the healthcare supply chain itself.

This includes the manufacture, transport and disposal of pharmaceuticals, medical devices, reusable equipment and single-use items such as gloves, masks and syringes.

Modern medicine depends heavily on these products and every item carries its own hidden environmental cost. This means that the carbon footprint of healthcare is not just tied to buildings and electricity use, but to the entire global network required to deliver care.

Hospitals themselves are a major source, accounting for around 30% of healthcare-related emissions in high-income countries. With operating theatres three to six times more energy intensive than other hospital areas.

Individual surgical procedures can also have significant carbon footprints. For example, a heart bypass operation has been estimated to be roughly equivalent to driving 1,700 miles in a petrol car. And even a tonsil removal, a relatively simple operation, is estimated to be like driving 150 miles. When multiplied across the millions of procedures performed worldwide each year, these emissions quickly add up.

Even small, everyday treatments can have surprisingly large environmental impacts. Inhalers, for example, commonly used to treat asthma and other lung conditions, can contain extremely powerful greenhouse gases.

Some of these gases have a global warming potential up to 3,000 times greater than carbon dioxide – a key culprit of climate change. Indeed, inhalers account for over 3% of the total carbon footprint of the National Health Service (NHS) in England alone.

Healthcare emissions are also deeply unequal across the world. Wealthy, technologically advanced countries produce the majority of healthcare related greenhouse gases – with estimates indicating that they account for around 75% of the global total. While poorer countries, which contribute far less to the problem, often face the most severe health consequences of climate change.

Rethinking patient care

But despite the scale of the problem, it is possible to reduce emissions by using different treatments or approaches without compromising patient care.

Where appropriate, this can mean switching patients from high-emission pump inhalers to lower-impact alternatives such as dry powder or capsule-based devices. It could also include doing more procedures as day cases to avoid hospital admissions. Or opting for non-surgical treatment of common conditions instead of operating.

Actually changing clinical practice is, however, a challenge. One of the biggest barriers is that without understanding exactly where emissions occur, it is difficult to identify what changes need to be made and where they’d have the greatest effect.

This is why our team is in the process of measuring the environmental impact of different treatments – from physical training to pain medication, to surgery – to identify the processes responsible for the most emissions.

Although our initial focus will be on a single condition, knee osteoarthritis, our model will eventually be able to be applied more widely across the healthcare system, hopefully allowing real change to occur. This is important because ultimately, hospitals cannot fully protect human health while contributing to the environmental changes that threaten it.

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This article was commissioned as part of a partnership between Videnskab.dk and The Conversation, where articles are also published in Danish.

Lucy Bray is affiliated with Læger for Klimaet (Doctors for the Climate).

Søren T. Skou 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. An uncomfortable truth: healthcare is both a protector of health and a contributor to one of its greatest threats – https://theconversation.com/an-uncomfortable-truth-healthcare-is-both-a-protector-of-health-and-a-contributor-to-one-of-its-greatest-threats-269319

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

King Charles’s speech to the US Congress – only the second such address by a British monarch – demonstrates how much both the US and the UK have changed in the last three decades.

The first speech was in May 1991 during his mother, Queen Elizabeth II’s, third state visit to the US. The underlying purpose of both speeches was the same: to stress the enduring links between Britain and the US. But the circumstances in which they were delivered were very different.

The late queen’s speech came in the wake of joint action by US and British forces, along with other allies, to eject Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi troops from Kuwait. She referenced this in her speech as a concrete example of the strength of the Anglo-American alliance.

In 2026, the UK has pointedly refused to join the US-Israeli attack on Iran, angering President Donald Trump. Charles’s speech adroitly inverted the moral of this apparent diplomatic rift, suggesting that tensions in the past had always been overcome. Referring to the revolution of 1776 he noted: “Ours is a partnership born out of dispute, but no less strong for it”, because ultimately “our nations are in fact instinctively like-minded”.

A speech like this, voiced by the monarch, can serve at least two useful purposes. The first is to portray things that are, at heart, profoundly political, as being somehow above politics. The second is to place the transitory difficulties of day-to-day diplomacy within the much longer-term perspective of a dynasty that traces its lineage back to the Norman Conquest.

These two elements featured in how both Elizabeth II and Charles’s speeches depicted the Anglo-American alliance. The latter was the basis of a joke by the king, who referred to the actions of the Founding Fathers “250 years ago, or, as we say in the United Kingdom, just the other day”.

Charles’s speech was beautifully crafted and delivered with a degree of warmth and conviction that was always beyond the range of his mother’s public oratory. That, in itself, was almost an implicit reproach to the president’s own rambling, undisciplined public pronouncements.

And in more than one way the address was pitched over the head of Trump. The lack of any immediate pushback from the president suggests that the subtlety of some of the messaging eluded him. But in a more significant sense, it was an appeal to causes that still resonate with much of the American political class if not with the Trump administration itself.

Charles stressed the value of Nato and the importance of “the defence of Ukraine and her most courageous people”. He made a sly reference to his proud association with the Royal Navy – an institution that has been the subject of some disparagement by Trump in recent weeks.

He emphasised the importance of protecting the environment, although couched in a Trumpian language of profit and loss: “We ignore at our peril the fact that these natural systems – in other words, Nature’s own economy – provide the foundation for our prosperity and our national security.”

Perhaps his most pointed remarks – and those that generated the loudest applause from some (although not all) in the hall – were directed at the US itself. He described Congress as “this citadel of democracy created to represent the voice of all American people”. He mentioned the role of Magna Carta in laying the foundation for the constitutional principle that “executive power is subject to checks and balances”. Trump’s opponents clearly enjoyed that.

Saving the special relationship

State visits by British monarchs to the US have been relatively rare, and state visits to London by US presidents are even rarer. Trump is unique in having made two. This in itself is a mark of the desperate attempts by British governments, both Tory and Labour, to find ways of managing relations with his administration. This desperation was also apparent in Keir Starmer’s reckless decision to appoint Peter Mandelson as British ambassador to Washington.

The king’s speech pushed in interesting ways at the boundaries of what a British monarch might be expected to have said in Trump’s America. Yet some of the sentiments in his mother’s 1991 address to Congress – considered uncontroversial at the time – could no longer be expressed without the risk of offending the current administration.

Queen Elizabeth noted: “Some people believe that power grows from the barrel of a gun. So it can, but history shows us that it never grows well nor for very long. Force, in the end, is sterile.”

That may be a lesson Trump will have to learn the hard way. But for the moment, he and his immediate circle seem to have an unwavering belief in the primacy of kinetic force, and have little interest in the objective Charles described of stemming “the beating of ploughshares into swords”.

The queen also commended “the rich ethnic diversity of both our societies”. Charles spoke instead about interfaith understanding. This is not quite the same thing – but is certainly more compatible with the Trump administration’s disturbingly relaxed approach to the rise of white-supremacist politics.

Perhaps the saddest feature of a comparison of the two speeches is the queen’s proud boast in 1991 that “Britain is at the heart of a growing movement towards greater cohesion within Europe, and within the European Community in particular”. If the US has changed since 1991, so has Britain. It would be nice to think that one day the monarch might give an equally generous speech about shared history and values in front of the UK’s European neighbours.

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

– ref. How King Charles charmed the US while taking digs at Trump in historic speech to Congress – https://theconversation.com/how-king-charles-charmed-the-us-while-taking-digs-at-trump-in-historic-speech-to-congress-281766

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Carlos Abrahams, Senior Lecturer in Environmental Assessment – Director of Ecoacoustics, Nottingham Trent University

Each May, nature lovers get out of bed early to experience the seasonal wonder of birds singing, as the sun rises above the horizon to take part in International Dawn Chorus Day.

In Europe you may hear blackbirds, chiffchaffs and nightingales. In the US, cardinals, chickadees and blue jays. In East Africa, morning thrush, hornbills and wood doves. Each with their own song.

There is no single dawn chorus, but the harmonies of hundreds of bird voices at first light change from place to place in a huge wave that surfs around the world as the planet rotates.

A dawn chorus is part of a wider soundscape – the interaction between biological sounds from birds and other animals (biophony), natural physical sounds such as wind or water (geophony) and human‑generated sounds like traffic (anthrophony). The dawn chorus is often the most prominent component of the soundscape at sunrise, but it never exists in isolation.

Scientists believe that birds structure their early morning singing in a way that prevents overlap and masking of each other’s vocalisations. They use different pitches and timings to partition and share the acoustic space. Birds in open landscapes such as grasslands use shorter, scratchier sounding song phrases, while birds in woodlands use longer whistling notes – each evolved to allow the best transmission of their song in their own habitat. So birdsong is filtered by trees, grasses, across water and through urban areas, to create a soundscape phenomenon that differs very clearly from region to region.

In the Caledonian pinewoods of northern Scotland, the first morning sounds are often geophonic: wind moving through tall pine canopies. Typically before first light, male western capercaillies gather together to vie for females. The males fan out their tail feathers, puff out their chests and produce a series of clicks, pops and wheezing notes. These are short‑range sounds, shaped by the open understorey and the resonant qualities of the forest.

Fieldwork in these woods has shown how these vocalisations are tied to group mating activity (known as lekking) and can be used to assess the populations of this rare and declining species. These sounds indicate a specialised habitat that has remained untouched for a long time? and without much human disturbance, where the secretive birds can go about their lives, while contributing to the distinctive acoustic character of the pinewoods.

Move to a lowland heath in southern England though, and the differences are immediate. The geophony shifts to the dry hiss of wind across heather and scattered gorse. The dawn biophony is dominated by an assemblage of species that are rare across Europe. The nightjar might have been producing its continuous churring since well before first light. Woodlarks add clear, falling song phrases, while Dartford warblers deliver rapid, scratchy calls from gorse clumps. Research on heathland species has shown how these calls are useful indicators of local habitat quality and structure.

In urban areas, birds have to compete with the noises made by people and their machines. Cars, motorbikes, trains. Sirens and alarms. Nightclubs and pubs. The urban architecture often makes this worse, with reflective hard surfaces bouncing these noises around the streets, instead of absorbing them as natural spaces would.

Birds have to adjust their behaviour around this. Some advance or delay the timing of their singing; others increase volume or shift pitch to higher frequencies. Large‑scale studies indicate that spring soundscapes across Europe and the US are becoming quieter and less varied, due to changes and declines in bird communities, linked to climate change and habitat loss.

Because many people hear birds more often than they see them, changes in soundscape complexity can be one of the earliest signs that local biodiversity is under pressure. Long‑term listeners of bird song – whether through formal monitoring or casual early‑morning walks – may be detecting real ecological change.

Listen up

Understanding soundscapes can help make sense of these changes. A chorus lacking high‑frequency elements may indicate the loss of particular warblers; reduced low‑frequency components may point to declines in larger bird species.

Changes in the geophony, such as increased wind noise in fragmented woodland, can alter how well birds communicate. And increasing man-made noise can mask quieter species entirely, leading to an impression of silence even where birds are still present.

In the UK, pinewoods and heaths both depend upon active vegetation management for conservation and long‑term habitat stability. Maintaining these landscapes means maintaining the conditions that support their characteristic sounds.

Paying attention to how different places sound at first light can be a reminder that biodiversity is something we can hear as well as see. You can even compare it with the sounds that accompany sunrise from other places. Arts cooperative SoundCamp’s Reveil project offers a 24‑hour broadcast that relays sunrise sounds from microphones around the world, allowing us to track the soundscape as the Earth rotates through one full day each spring.

A dawn chorus is more than an aesthetic experience: it is a summary of local ecology, habitat condition and the pressures shaping both.

Carlos Abrahams is director of Naturesound Ltd, an ecoacoustics consultancy. He is a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Ecology and Environmental Management.

– ref. Why the dawn chorus sounds different from place to place – https://theconversation.com/why-the-dawn-chorus-sounds-different-from-place-to-place-279906

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Iveri Kekenadze Gustafsson, PhD Candidate in European Studies, Lund University

The EU formally unblocked a €90 billion (£78 billion) loan for Ukraine on April 23 after Hungary and Slovakia dropped their opposition. This move came over a week after defeat in parliamentary elections brought the 16-year tenure of Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán, to an end. He will be replaced by Péter Magyar of the pro-Europe Tisza party.

But at a summit simultaneously taking place in Cyprus, EU leaders struggled to agree on a membership timeline for Ukraine. This is despite the exceptional pace of the war-torn candidate country’s accession-related reforms. The hesitation of EU member states also comes even though the bloc has prioritised its enlargement agenda since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022.

Meanwhile, another candidate country, Montenegro, is making progress on joining the bloc. Ambassadors from all EU member states said on April 22 that they had decided to set up an “ad hoc working party” to draft an accession treaty for the Balkan nation. The president of the European Council, António Costa, described this as “a big step” towards membership.

Montenegro wants to become the EU’s 28th member by 2028, concluding a process that began when it applied nearly two decades ago. It is aiming to close formal negotiations by the end of 2026 so the accession treaty can then be adopted and ratified by each of the EU’s 27 member states.

However, despite this formal progress, there are reservations about the quality of the reforms Montenegro is carrying out to align with EU standards. These reservations relate to the country’s efforts to combat corruption, ensure judicial independence and guarantee a free and pluralistic media environment.

The accession treaty is thus expected to include extensive transitional arrangements, a period after accession during which a new member does not fully participate in certain EU programmes and policies. This will give Montenegro time to adapt.

Formally, EU enlargement is a merit-based process driven by a candidate country’s compliance with political, economic and legal standards. But politics play a role, too. This is showcased by the contrasting progress Ukraine and Montenegro have made towards EU membership.

Montenegro’s small size and membership of Nato make consensus among member states on its accession relatively easy to achieve. The same cannot be said for Ukraine. Its larger size, wartime context and the scale of its potential accession make Ukraine a far more contentious decision for member states.

Politicisation of enlargement

The politicisation of the enlargement process, where individual member states shape the accession process in line with their domestic preferences, is perhaps the main factor explaining why the EU has struggled to replicate Montenegro’s progress across other candidate countries.

Despite their readiness to move forward with opening negotiations, Ukraine and neighbouring Moldova’s formal accession progress has been stalled for several months. Decisions related to Ukraine’s EU membership, in particular, have been vetoed multiple times by Orbán.

The outgoing Hungarian prime minister leveraged bilateral disputes with Ukraine to justify blocking progress in accession talks. He linked concerns over energy security, as well as a disagreement over disrupted Russian oil supplies through Ukraine, to the country’s EU path. Orbán used these disputes to veto the opening of negotiations.

Even Montenegro may not enjoy a smooth path to EU membership if Croatia continues to link bilateral issues such as maritime disputes to enlargement. The disagreement between the two countries primarily concerns the Prevlaka peninsula. This is a strategically significant area, which controls access to Montenegro’s only deep-water bay and main naval base.

According to Zvezdana Kovač of the Centre for Civic Education, an organisation that monitors Montenegro’s progress towards joining the EU, Croatia is a “manageable risk” in Montenegro’s accession process. In a 2025 interview with the New Union Post website, she noted that Croatia’s responses “are not driven by a strategic desire to block Montenegro” and it retains “a clear interest” in having EU member states as its neighbours.

Vetoes driven by bilateral disputes have contributed to disillusionment in some candidate countries. In North Macedonia, which first applied for EU membership in 2004, Bulgaria’s continued veto over deep-seated language and identity disputes has helped bring to power a government led by Hristijan Mickoski that no longer prioritises accession at all costs.

The EU’s varied responses to protests and its contrasting relations with governments in Georgia and Serbia, two other candidate countries, have also alienated many particularly in Belgrade.

While the EU’s response to democratic backsliding in Georgia has been strict, targeting the ruling party by imposing visa restrictions for diplomatic passport holders, the approach to Aleksandar Vučić’s government in Serbia has been more cautious. Serbian opposition groups have reacted to this with dismay.

If the EU sees enlargement as central to its security, decisions cannot risk being derailed by one or two member states. Moving from unanimity to qualified majority voting in enlargement-related decisions would help speed up decision-making in the Council.

But, at the same time, the EU must ensure it does not admit countries that later fail to uphold its standards – a lesson drawn from Hungary’s increasingly authoritarian trajectory over the past 16 years of Orbán’s rule.

While Montenegro appears to be entering the final stage of its path to EU membership, disagreements over Ukraine’s timeline show that some member states have not fundamentally shifted their approach to using enlargement as a geopolitical tool.

For now, the EU is managing rather than overcoming politicisation in its accession process. This risks an enlargement policy that remains inconsistent and unreliable.

Iveri Kekenadze Gustafsson 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. EU enlargement is often deeply political – as Ukraine and Montenegro show – https://theconversation.com/eu-enlargement-is-often-deeply-political-as-ukraine-and-montenegro-show-257055

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Sofie Abildgaard Jacobsen, PhD Candidate in the Department of Clinical Medicine – Clinic for Functional Disorders, Aarhus University

Global figures estimate that around one in six women will experience sexual assault during their lifetime. These figures are not only high but also extremely concerning, given that sexual assault is a deeply traumatic experience for someone to go through.

The psychological consequences of sexual assault, such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), anxiety and depression, are well known. But most people are less aware that sexual violence can also affect a person’s physical health – for sometimes months or years to come.

Existing research in this area has mostly focused on pelvic pain, gastrointestinal problems, or short-term pain in the months following an assault.

But as we found in our recent study, survivors of sexual assault can often experience persistent physical symptoms across the entire body for many years after being attacked or assaulted.

These symptoms fall under what clinicians call functional somatic disorders. These are conditions with persistent physical symptoms that aren’t fully explained by other medical or mental health conditions. And they can cause significant distress and seriously affect a person’s daily life. These include conditions such as Fibromyalgia, ME/CFS (myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome), and irritable bowel syndrome (IBS).

Hidden trauma

As part of our recent research, we used data from a large Danish health study that followed thousands of adults over several years, looking for how many of those people had a functional somatic disorder at a given time, and how many would develop a functional somatic disorder over time.

What we found in our study was that people who had experienced sexual assault were 69% more likely to report or develop ongoing physical health problems compared to those who had not experienced sexual violence.

The risk of developing more widespread health problems (meaning several persistent and bothersome symptoms affecting different parts of the body) was six times higher among survivors of sexual assault in our data.

Overall, survivors reported more symptoms. And these symptoms were often more severe and affected multiple parts of the body.

Findings from our earlier study also found that the more severe the assault, the greater the risk of developing long-term physical health problems.

In our research we also found that sexual assault appeared to have a particularly strong impact compared to other forms of abuse, such as emotional and physical abuse. This is probably because sexual violence can activate several stress‑related systems in the body.

Sexual trauma can disrupt emotional regulation and keep the body in a prolonged state of physiological alert. Over time, this may make pain and other bodily sensations harder to regulate. Trauma can also heighten sensitivity in the nervous system, so signals that would normally fade can instead become amplified. For some, it seems this can then become entrenched and may contribute to the development of functional somatic disorders.

Lasting impact

As our recent research shows, sexual assault is not only a severely traumatic experience for someone to go through. But it’s also an important public health issue. With potential long-lasting consequences for a person’s mental and physical health.

Indeed, these findings suggest that some people with unexplained pain or persistent somatic symptoms may carry a hidden history of trauma. Even if they do not disclose these experiences directly to a doctor.

It’s clear then that there needs to be a greater recognition of the connection between sexual trauma and physical symptoms within the medical system. At sexual assault referral centres, for example, professionals could make survivors of sexual assault aware of the possibility of long-term somatic symptoms as well as psychological ones.

This may help to normalise someone’s experience of sexual violence. It may also help to reduce shame and ensure that treatment encompasses the full spectrum of the trauma’s impact.

On a wider level, sexual assault should be considered a significant risk factor for both mental and physical health difficulties. And more must be done to inform doctors and nurses in all areas of healthcare about the hidden health risks of sexual assault and rape.

Indeed, raising awareness and improving understanding would lead to more validation of survivors’ experiences and greater trust in healthcare systems for patients.

This is important because supporting someone after sexual violence means more than just treatment – it means care that understands trauma and that gives survivors the support they truly need.

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This article was commissioned as part of a partnership between Videnskab.dk and The Conversation.

Sofie Abildgaard Jacobsen receives funding from The Danish Victims Foundation. She is affiliated with SundFornuft – Tænketanken for Sundhedspolitik (Common Sense – The Health Policy Think Tank).

– ref. Rape, sexual assault and long-term chronic health issues – our new study – https://theconversation.com/rape-sexual-assault-and-long-term-chronic-health-issues-our-new-study-271587

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Gabriele Neher, Associate Professor in History of Art, University of Nottingham

The first modern mention of the Flemish painter Michaelina Wautier (1614–1689) introduces an artist who defies expectation. Referring to her monumental Triumph of Bacchus (1655–59), Gustav Glück, the first art historian to serve as curator of Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum, wrote in 1903 that “even in an age of female emancipation, one would hardly wish to ascribe this picture, which shows a highly vigorous, almost coarse conception, to a woman’s hand”.

And thereby hangs the achievement of Wautier: she may have been able to paint “like a man”, but in most of her works, she does not feel the need to do so. Instead, Michaelina Wautier emerges as an artist with a distinctive style of her own.

The Royal Academy of Arts (RA) in London is currently host to the most complete representation of her work to date. It is a landmark exhibition that reintroduces an artist who in her day was highly successful and championed by the court and elite in Brussels; but, who subsequently almost disappeared from public and scholarly notice for close on 300 years.

Restoring Wautier to a place in the artistic canon through an exhibition in the Royal Academy of Arts seems especially apt for an artist who defies expectation. The RA was the first institution to provide professional training for artists in Britain. Wautier’s work and the RA’s presentation of it shows clear evidence of the sort of training that was at the time the exclusive prerogative of male artists.

The point on her training is made straight away through the image that opens the show, a graceful and confident Study of the Medici Ganymede Bust (1654). The drawing depicts the famous ancient Roman sculpture, which was at the time in Rome. Drawing competently was a much valued skill and the Ganymede suggests not only a meticulously trained artist, but one whose work is up-to-date and reflects contemporary trends.

Many will be questioning where she sits in relation to the titan of Baroque painting and her contemporary, Artemisia Gentileschi (1593–1654) – the favourite subject of feminist art history. Both women disappear from view after the 1650s, both worked with close relatives (Wautier with her brother, Gentileschi with her father), both were championed by high-ranking patrons. But this is where the similarities end.

Gentileschi’s violent personal history has often overshadowed the discussion of her consummate skill and mastery of her craft. For instance, works like the Beheading of Holofernes (1612) are frequently interpreted as responses to her experience of sexual violence.

In Wautier’s case, however, there just isn’t much known about her life beyond bare facts such as who her parents were, that she shared a studio with her brother in Brussels and that she never married. This lack of information is partially due to the artist’s will going up in the flames of the French bombardment of Brussels in 1695.

So where for Gentileschi it feels as if we can’t separate the art from the biography; in Wautier’s case, there is nothing but the art. And, what wonderful art it is too.

Wautier excelled in portraiture, with her elegant palette and her mastery of textures – be it hair or textiles. In her portraits, especially in the depiction of children, she is vivacious and lively and so observant of quirks and foibles. You can see this in her Five Senses (1650) series. For instance, Smell features a little blond boy clutching a rotten egg in one hand and pinching his nose shut with the other, recoiling from the egg’s stench.

Despite their brilliance, however, she never signed her portraits. She did, however, sign two large-scale religious paintings, a Mystic Marriage of Saint Catherine of Alexandria and an intriguing and unusual panel depicting the Education of the Virgin. Both panels centre around educated, confident, elegant female protagonists, defined by their actions.

These paintings defy contemporary ideas that women artists excelled at imitation but lacked the capacity to imagine and create a subject from scratch. Wautier signs these paintings “invenit et fecit”, which translates as “invented and executed”. Here she is staking her claim to possessing the imagination to execute significant work at large scale. She attests to be a master of her craft, and this is nowhere more apparent than in the centrepiece of the Royal Academy’s exhibition, her immense Triumph of Bacchus.

Here, Wautier tackles the epitome of artistic mastery: a large-scale mythological subject that featured in the work of her most significant contemporaries, such as Andrea Mantegna, Titian and of course the artist who dominated the market in Flanders and the Netherlands, Peter Paul Rubens.

Wautier’s Triumph of Bacchus is larger than that of her male competitors, and she combines in her image the fleshiness of the central male nude with the grace and the elegance of Titian. She presents the viewer with a powerful image of a flabby Bacchus reclining in a wheelbarrow, surrounded by his followers. Wautier’s skill in painting a variety of male nudes in a range of poses looks effortlessly competent, with the Bacchus becoming the work that firmly places her within art history, a masterpiece designed to defy the challenge that a woman can not paint like a man.

This one can, but she takes the challenge up a notch with the intriguing inclusion of a self portrait. Wautier depicts herself as an elegant, bare-breasted Bacchante, a female follower of Bacchus, clad in a striking robe of salmon-pink, looking out at the viewer, the only person to do so in the array of figures depicted. Wautier’s Bacchante stands tall and proud, inviting the viewer to look at her. But it’s Wautier who controls this gaze; in the painting, a sallow-skinned faun attempts to grab the Amazonian, composed woman. She shrugs off his leering, and ignores him grabbing her hair. She is in charge.

Michaelina Wautier is on at The Royal Academy in London until June 21, 2026

Gabriele Neher 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. Michaelina Wautier review: an astoundingly skilled painter returned to her rightful place in the spotlight – https://theconversation.com/michaelina-wautier-review-an-astoundingly-skilled-painter-returned-to-her-rightful-place-in-the-spotlight-281462

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Kartikeya Walia, Lecturer, Department of Engineering, Nottingham Trent University

A table tennis robot has outperformed elite players in recent evaluations. The robot, called Ace, marks a significant step toward artificial intelligence (AI) systems that can operate in fast, uncertain, real-world environments.

In the tests, the autonomous robot won three out of five matches against elite players – competitive athletes with over ten years’ experience and an average of 20 hours weekly training. The robot, developed by Sony AI, lost both matches against players in professional Japanese leagues, but did win a game against one of them. The system is described in detail in a recent paper published in Nature.

AI has spent decades mastering games. It has repeatedly outperformed the best humans in everything from complex video games like StarCraft II to chess – where modern programs now far exceed human ratings.

Landmark systems such as Deep Blue and AlphaGo have confirmed that, given clear rules and enough data, AI can achieve superhuman performance. But these victories all shared one key feature: they happened in controlled, digital environments.

At first glance, table tennis might seem like an unusual benchmark for artificial intelligence. In reality, it is one of the most demanding imaginable. The ball can travel faster than 20 metres per second, giving players less than half a second to react.

On top of that, spin introduces enormous complexity. A ball rotating at extreme speeds can curve mid-air and rebound unpredictably off the table. For humans, interpreting spin is largely intuitive. For robots, it has been a longstanding obstacle.

Earlier table tennis robotic systems such as Forpheus, developed by Japanese company Omron, addressed this by simplifying the game – using controlled ball launchers, limiting movement, or ignoring spin altogether. More recent iterations have aimed for interaction, but still operate under constrained conditions.

Ace does none of this. It plays with standard equipment, on a regulation table,
against human opponents who are free to use the full range of shots.

How Ace works

Ace’s performance relies on three key innovations: how it sees the world, how it
decides what to do, and how it carries out those actions. First, let’s deal with how Ace sees the world. Traditional cameras struggle with fast motion, often producing a blur or missing critical details.

Ace instead uses three “event-based” vision sensors, which detect changes in light rather than capturing full images at fixed intervals. These are complemented by nine high-speed cameras that track the environment, including the opponent and their racket.

Together, these systems enable high-speed gaze control (the technology that enables a robot to direct its sensors to focus on specific things) and allow the robot to follow the ball with exceptional real-time precision.

By tracking markings on the ball, where professional players can generate spin approaching 9,000 revolutions per minute (rpm), the system can estimate spin in real time, something that has long challenged robotic systems.

The second important innovation is how Ace decides what to do. Knowing where the ball is going is only half the problem; the robot must also respond instantly. Ace uses deep reinforcement learning, trained in simulation over millions of virtual rallies, including self-play.

It continuously generates movement commands for its multi-jointed robotic arm, recalculating trajectories every few tens of milliseconds while avoiding collisions with the table or itself.

The third innovation is how Ace how it carries out its actions. To match the speed of human elite players, the robot is built around a high-performance arm combining two prismatic (sliding) and six revolute (rotational) joints. This enables rapid sideways motion and precise striking. There is both a table tennis racket and a mechanism for ball handling, allowing one-armed serves.

Crucially, the system is engineered for high-speed interaction: lightweight structures and optimised actuation (the mechanisms in a robot that convert energy into mechanical force) allow Ace to return balls at speeds approaching 20 metres per second. This enables sustained, competitive rallies with skilled human players.

What makes this particularly notable is the transition from simulation to reality. Many AI systems perform well in virtual environments but fail when exposed to real-world noise and uncertainty. Ace demonstrates that this “sim-to-real” gap can be
meaningfully reduced.

One moment during a rally with an elite player illustrates the way that Ace has leapt over this gap. When a predicted ball trajectory suddenly changed after clipping the net, Ace reacted almost instantly, returning the shot and winning the point. What makes Ace particularly significant is therefore not just its performance, but its ability to operate reliably under real-world uncertainty.

Why this matters beyond sport

A robot returning high-speed topspin shots may be entertaining, but the implications go far beyond table tennis. In manufacturing, for example, robots are typically confined to highly structured tasks.

The real challenge is adaptability, handling irregular objects, responding to variation. This is particularly relevant for next-generation robots operating in unstructured environments.

To function effectively in homes, hospitals or construction sites, robots must be able to predict, adapt and respond to constantly changing conditions. The same predictive and control capabilities that allow Ace to respond to unpredictable shots could enable more flexible, responsive automation.

There are also implications for human–robot interaction. Most industrial robots are
kept behind safety barriers because they cannot react quickly or reliably enough to
unexpected human behaviour. Ace operates at the edge of human reaction time,
suggesting a future where robots can safely collaborate with people in shared
spaces.

More broadly, this work represents a shift in what AI is expected to do. The next
frontier is not just intelligence in abstract problem-solving, but intelligence embedded in the physical world. The gap between simulations and reality needs filling, and this is a big step forward.

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Read more:
Amazon’s new robot has a sense of touch, but it’s not here to replace humans

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What humans still do better

Professional players were still able to exploit Ace’s limitations – particularly in reach, speed, and the ability to handle extreme or highly deceptive shots. This highlights that intelligence is not just about prediction and control, but also about physical embodiment. Humans combine perception, movement and strategy in ways that remain difficult to replicate.

Interestingly, systems like Ace may end up enhancing human performance rather
than replacing it. As one former Olympic player observed after facing the robot,
seeing it return seemingly impossible shots suggests humans might be capable of more than previously thought.

Kartikeya Walia receives funding from Innovate UK, UKRI. He 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. Table tennis robot defeats some of world’s best players – why this has major implications for robotics – https://theconversation.com/table-tennis-robot-defeats-some-of-worlds-best-players-why-this-has-major-implications-for-robotics-281511