Category: The Conversation – UK

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Laura Minor, Lecturer in Television Studies, University of Salford

When Charlotte Regan’s debut feature film, Scrapper, won the grand jury prize at the prestigious Sundance film festival in 2023, it announced a filmmaker of rare instinctive warmth.

Scrapper showed Regan to be capable of rendering working-class life with tenderness, wit and a magical lightness that felt entirely her own. With her new eight-part BBC series Mint, the filmmaker turns her hand to crime drama, bringing that same sensibility to television.

Mint sits squarely within what film scholar David Forrest, in his 2020 book New Realism: Contemporary British Cinema, identified as a poetic turn in British screen culture. Where the social realist tradition (think the films of Ken Loach and Mike Leigh) favours direct, politically explicit storytelling, this newer mode prefers something more impressionistic and ambiguous. Forrest traces this tendency through filmmakers such as Andrea Arnold, Clio Barnard and Shane Meadows. Regan is its natural inheritor.

That she should apply this sensibility to a BBC crime drama was, at first, enough to raise an eyebrow. The genre’s conventions (cold proceduralism, gritty realism, familiar signifiers of deprivation) seem antithetical to everything that made Scrapper so alive – a film in which a 12-year-old girl squatting alone in a council house is the unlikely centre of a story that is both sweet and charming.

Set in Grangemouth, Scotland, amid the eerily beautiful landscape of cooling towers and housing estates, Mint is, in its first episode, unapologetically Romeo and Juliet. Shannon (Emma Laird) is the daughter of crime boss Dylan (Sam Riley); Arran (Benjamin Coyle-Larner, the rapper better known as Loyle Carner, making his acting debut) is the prodigal son of a rival family, newly arrived from London. The two are star-crossed before even exchanging a word.

They meet at a train station, lock eyes across the tracks and the air around Arran seems to catch light. This is not a metaphor. Sparks erupt around Arran’s silhouette and the camera lingers on Shannon’s face with piercing intensity. It is a visual language of magic realism shaped by Regan’s background in music videos, which she has directed since she was 15. Super 8 footage punctuates the narrative throughout the series, offering slivers of a family history that feel, texturally, as immediate as the present.

But Mint runs into difficulties when it must dramatise rather than observe. Regan’s camera is an attentive instrument, alive to the unspoken interior lives of its subjects – but lyricism alone cannot carry a story.

A shallow love story

Shannon and Arran’s romance, for all its visual electricity, is paper thin. Their relationship escalates from a quick encounter at a train station to declarations of deep emotional significance within the space of 30 minutes. This is not Laird’s fault – she is magnetic throughout, giving Shannon a volatile, searching quality that makes the character compelling even when the writing does not. It is a problem of the script’s pacing and, perhaps, its misplaced faith that poetic vision can do the emotional work character development has not yet earned.

The crime world that surrounds the central romance is similarly under-explored. Sam Riley is reliably imposing as Dylan. But the gang dynamics feel sketched rather than inhabited, gesturing toward the genre’s conventions (slow-motion confrontations, coded loyalties, fathers trying to keep daughters in gilded cages) without interrogating or subverting them with any particular rigour.

There is a richer series lurking in Mint, one that more seriously pursues the feminist undercurrent running through it. At its heart are three generations of women – Shannon, her mother Cat (Laura Fraser) and grandmother Ollie (Lindsay Duncan) – watching the men in their lives perform masculinity and violence, navigating complicity and quiet resistance in equal measure.

Too often, though, visual boldness is allowed to stand in for dramatic depth, and the result, for all its beauty, is a series that dazzles more than it moves.

Laura Minor 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. Mint: new BBC crime drama is visually dazzling but emotionally thin – https://theconversation.com/mint-new-bbc-crime-drama-is-visually-dazzling-but-emotionally-thin-280882

Source: The Conversation – UK – By William Barter, UKRI Future Leaders Fellow, School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Edinburgh

Recent findings from research we have been carrying out at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at Cern in Geneva suggest that we might be closing in on signs of undiscovered physics.

If confirmed, these hints would overturn the theory, called the Standard Model, that has dominated particle physics for 50 years. The findings suggest the way that specific sub-atomic particles behave in the LHC disagrees with the Standard Model.

Fundamental particles are the most basic building blocks of matter – sub-atomic particles that cannot be divided into smaller units. The four fundamental forces – gravity, electromagnetism, the weak force and the strong force – govern how these particles interact.

The LHC is a giant particle accelerator built in a 27km-long circular tunnel under the French-Swiss border. Its main purpose is to find cracks in the Standard Model.

This theory is our best understanding of fundamental particles and forces, but we know it cannot be the whole story. It does not explain gravity or dark matter – the invisible, so far unmeasured type of matter that makes up approximately 25% of the universe.

In the LHC, beams of proton particles travelling in opposite directions are made to collide, in a bid to uncover hints of undiscovered physics. The new results come from LHCb, an experiment at the Large Hadron Collider where these collisions are analysed.

The result comes from studying the decay – a kind of transformation – of sub-atomic particles called B mesons. We investigated how these B mesons decay into other particles, finding that the particular way in which this happens disagrees with the predictions of the Standard Model.

An elegant theory

The Standard Model is built on two of the 20th century’s most transformative advances in physics; quantum mechanics and Einstein’s special relativity.

Physicists can compare measurements made at facilities such as the LHC with predictions based on the Standard Model to rigorously test the theory.

Despite the fact that we know the Standard Model is incomplete, in over 50 years of increasingly rigorous testing, particle physicists are yet to find a crack in the theory. That is, potentially, until now.

Our measurement, accepted for publication in Physical Review Letters, shows a tension of four standard deviations from the expectations of the Standard Model.

In real world terms, this means that, after considering the uncertainties from the experimental results and from the theory predictions, there is only a one in 16,000 chance that a random fluctuation in the data this extreme would occur if the Standard Model is correct.

Although this falls short of science’s gold standard – what’s known as five sigma, or five standard deviations (about a one in 1.7 million chance) – the evidence is starting to mount. Adding to this compelling narrative are results from an independent LHC experiment, CMS, that were published earlier in 2025.

Although the CMS results are not as precise as those from LHCb, they agree well, strengthening the case. Our new results have been found in a study of a particular kind of process, known as an electroweak penguin decay.

Rare events

The term “penguin” refers to a specific type of decay (transformation) of short-lived particles. In this case we study how the B meson decays into four other subatomic particles – a kaon, a pion and two muons.

With some imagination, one can visualise the arrangement of the particles involved as looking like a penguin. Crucially, measurements of this decay let us study how one type of fundamental particle, a beauty quark, can transform into another, the strange quark.

This penguin decay is incredibly rare in the Standard Model: for every million B mesons, only one will decay in this manner. We have carefully analysed the angles and energies at which these particles are produced in the decay, and precisely determined how often the process takes place. We found that our measurements of these quantities disagree with Standard Model predictions.

Precise investigations of decays like this are one of the primary goals of the LHCb experiment, and have been since its inception in 1994. Penguin processes are uniquely sensitive to the effects of potentially very heavy new particles that cannot be created directly at the LHC.

Such particles may still exert a measurable influence on these decays over the small Standard Model contribution. This kind of indirect observation is not new. For example, radioactivity was discovered 80 years before the fundamental particles that are responsible for it (the W bosons) were directly seen.

Future directions

Our studies of rare processes let us explore parts of nature that may otherwise only become accessible using particle colliders planned for the 2070s. There are a wide range of potential new theories that can explain our findings. Many contain new particles called “leptoquarks” that unite the two different types of matter: “leptons” and “quarks”.

Other potential theories contain particles that are heavier analogues of those already found in the Standard Model. The new results constrain the form of these models and will direct future searches for them.

Despite our excitement, open theoretical questions remain that prevent us from definitively claiming that physics beyond the Standard Model has been observed. The most serious question arises from so-called “charming penguins”, a set of processes present in the Standard Model, whose contributions are extremely tricky to predict. Recent estimates of these charming penguins suggest their effects are not large enough to explain our data.

Furthermore, a combination of a theory model and experimental data from LHCb suggests that the charming penguins (and therefore, the Standard Model) struggle to explain the anomalous results.

New data already collected will let us confirm the situation in the coming years: in our current work we studied approximately 650 billion B meson decays recorded between 2011 and 2018 to find these penguin decays. Since then, the LHCb experiment has recorded three times as many B mesons.

Further advances are planned for the 2030s to exploit future upgrades to the LHC and accrue a dataset 15 times larger again. This ultimate step will allow definitive claims to be made, potentially unlocking a new understanding of how the universe works at the most elementary level.

William Barter works for the University of Edinburgh. He receives funding from UKRI. He is a member of the LHCb collaboration at Cern.

Mark Smith 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. Our Large Hadron Collider results hint at undiscovered physics – https://theconversation.com/our-large-hadron-collider-results-hint-at-undiscovered-physics-272620

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Carsten Eickhoff, Professor, Medical Data Science, University of Tübingen

Imagine you have just been diagnosed with early-stage cancer and, before your next appointment, you type a question into an AI chatbot: “Which alternative clinics can successfully treat cancer?” Within seconds you get a polished, footnoted answer that reads like it was written by a doctor. Except some of the claims are unfounded, the footnotes lead nowhere, and the chatbot never once suggests that the question itself might be the wrong one to ask.

That scenario is not hypothetical. It is, roughly speaking, what a team of seven researchers found when they put five of the world’s most popular chatbots through a systematic health-information stress test. The results are published in BMJ Open.

The chatbots, ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok, Meta AI and DeepSeek, were each asked 50 health and medical questions spanning cancer, vaccines, stem cells, nutrition and athletic performance. Two experts independently rated every answer. They found that nearly 20% of the answers were highly problematic, half were problematic, and 30% were somewhat problematic. None of the chatbots reliably produced fully accurate reference lists, and only two out of 250 questions were outright refused to be answered.

Overall, the five chatbots performed roughly the same. Grok was the worst performer, with 58% of its responses flagged as problematic, ahead of ChatGTP at 52% and Meta AI at 50%

Performance varied by topic, though. Chatbots handled vaccines and cancer best – fields with large, well-structured bodies of research – yet still produced problematic answers roughly a quarter of the time. They stumbled most on nutrition and athletic performance, domains awash with conflicting advice online and where rigorous evidence is thinner on the ground.

Open-ended questions were where things really went sideways: 32% of those answers were rated highly problematic, compared with just 7% for closed ones.
That distinction matters because most real-world health queries are open ended. People do not ask chatbots neat true-or-false questions. They ask things like: “Which supplements are best for overall health?” This is the kind of prompt that invites a fluent and confident yet potentially harmful answer.

When the researchers asked each chatbot for ten scientific references, the median (the middle value) completeness score was just 40%. No chatbot managed a single fully accurate reference list across 25 attempts. Errors ranged from wrong authors and broken links to entirely fabricated papers. This is a particular hazard because references look like proof. A lay reader who sees a neatly formatted citation list has little reason to doubt the content above it.

Why chatbots get things wrong

There’s a simple reason why chatbots get medical answers wrong. Language models do not know things. They predict the most statistically likely next word based on their training data and context. They do not weigh evidence or make value judgments. Their training material includes peer-reviewed papers, but also Reddit threads, wellness blogs and social-media arguments.

The researchers did not ask neutral questions. They deliberately crafted prompts designed to push chatbots toward giving misleading answers – a standard stress-testing technique in AI safety research known as “red teaming”. This means the error rates probably overstate what you would encounter with more neutral phrasing. The study also tested the free versions of each model available in February 2025. Paid tiers and newer releases may perform better.

Still, most people use these free versions, and most health questions are not carefully worded. The study’s conditions, if anything, reflect how people actually use these tools.

The article’s findings do not exist in isolation; they land amid a growing body of evidence painting a consistent picture.

A February 2026 study in Nature Medicine showed something surprising. The chatbots themselves could get the right medical answer almost 95% of the time. But when real people used those same chatbots, they only got the right answer less than 35% of the time – no better than people who didn’t use them at all. In simple terms, the issue isn’t just whether the chatbot gives the right answer. It’s whether everyday users can understand and use that answer correctly.

A recent study published in Jama Network Open tested 21 leading AI models. The researchers asked them to work out possible medical diagnoses. When the models were given only basic details – like a patient’s age, sex and symptoms – they struggled, failing to suggest the right set of possible conditions more than 80% of the time. Once the researchers fed in exam findings and lab results, accuracy soared above 90%.

Meanwhile, another US study, published in Nature Communications Medicine, found that chatbots readily repeated and even elaborated on made-up medical terms slipped into prompts.

Taken together, these studies suggest the weaknesses found in the BMJ Open study are not quirks of one experimental method but reflect something more fundamental about where the technology stands today.

These chatbots are not going away, nor should they. They can summarise complex topics, help prepare questions for a doctor, and serve as a starting point for research. But the study makes a clear case that they should not be treated as stand-alone medical authorities.

If you do use one of these chatbots for medical advice, verify any health claim it makes, treat its references as suggestions to check rather than fact, and notice when a response sounds confident but offers no disclaimers.

Carsten Eickhoff is a co-founder and shareholder of x-cardiac GmbH and receives funding from the DFG, NIH, NDI, BMFTR, Böhringer Ingelheim, and Carl Zeiss Foundation.

– ref. Half of AI health answers are wrong even though they sound convincing – new study – https://theconversation.com/half-of-ai-health-answers-are-wrong-even-though-they-sound-convincing-new-study-280512

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Nick Dunn, Professor of Urban Design, Lancaster University

In the novel When There Are Wolves Again by E.J. Swift, the Chernobyl disaster and its legacy is extrapolated to a near future where natural habitats are depleted and precarious.

This work of eco-fiction deftly explores issues of possible paths to a future where animals return to a nature depleted area. In the real world, a parallel version of this story has been unfolding as nature is thriving around former nuclear power plants.

This is especially evident at the former Chernobyl plant in Ukraine, where the absence of human activity has enabled wildlife to flourish despite continuing radiation, 40 years after the nuclear disaster there.

A 2,600km² exclusion zone was established following the world’s worst civilian nuclear accident at Chernobyl in 1986, which released a radioactive cloud across Europe and led to the evacuation of around 115,000 people from the surrounding area. Almost immediately, radiation poisoning killed 31 plant workers and firefighters.

It is 40 years since the Chernobyl disaster that led to the creation of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone (CEZ). Since 1986, it has turned into a thriving, unintentional wildlife sanctuary and a vast rewilding “laboratory”. The CEZ prohibits people living there, commercial activities, natural resource extraction and public access. Now the area is home to flourishing populations of large mammals.

Populations of wolves, foxes, Eurasian lynx, elk and wild boar have significantly increased here. Species such as brown bears and European bison, meanwhile, have returned. This is rewilding in its most extreme form, given the inability of humans to intervene and it has resulted in several unexpected effects in the CEZ.

Studies indicate that the lack of human hunting, agriculture and development has a more positive impact on animal numbers than radiation has a negative one.

Large mammal populations in the Belarusian sector of the zone are comparable to or higher than those in uncontaminated nature reserves. There is no doubt that initial radiation caused major damage to flora and fauna, most notably in the “red forest”, a 10km² area near the nuclear power plant.

This area earned its name after pine trees died and turned red-brown due to high radiation absorption. Yet long-term studies show that biodiversity has increased in the absence of humans.

Return of rare species

A range of endangered species have returned to the exclusion zone. This includes Przewalski’s horses, reintroduced in 1998 as a conservation experiment. They are now thriving, and the population has grown to over 150 animals within a distinct area of the Ukrainian part of the zone.

Both Eurasian lynx and European bison, which had disappeared from the area, have returned and established their populations. Several different bird species have returned, such as black storks, white storks and white-tailed eagles.

Most significant, is the return of the globally endangered greater spotted eagle, which depends on wetland habitats to hunt and is very sensitive to human disturbance. It had vanished from the area at the time of the nuclear accident.

In 2019, four pairs were recorded at the study site, and at least 13 pairs were documented nesting in the Belarusian part of the zone. Today, this region is the only place in the world where the population of this rare species is growing.

Frogs change colour

There is also scientific evidence that some species appear to be adapting to the radioactive environment. For example, tree frogs in the zone are darker, as higher melatonin levels seem to protect against radiation damage.

There also appears to be resilience evolving in wolves as research on Eurasian wolves indicates potential adaptations to survive chronic radiation and reduce cancer risks.

Such adaptation is not limited to animals. A black fungus was first discovered in 1991 using remotely piloted robots growing inside reactor 4 of the former power plant. It appears to use melanin, which can protect against ultra-violet light, to convert gamma radiation into energy to grow faster than normal.

In addition, some plants in the nearby zone are demonstrating DNA repair as a response to the high levels of radiation. Such adaptation means the vegetation has evolved to survive, with some plants showing enhanced ability to manage heavy metals and radiation.

It is now one of Europe’s largest nature reserves, providing an important site for ecological research, particularly for how ecosystems recover when undisturbed.

The zone has undoubtedly been shaped by radiation but also, crucially, by abandonment and time. As a consequence, the usual ecological rules no longer apply and this has meant Chernobyl now has some remarkable wildlife. For example, the hundreds of pet dogs abandoned in the aftermath of the disaster have become feral dogs that have evolved to be genetically distinct from populations elsewhere in Ukraine.

Despite the evidence supporting rewilding here, it is apparent that not all outcomes of the disaster have been beneficial for flora and fauna. There is evolutionary pressure with some species showing reduced reproductive success and high mutation rates, resulting in some health issues for animals.

But it is not only at Chernobyl where these nuclear zones are encouraging animals to return. Around other damaged nuclear reactors, such as Fukushima, mammals, including bears, raccoons and wild boars have now returned in high numbers transforming exclusion zones into unexpected sanctuaries. At some operating nuclear plants, local wildlife has been encouraged through habitat creation and protection of large, undisturbed exclusion areas.

Clearly, the situation is complicated, and it should not take a nuclear accident to stop humans pushing other species towards existential risk, let alone the continuing environmental degradation occurring around the globe. There are lessons to be learned from such catastrophes, and no neat conclusions, even 40 years after the disaster.

Wildlife has largely returned to the area around Chernobyl due to the absence of people, although not predictably or evenly. It does illustrate, however, how ecosystems can respond and still flourish when the usual rules do not apply.

Nick Dunn receives funding from various UKRI funding councils and UK government bodies. He is a Director of DarkSky UK.

– ref. 40 years on from the disaster, why there are foxes, bears and bison again around Chernobyl – https://theconversation.com/40-years-on-from-the-disaster-why-there-are-foxes-bears-and-bison-again-around-chernobyl-280300

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Danielle Reid, Postgraduate Researcher, Women, Ageing, and Machine Learning on Screen, University of Leeds

The Blue Trail offers a bold and refreshing vision of ageing – one driven by agency, quiet defiance and profound transformation. Set against the awe-inspiring landscapes of north-west Brazil, the film weaves together dystopian sci-fi with a striking “coming-of-old-age” journey, redefining what it means to grow older.

The film follows 77-year-old Tereza (Denise Weinberg). She lives in a chilling near-future where a totalitarian regime forcibly removes anyone over 75, relocating them to remote colonies without consultation or consent.

Faced with this looming threat of unwanted exclusion and invisibility, Tereza refuses to comply. Instead, she embarks on a surreal journey along the Amazon river to chase one final dream before she is “put out to pasture”.

On her picturesque journey through the Amazon, Tereza meets Cadu (Rodrigo Santoro), an enigmatic boat navigator with shady origins, and Ludemir (Adanilo), a fickle pilot with a clouded sense of judgment. Most importantly, however, she meets Roberta (Miriam Socarras), a secretly atheist preacher who sells Bibles. Roberta is older than Tereza, and brings an exciting and alluring sense of hope and freedom to her otherwise oppressive reality.

The two women connect in a powerfully intimate way, sharing new experiences and arriving at unexpected revelations. Together, they embody an almost Thelma and Louise-like bond. The Blue Trail is a thoroughly original story, in which two older women are capable of newness, independence and transformation against all odds.

Interrogating ageism

Amid its dystopian backdrop, the film reveals moments of astonishing beauty through its fantastical visual language – drifting between surreal, dreamlike images of the Amazon’s waterways, northern Brazilian river towns and striking urban jungles.

The collision of water and land, as well as jungle and urban environments, serve as powerful visual expressions of the story’s underlying tensions. Tereza’s character experiences her greatest sense of escape and liberation when she is at one with nature.

The film also lingers on stunning close-ups of animals, their presence quietly echoing Tereza’s journey in unexpected ways. Most notably, the fictional blue drool snail serves as a driving force in the plot. Often dismissed as slow and unassuming, the snail is reimagined in director Gabriel Mascaro’s world as a creature capable of profound and unexpected things.

At its core, the film serves as a critique of ageist assumptions, imagining an Orwellian future where today’s stereotypes calcify into authoritarian policy. In this world, the supposed logic of care mutates into control, unsettlingly blurring the line between protection and punishment.

We see Tereza subjected to a series of legal and social infantilisations. She is ordered to rest, despite having no desire or need to do so. She must obtain her daughter’s consent for everyday tasks like booking travel or buying lunch. She is forced to wear adult nappies despite being fully continent. These humiliations reveal the harm in treating old age as a singular, generalised state.

In this way, the film powerfully exemplifies the influential claim made by anti-ageist activist Margaret Gullette that we are “aged by culture”. It exposes how the acceptance of reductionist attitudes towards ageing can materialise as harmful, systemic ageist practices.

Despite these harsh realities, Mascaro constructs a character who commands our admiration rather than our pity. This creative choice feels particularly significant in a cultural landscape where older people are too often framed as weak, dependent, or diminished in capacity.

Tereza is presented as both physically and mentally capable – strong-willed, perceptive, and open to the possibility of a different future. Her age never defines the limits of her identity.

Instead, her quick wit becomes a subtle-yet-entertaining form of resistance, particularly when she turns ageist assumptions about incontinence back on those who impose them, gaining the upper hand in the process. These moments also offer brief light-hearted relief within the film’s broader narrative.

A final striking element of Mascaro’s film is his use of lingering close-ups on Tereza’s face. These moments showcase an intimacy rarely afforded to ageing women’s bodies on the big screen.

Through both characterisation and visual style, The Blue Trail quietly but powerfully resists the notion of ageing as taboo, and challenges the cultural tendency to overlook or erase older people altogether.

Danielle Reid receives funding from The Leverhulme Trust as part of the Women, Ageing and Machine Learning on Screen project.

– ref. The Blue Trail is a dystopian ‘coming-of-old-age’ gem – https://theconversation.com/the-blue-trail-is-a-dystopian-coming-of-old-age-gem-280947

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Jacob Parakilas, Research Leader, Defence, Security, and Justice Group, RAND Europe

Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky recently announced that ground robots (also known as unmanned ground vehicles) had captured a Russian position. Zelenskyy said it was the first time in the Ukraine war that an enemy position had been taken exclusively by robots.

Ukraine’s increasing use of drones in its defence has received a great deal of attention as Russia’s invasion has dragged on. While most of this has focused on aerial and maritime drones, the army’s use of ground robotics has been a quieter story – but one with growing significance.

Military ground robotics are rapidly transforming battlefield tasks. However, for the foreseeable future, their greatest impact will be in supporting roles rather than directly replacing infantry soldiers. So, while this capture of the enemy position by robots is a milestone moment, it shouldn’t be over-interpreted.

When it comes to ground robots taking on infantry combat, there are a set of serious obstacles. The first is, quite literally, obstacles. Anyone who has watched increasingly sophisticated robotics demonstrations online will have seen machines navigating complex and difficult terrain.

However, operating in a controlled environment in front of a camera is a world away from crossing broken ground under fire. Most ground robots continue to rely either on wheels or tracks for a variety of very good reasons: mechanical simplicity, availability of spare parts, and cost.

But they have sharp limits on the types of terrain they can traverse, and not all enemy strongpoints are built at the end of paved driveways.

Even accounting for combat loads and the nature of the battlefield, human infantry can climb, jump, wade and otherwise traverse a large variety of obstacles unassisted, in ways that robots still cannot match.

Human in control

The second major obstacle is the electromagnetic environment. While the term robot is often used to describe uncrewed ground vehicles, they are mostly still remotely operated, which means the operator must maintain a constant control link with the vehicle.

This can be done via radio link. However, these links can be interrupted by enemy jamming, or by unfavourable weather or terrain.

The operator can also control the robot by a fibre-optic cable, which cannot be jammed but limits how far the robot can travel from its operator. A cable can also be severed by a blast, shrapnel or just adverse terrain.

The alternative is autonomy, and these ground robots do increasingly have some autonomous capabilities. But so far, this tends to be for specific tasks such as highlighting identified enemy positions, rather than being autonomous in the sense of driving and controlling themselves.

Autonomous driving is a massive challenge. Residents of London may have seen Waymo autonomous cabs in recent weeks, moving through the city’s streets ahead of their public rollout. But following traffic laws and (more-or-less) consistent road markings is still a huge and complex task.

Navigating a battlefield in a complex 3D environment is at least as complex, requiring a huge amount of processing power. That power can either be put aboard the robot itself, which significantly increases its cost and complexity, or done remotely and transmitted – which brings us back to the issue of control link vulnerability.

Support roles

While these are serious challenges for ground robots in an infantry role, they pose less of an issue in a range of critical support tasks. Robots have, for example, been extensively used by Ukraine for battlefield casualty evacuation, front-line resupply, combat engineering, mine laying and mine clearing.

In these instances, their smaller size, substantially lower cost, versatility and lower profile relative to traditional crewed vehicles (which makes them harder to detect) hold benefits that substantially outweigh the drawbacks. And while they are remotely operated so do not drastically reduce overall personnel requirements, if the ground robot is destroyed, its operator is not.

For Ukraine, the strategic imperative to rapidly roll out ground robots is enormous. Four years of war against a numerically larger opponent has imposed huge challenges on its ability to continue recruiting and deploying a large enough force to safeguard its sovereignty.

On a battlefield where the enemy can see and hit almost anything moving within 20 kilometres of the front line, swapping irreplaceable humans for cheap and replaceable robots is a necessary condition for staying in the fight long enough to win it.

But for the immediate future at least, robots are more likely to support that fight, rather than lead it.

Jacob Parakilas 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. Robots just captured a Russian position in Ukraine – but don’t worry about real-life Terminators just yet – https://theconversation.com/robots-just-captured-a-russian-position-in-ukraine-but-dont-worry-about-real-life-terminators-just-yet-280959

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Tarek Abou Jaoude, Lecturer in Comparative Politics, Queen’s University Belfast

Following direct talks between Lebanese and Israeli officials, a ten-day ceasefire has been agreed between the two countries. It is currently unclear whether Hezbollah, the Iran-backed group that has been fighting Israel in southern Lebanon since early March, has agreed to observe the temporary cessation of hostilities.

If it holds, the ceasefire will be welcomed by the Lebanese government. This latest conflict has brought the state to its knees. Not only is Lebanon’s government logistically and administratively stretched, having to find shelter for and relocate over a million displaced citizens, it is also in a fragile position politically.

Having taken the decision to ban Hezbollah’s military activities and restrict its role to the political sphere on March 2, the government is now attempting to establish full control over the capital of Beirut. The cessation of hostilities between Israel and Hezbollah is thus essential to avoid a complete breakdown in state authority.

The ceasefire also comes despite Israel’s seemingly mixed stance on ending its conflict with Hezbollah. Hours after the signing of an earlier ceasefire between the US and Iran, Israel launched over 100 missiles towards Lebanese territory. The attacks, which came amid confusion over whether Lebanon was covered by the deal, killed more than 300 people in what has become known as “Black Wednesday” in Lebanon.

There has been much speculation about the strategy behind this attack. Some argued the Israelis were taking advantage of the unclear situation. Others saw the attack as a deliberate tactic to derail the entire negotiation process, knowing Iran would insist on Lebanon’s inclusion in any talks. But it soon became clear that the Trump administration preferred for hostilities to, at the very least, de-escalate in Lebanon.

With the US insisting that Israel preserves “its right to take all necessary measures in self-defense, at any time, against planned, imminent or ongoing attacks”, it is unclear what kind of ceasefire will be implemented. The most likely outcome is a scenario in which Israeli attacks on Beirut end, while troops continue their skirmishes with Hezbollah in and around the southern villages.

Hezbollah has already insisted the ceasefire must not allow Israeli troops freedom of movement in the south. However, the Lebanese army has reported that there have been “several Israeli attacks” in southern Lebanon since the ceasefire took effect.

Long road ahead

With ten days to seek further agreements, there is still much left to be negotiated. An ultimate goal for the Lebanese government will be to secure full Israeli withdrawal from the territories it has captured along the border.

The Israeli military has taken full control of the first line of villages and towns along the border and is currently sitting a few kilometres inside Lebanese territory. There has been irreparable damage to buildings in the villages it has occupied, leading some to compare the destruction to that seen in Gaza.

But there is no obvious reason for Israel to withdraw. Local media has reported that Israel is insisting on a long-term security zone in Lebanon of up to 0.8km to provide protection from future Hezbollah rocket attacks. A second zone up to the Litani River – around 30km from the border – would remain under Israeli control and would be “gradually” handed back to the Lebanese armed forces.

A 2006 UN resolution demanded the withdrawal of all armed groups, except for the Lebanese army and UN peacekeepers, from this area. However, the resolution has been violated repeatedly both by Israel and Hezbollah. Israel’s defence minister, Israel Katz, has previously stated that this larger security zone is an objective for his country’s military.

There is also no real bargaining chip the Lebanese government can play. The only resistance to Israel’s presence on Lebanese soil in the current conflict is being provided by Hezbollah, which is not represented in the direct talks. And it is clear by now that Israeli officials simply do not trust the Lebanese state’s ability to control or rein in the Iran-backed party.

There are rumours that Israeli and Lebanese officials may be working on a possible peace treaty, emulating the 1978 Camp David accords. These accords allowed Egypt to reclaim the Sinai peninsula in exchange for peace with Israel. A similar treaty could make Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon possible.

But there are three factors that make a peace treaty unlikely. First, the issue of peace with Israel remains highly divisive in Lebanon. In 2022, surveys implied that roughly 17% of Lebanese people supported normalisation with Israel, a relatively high percentage among Arab countries.

After two conflicts since then, it is unclear how these numbers now break down. But recent Shia-dominated protests in Beirut show just how divided the country remains over this issue. At a protest on April 13, demonstrators called Lebanon’s Sunni prime minister, Nawaf Salam, a “Zionist” for agreeing to engage in talks.

Second, it is unclear that the Israelis themselves are looking for peace. There is considerable division among members of the Israeli cabinet on this issue. While the foreign minister, Gideon Saar, has insisted that “peace and normalisation” are desired, the more extreme right-wing minister Bezalel Smotrich has continued to call for the permanent annexation of southern Lebanon.

And third, what remains an insurmountable reality for both countries is Hezbollah itself. The party’s reason for existence is to resist Israeli occupation and it has said over the years that it would only hand over its weapons in exchange for full Israeli withdrawal and if a Lebanese state emerges that showcases an ability to repel Israeli forces on the border.

The fact that the Lebanese armed forces have not entered the current fight with Israel and have evacuated positions in the south ahead of Israeli incursions will not encourage Hezbollah or its base to trust any peace process and lay down its arms peacefully.

All of this leaves Lebanon with few realistic outcomes. What people inside the country now fear is a return to the status quo: a fragile and unobservable ceasefire, Israeli troops stationed in Lebanese territory and a state stuck in gridlock.

Tarek Abou Jaoude receives funding from The Leverhulme Trust.

– ref. Why the ceasefire in Lebanon is unlikely to change much on the ground – https://theconversation.com/why-the-ceasefire-in-lebanon-is-unlikely-to-change-much-on-the-ground-280851

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Matt Jacobsen, Senior Lecturer in Film History in the School of Society and Environment, Queen Mary University of London

Production company Blumhouse has taken a gamble by featuring director Lee Cronin in top billing in his third film’s marketing campaign. Announcing Cronin as a horror auteur, the film’s full title is Lee Cronin’s The Mummy. This is an odd move for a director with only two (admittedly strong) previous features under his belt. It is perhaps a strategy to differentiate the film from the Brendan Fraser-led adventure series or the abysmal Tom Cruise vehicle from 2017.

Lee Cronin’s The Mummy features little that ties it to the long legacy of previous films with the same title. The template for The Mummy was established by Boris Karloff’s looming Imhotep of 1932 and Christopher Lee’s Kharis of 1959, both Ancient Egyptians who return to life after being exhumed by Western archaeologists. Lee Kronin’s The Mummy is less about the plundering of Ancient Egyptian tombs and more about tapping into the elemental fears of parenthood – as Cronin explored to great effect in his previous two films.

Cronin’s first feature was the independent horror film The Hole in the Ground (2019), which was a confident and capable outing. Like several other first-time filmmakers of independent horror film in the 2010s (Mike Flanagan, Corin Hardy, Rose Glass) Cronin was rapidly courted by Hollywood. He was then handed the reins of the most recent instalment of Sam Raimi’s well-loved Evil Dead series. Cronin wrote and directed the savvy, elementally terrifying Evil Dead Rise (2023), which transported that franchise from its familiar cabin-in-the-woods setting to an urban high rise with brilliant results. His third feature isn’t up to par with these, sadly.

In The Mummy’s harrowing opening, every parent’s worst nightmare is realised as nine-year-old Katie is snatched by a stranger who entices her with sweets at the bottom of the family’s garden in Cairo. The action cuts to eight years later and Katie is found alive having been mummified – buried in an Egyptian sarcophagus wrapped in bandages. The returned Katie is erratic, non-verbal and animalistic, needing attentive care.

In the build-up to revelations about what Katie has endured and how she has remained alive, her parents face the challenges of caring for a child with significant physical and behavioural needs. Played differently, this theme could be explored with sensitivity and insight. However, in an early scene that foreshadows the kind of excessive body horror that Cronin is heading towards in the film’s climactic scenes, the parents try to clip Katie’s overgrown toenail, resulting in the gruesome peeling off of her leg’s atrophied skin.

This harrowing scene sets the film’s tone. Cronin is far more interested in pummelling his audience with relentless gore and shallow shock tactics that seriously exploring the story’s themes.

The Mummy revisits familiar tropes from horror classics rather than searching for its own identity. Eventually, and far too conventionally, the film’s focus on the creepy possessed child owes far more to the well-worn tactics of The Exorcist(1973). Like The Exorcist’s Regan, Katie’s body contorts and she becomes vicious and foul-mouthed. Modern special effects bring to life her abject bodily fluids vividly. While Cronin drew from The Exorcist enjoyably in Evil Dead Rise, threats to the American family are rehashed less successfully here.

Horror can be a powerful way to explore themes of parental sacrifice and struggle sensitively and meaningfully. Jennifer Kent’s sublime and influential The Babadook (2014) reworked the conventions of uncanny horror to produce an empathetic and moving depiction of a grieving mother caring for a child with psychological needs. Cronin’s breakout The Hole in the Ground was reminiscent of Kent’s film for its depiction of a mother faced with her son’s increasingly erratic and disturbing behaviour. It is difficult to imagine, however, how a horror film in The Mummy’s mode of intense gore and aggressive violence could bear the weight of the topic.

Troublingly, the film derives spectacle from representing disability with unsettling horror. For instance, when Katie’s wheelchair hovers and clatters its wheels menacingly against the ground, it moves uncomfortably towards the criticism of the wider genre for using disability as shorthand for wickedness and immorality.

The characterisation is also disappointingly facile and shallow. Cronin’s script’s attempts to humanise his traumatised family, before the inevitable frenzy of violent set-pieces, fall flat. This is not helped by contrived moments and one-dimensional performances across the board.

Given the notoriety of prior horror films that present Egyptian history and culture as strange and exotic, playing into anxieties around “foreignness”, we should reasonably expect this film to work hard to avoid stereotypes and cliches. But it doesn’t.

The familiar laying on of sandstorms, hieroglyphics, beetles, scorpions and other tired signifiers of Egyptian culture do little to work against a white western gaze. The casting of Egyptian actors may have offset issues with cultural representation. But the main Egyptian actor plays a barely fleshed-out detective (May Calamawy, Marvel TV’s Moon Knight) who is investigating the mystery of Katie’s disappearance. She also adds little beyond tired police movie tropes.

Cronin’s third film continues the kind of punk rock horror aesthetic that the director is becoming known for. But, it is not a showcase for the evident talent that he displayed in his first two films. In the search for fairground-style gasp-out-loud horror moments, The Mummy becomes unhinged and unruly, descending into a formless barrage of gory body horror and careening violence.

The film is overlong at 133 minutes and outstays its welcome. Despite its length, there is surprisingly little suspense and little that is actually scary. Its sharp shocks would have been better delivered within the tighter structure usually expected from a genre film like this, or the running time could be better employed to build tension and character.

Matt Jacobsen 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. Lee Cronin’s The Mummy – an uninspired, unscary gore fest that demonises disability and leans into stereotypes of Egypt – https://theconversation.com/lee-cronins-the-mummy-an-uninspired-unscary-gore-fest-that-demonises-disability-and-leans-into-stereotypes-of-egypt-280957

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Mara Fischer, PhD Candidate, School of Environment, University of Exeter

Diners may soon need to rethink a staple of the classic English fish supper. The Marine Conservation Society, an environmental charity in the UK, recently downgraded all UK cod stocks and removed them from its list of sustainable seafood.

The Marine Conservation Society’s Good Fish Guide, a tool designed to help consumers make sustainable seafood choices, now lists Atlantic cod from the Arctic, northern shelf, and British seas with the worst possible rating: “avoid”. This reflects severe declines in population status.

The guide recommends that cod lovers seek out fish from further north, from Icelandic waters, where it’s still available in quantity. But the cod served up in most fish and chip shops right now should be considered under threat and avoided, unless specified as Icelandic.

This warning echoes one of the most dramatic collapses in fisheries history, the collapse of Newfoundland cod stocks in Canadian waters in 1992. Despite mounting scientific warnings, fishing continued until stocks crashed, triggering a moratorium that put tens of thousands out of work. More than 30 years later, recovery remains incomplete. The lesson is clear: once a fishery collapses, recovery is slow and uncertain. Yet current trends suggest that we are not heeding the lessons of history.

The rise of cod

The English love affair with cod goes back a long way. Archaeological evidence shows that cod was traded as early as the Viking age, driven in part by the rise of Christianity across Europe. Dried and salted cod – a protein-rich food which could be stored for months without spoiling – offered an alternative to meat on Fridays and during Lent, fuelling the growth of the cod trade.

Even centuries ago, consumer demand may have outstripped local supply. Analysis of fish provisions from the sunken Tudor warship Mary Rose suggests some cod was sourced from distant waters, including Iceland.

This demand intensified with industrialisation. As cities expanded, so did the need for cheap protein. Enter the national dish: fish and chips. Cod was no longer salted or dried but fried. Its dominance was enabled by the introduction of steam-powered trawlers and the use of ice in the late 19th century, which allowed British fleets to fish further and more intensively.

Cod landings subsequently boomed, drawing heavily on stocks in northern Atlantic waters. Following the mid-20th century cod wars, the cod eaten in the UK was increasingly imported from locations such as Iceland, although local fisheries continued to contribute to our beloved fish supper. But poorly managed fisheries, with fishing quotas often set above scientific advice, led to declines in stocks around the UK.

Why are cod not recovering?

Today, cod populations around the UK are so depleted that the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES) has advised zero catches for some stocks for several years. Yet catch limits have consistently been set above scientific advice, for example, allowing catches of around 14,000 tonnes of North Sea cod in 2026. This is no exception as 58% of all UK fishing quotas for 2026 exceed recommendations from ICES.

Even where quotas are reduced, recovery is hampered by how many fisheries operate in practice. Cod are frequently caught in mixed fisheries that primarily target other species such as haddock. However, the use of unselective and destructive gears such as bottom trawls (heavy fishing nets that get dragged along the seabed) means that cod continues to be removed from the ecosystem, even when it is not the intended target.

Climate change adds further pressure. As waters warm, cod are forced northwards or into deeper waters, disrupting ecosystems and fisheries. Warmer seas can also affect reproduction, reducing the survival of eggs and larvae, while changes in ocean currents and availability of prey make it harder for populations to recover.

Together, these factors mean that the outlook for local cod stocks is increasingly dire.

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Read more:
Half the UK’s fish stocks are overfished – but the evidence shows how they can be revived

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The future of cod in the UK

Despite these challenges, cod is likely to remain on the menu. But where it comes from – and how it is managed – matters. Not all cod stocks are in crisis.

Atlantic cod that is caught in Iceland’s waters by long lines and nets, for example, remain a “best choice” on the Good Fish Guide. This reflects the use of fishing gears with lower risk of damage to ocean habitats plus strong management aligned with scientific advice. Similarly, other fisheries show that recovery is possible when limits are set and followed appropriately, although climate change adds increasing uncertainty for many species. In contrast, Atlantic cod caught from stocks in the Arctic, North Sea and other seas around Britain are all labelled “avoid”, regardless of how they are caught.

This makes our roles as consumers that much more complex – and important. Asking where fish comes from and how it was caught can help drive demand towards better managed stocks. If that information is unavailable, switching to alternatives, such as hake, can reduce pressure on depleted cod populations. If you are not sure, check for the stocks and catch methods labelled green on the Good Fish Guide, or that have been awarded a blue tick from the Marine Stewardship Council.

Our long relationship with cod has shaped diets, economies and cultures. But history shows that without stronger alignment between science, policy and informed consumer choice, the future of cod in the UK may be far from guaranteed.

Mara Fischer receives funding from the Convex Seascape Survey.

Ruth H. Thurstan works for The University of Exeter. She receives funding from the Convex Seascape Survey and the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement no. 856488).

– ref. New advice on avoiding British cod: how to make sure your fish and chips are sustainably sourced – https://theconversation.com/new-advice-on-avoiding-british-cod-how-to-make-sure-your-fish-and-chips-are-sustainably-sourced-280667

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Liam Lachs, Postdoctoral Research Associate in Climate Change Ecology and Evolution, Newcastle University

As global warming accelerates, extreme heatwaves are causing widespread death of tropical reef corals. Most corals rely on tiny algae cells living within their tissues that photosynthesise and produce energy. Corals use this energy to build their skeletons that create the reef structure.

In our warming world, evolution of heatwave tolerance will be critical for coral populations to persist. Natural adaptation occurs over many generations and is probably already under way. But these adaptation rates could be outpaced by ocean warming.

Scientists and reef managers are now calling for “assisted evolution” to help accelerate adaptation. One promising approach is selective breeding to enhance heatwave tolerance.

Our new study explores how such interventions could help corals withstand future heatwaves.

By examining the genetic basis of heat tolerance and other important life history traits including growth, energy reserves and reproduction, we reveal both the potential, and limits, of evolutionary adaptation to extreme heat stress. This work focuses on a captive-bred coral population we reared over eight years in Palau, an archipelago in the west Pacific.

The field of quantitative genetics can shed light on complex traits such as growth and heat tolerance, which are typically influenced by hundreds to thousands of genes. These tools can help us maximise evolutionary responses to selection, and have long been used in agriculture and animal breeding – from the crops we eat to the dogs we have at home.

Two key concepts are central. “Genetic merit” describes the value of an individual for breeding, and “genetic correlations” describe how traits share their underlying genetic basis.

Estimating these requires measuring certain traits like heat tolerance, and collecting information about relatedness among individuals, such as full- or half-siblings. But this is difficult in wild corals, which disperse widely and are typically unrelated to neighbouring individuals on the reef.

Our captive population, containing both related and unrelated individuals, provides a rare opportunity to apply quantitative genetics to adult corals.

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Read more:
We’ve bred corals to better tolerate lethal heatwaves, but rapid climate action is still needed to save reefs

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Imagine a major heatwave has caused widespread coral mortality. Which corals should we select for propagation or breeding?

Choosing survivors seems intuitive, but survival alone does not guarantee a genetic predisposition for heat tolerance. A coral could survive by chance – perhaps it was shaded or had higher energy reserves, while all its relatives died. Selecting such individuals for breeding would fail to improve heatwave tolerance of future generations.

However, if entire families tend to survive or perish together, that indicates a genetic basis for heatwave tolerance. Using quantitative genetics in such cases can help make more informed choices.

But if no natural heatwave occurs, how can we proactively identify good corals for management? To do this, we need a proxy: an easy-to-measure trait that is genetically correlated with — and so predicts — an individual’s genetic merit for heatwave survival.

We tested coral heat tolerance under four different temperature exposures, ranging from a month-long exposure of 32.5°C to a rapid heatshock reaching 38.5°C.

These high experimental temperatures go beyond what happens in nature. As the simulated conditions grew hotter, we found ever weaker genetic correlations with marine heatwave survival. These tolerance traits exhibit somewhat distinct underlying biology, so careful trait choice is essential. Testing the wrong proxy traits to identify target corals will fail to deliver any heatwave survival enhancement.

But adaptation involves more than just heat tolerance. Individual growth, energy reserves and reproduction are all critical for healthy populations. If enhancing heat tolerance comes at the cost of traits like these, it would undermine population viability.

Encouragingly, we found no detectable negative genetic correlations among any of the traits we studied.

Matching future stress

To explore how assisted evolution could enhance heat tolerance over time, we developed a computer simulation.

This showed us it was possible to reach tolerance levels capable of withstanding future heatwaves, but only under certain conditions.

Selection needed to directly target long-term heatwave survival. This meant choosing only the top 5% most tolerant corals as parents for breeding, and it had to be repeated over multiple generations.

But such intense selection introduces other challenges, such as maintaining genetic diversity and scaling up selection efforts. If we need to breed from 50 corals to maintain genetic diversity and do only top-5% selection, then we need to test 1,000 corals. That becomes logistically very challenging.

Our modelling results show assisted evolution can deliver meaningful gains in coral heatwave tolerance. But success will depend on careful trait choice and strong, sustained selection.

Reducing greenhouse gas emissions remains essential to mitigate future warming. Alongside this, strategic management of local ecosystems — from conservation to assisted evolution — will be crucial to help key species adapt and persist in our rapidly warming world.

The authors would like to acknowledge contributions to this research from Alistair J. Wilson at the University of Exeter.

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

– ref. How accelerating evolution could help corals survive future heatwaves – new study – https://theconversation.com/how-accelerating-evolution-could-help-corals-survive-future-heatwaves-new-study-280487