Category: The Conversation – UK

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Hussein Boon, Principal Lecturer, Music, University of Westminster

Voice cloning technology platforms like ElevenLabs allow anyone to replicate a voice using just a few seconds of audio, for a small fee. These technologies are reshaping cultural and artistic expression.

In 2023, Canadian musician Grimes released a clone of her voice, saying that “it’s cool to be fused with a machine”. Similarly, American composer Holly Herndon launched Holly+ in 2021 as a voice tool that sings back music using a “distinctive processed voice”.

These female-led examples demonstrate working with the creative challenges of voice technologies, and in some ways, they’re nothing new: electronic music pioneer and composer Suzanne Ciani developed a technological approach decades ago to incorporate a male persona, named “Steve”, into her compositions when a male voice was required.

Voice-swapping technologies are also used by some male producers to present as female artists. British researcher and musician Helen Reddington has observed that: “Like the male gaze, the male ear is hidden and its power exercised behind the scenes.”

Reddington wrote that in 2018 in relation to the way that male writer/producers use female singers to reach an audience. But applied to AI, this points to a cultural dynamic where voice manipulation, as an extension of the male gaze and ear, may also reflect deeper desires to control female identities – especially in music, where voice is central to emotional expression and identity.

Earlier this month, singer Jorja Smith accused producer Harrison Walker of using AI technology to clone her vocals for his single, I Run. Walker said: “It shouldn’t be any secret that I used AI-assisted processing to transform solely my voice.” But Smith’s record label responded saying the producers producer and his distributors seemed to revel in the resulting public confusion.

AI voice technologies are a form of information technology. However, once a voice is rendered as information and is simulated, it will have “lost” its physical form. The combination of disembodied voice and the quality of its simulation can make it easier for people to think of computers as being like a human. This means that a person will be heard whether a machine or human speaks. It is this connection to a person that voice cloning disrupts.

British AI artist Oliver McCann, known as imoliver, openly admits to having “no musical talent at all … I can’t sing, I can’t play instruments, and I have no musical background at all”. Yet through AI, he has developed songs that foreground a female persona. Likewise, the eminent producer Timbaland has invented a pink-haired female artist, TaTa, in a new genre he refers to as a-pop or artificial pop. But does a creator’s gender matter in the development of AI artists and wider fanbases?

Noonoouri, a digital avatar signed by Warner Music Central Europe in 2024, though not completely AI-generated, is a composite of digital tools, presented as a human-made young female fashionista turned pop star. The Instagram feed for Noonoouri shows everyday activities – eating pasta, throwing peace signs, even signalling support for Black Lives Matter. The avatar’s appearance is malleable. But these gestures and modified appearance, while seemingly empathetic, may be more performative than transformative.

Noonoouri’s creator, Jeorg Zuber, used his own voice – digitally feminised – and motion capture of his movements to animate the avatar. It is Zuber’s embodiment of femininity that is being portrayed here, ultimately to produce a pliable brand ambassador. As Warner’s senior A&R manager, Marec Lerche, has stated: “We can change her style in a minute … we can make her fly if we want.”

As British author Laura Bates, founder of the Everyday Sexism Project, has pointed out, apps used to develop these female avatars and characters rely on a misogynistic idea of “what a woman is and should be. She’ll never disagree with you, she’ll never answer back”. It is not AI doing the impersonation, but the human company.

Technology may blur boundaries, but it also reveals who holds the power. When male creators use AI to simulate female voices and personas, are they expanding artistic possibilities or perpetuating a new form of gender appropriation, ventriloquism and misogyny? One call to action to counter the growth of the manosphere is the increased presence of girl voices to tackle misogyny. Yet voice simulation technologies may undo this.

In the age of AI, impersonation takes on new meaning. When mediated by technologies largely controlled by cisgender men and tech platform companies, female impersonation risks becoming a tool of dominance rather than expression. The question is no longer just about artistic freedom – it’s about who gets to speak, and who is being spoken through.

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This article is part of our State of the Arts series. These articles tackle the challenges of the arts and heritage industry – and celebrate the wins, too.

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Hussein Boon 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. When AI recreates the female voice, it also rewrites who gets heard – https://theconversation.com/when-ai-recreates-the-female-voice-it-also-rewrites-who-gets-heard-268257

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Eoin McLaughlin, Professor in Economics, University College Cork

History does not repeat itself, but it rhymes – and economic history is no exception. In 1964, a Labour government came to power in the UK with a pledge to curb inflation and to deliver growth. The growth plans were short lived. In 2024, in a cost-of-living crisis, Labour again won an election with a promise to “kick-start economic growth”. Only 18 months in, and plans have stalled again.

Weak economic growth has led to questions about whether the UK is once again the “sick man of Europe”. This echoes an earlier trope, the “British disease”, which described Britain’s poor economic performance from the 1950s to the 1970s. Compared to other European countries, Britain saw low investment, low productivity and low economic growth.

The British disease term peaked in the late 1970s, then slipped out of use as the country’s economic performance improved from the 1980s through to the early 2000s. But Britain’s more recent collapse in productivity growth has led to a new term: the “productivity puzzle”. Perhaps, instead of a puzzle, this should be understood as relapse into the old British disease.

In essence, the British disease described the relative decline of a nation that had led the world during the industrial revolution. It was the wealthiest country in the world for much of the 19th century, but by the early 20th century it had been overtaken by the US. This stemmed from Britain’s slow uptake of the innovations of the second industrial revolution (chiefly cars, chemicals and aerospace).

Britain underperformed in the 1950s and 1960s and its growth performance was sluggish compared with countries in western Europe, which soon overtook Britain.

In the 1960s, a team of economists from the US and Canada studied the British economy for US thinktank the Brookings Institution. Their 1968 report, Britain’s Economic Prospects, concluded that British growth was weak due to low investment and productivity.

Part of problem was the high level of government intervention in the economy after the second world war. The government was heavily involved in industrial policy but had a poor track record of picking winners. The history of British industrial policy is littered with high-profile failures.

In search of a remedy

Was there a cure for the British disease? Economists have disagreed over the past few decades. Writing in 1977, British economist Henry Phelps Brown observed that North Sea oil and gas production provided a temporary treatment through net energy exports.

On the other hand, another British economist, Nick Crafts, argued in 2011 that the British disease was cured by the increase in competition that came from joining the EU, and the role that Britain played in developing the single market.

Fellow British academic and economist George Allen argued that the only cure was a complete overhaul of UK institutions, particularly universities, where business and science subjects had been neglected in favour of classics. Now, of course, business and science subjects are now more widely taught.

Even if these cures were effective in the past, they are not effective today. The UK has left the EU and North Sea oil and gas has an uncertain future with new exploration actively discouraged.

Reform of the university sector is necessary to prevent Britain falling further behind. The country continues to trail its peers when it comes to the number of engineering students. If these are the solutions that cured the British disease in the past, they cannot vanquish the resurgent strain today.

How GDP growth has slowed:

Britain’s economic growth has experienced a slowdown since its heyday of the 1950s and 1960s. From 1992 until 2007, GDP per capita growth averaged 2.34% per year. Since 2008 this has fallen to 0.46% per year. Growth has effectively flatlined since 2023. A key factor has been the role of Brexit – a recent estimate suggested that the UK’s GDP has been reduced by between 6% and 8%.

The disease is no longer confined to Britain. From the 1970s, most developed countries also experienced a slowdown in economic growth. Similarly, the productivity puzzle is also occurring in other comparable countries.

One of the biggest areas where Europe as whole, and the UK in particular, are falling behind is in energy. The UK now leads in terms of the most expensive energy for industrial use in Europe. Urgent reforms are needed if the country is to avoid complete deindustrialisation.

The UK’s high industrial energy costs:

One widely touted panacea for the productivity puzzle is artificial intelligence (AI). However, two recent Nobel prize-winning economists have offered very different assessments of AI’s potential for productivity, ranging from a modest 0.53% increase over a decade to estimates several times larger.

In the meantime, there is no longer a solitary “sick man of Europe” but rather a malaise affecting much of the continent. Short-term remedies may be available, but over the long term, radical action and a renewed understanding of the causes of the disease are needed. The metaphor of acute illness may itself be misleading. Rather than a condition that can be cured, the disease resembles a chronic disorder that must be managed.

A note of caution from the insights of the economist Mancur Olson is also evident in the UK experience: when industrial policy becomes captured by interest groups, protection and subsidy displace innovation and competition, entrenching economic stagnation rather than correcting it.

Eoin McLaughlin 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. Whether it’s a ‘productivity puzzle’ or the ‘British disease’, the UK economy has been underperforming for decades – https://theconversation.com/whether-its-a-productivity-puzzle-or-the-british-disease-the-uk-economy-has-been-underperforming-for-decades-272480

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Daniel Kelly, Senior Lecturer in Biochemistry, Sheffield Hallam University

For more than 80 years, men have been told that testosterone helps prostate cancer grow. But a very different picture has emerged over the past two decades.

The prostate is a small gland that sits just below the bladder. Its job is to produce the fluid that helps transport sperm, and it relies heavily on testosterone to do so. In fact, the prostate is one of the body parts most affected by testosterone.

All prostate cells, whether healthy or cancerous, contain androgen receptors. These are the molecular switches that initiate testosterone’s action inside cells. When testosterone binds to these receptors, it helps the prostate grow and function normally.

This close hormonal control is important, but it also sets the stage for one of the most enduring assumptions in men’s health: because testosterone stimulates normal prostate growth, it must also stimulate cancer growth.

This belief rested largely on the Nobel prize-winning research of Charles Huggins in the 1940s. He found that prostate cancer shrank when testosterone levels were lowered and accelerated when testosterone was added, via injections.

Lowering testosterone levels, known as androgen deprivation therapy, became the standard treatment for advanced prostate cancer. It still is. Removing testosterone often shrinks tumours, slows disease progression and improves survival.

This belief became deeply embedded in medical practice, shaping decades of caution around testosterone replacement therapy for hypogonadism (testosterone deficienecy) because of fears it could trigger or drive prostate cancer.

Changing the narrative

In the early 1990s, Harvard urologist and testosterone pioneer Abraham Morgentaler began to challenge this view. He pointed out that some of the early research relied heavily on the response of just one patient.

In his clinic, he saw that men with very low testosterone still developed prostate cancer that was often more aggressive, while men receiving testosterone therapy did not show the expected rise in cancer rates.

This led to the proposal of the “saturation model”, which suggests that prostate tissue is sensitive to testosterone only at very low levels. Once androgen receptors are saturated, additional testosterone has little further effect.

At the same time, it was being shown that chronically low testosterone was associated with more aggressive prostate cancer, further challenging the idea that low testosterone is inherently protective.

Recent medical studies now show that testosterone treatment is safe. In multiple high-quality studies, testosterone therapy in men with low testosterone levels does not increase the risk of prostate cancer compared to men who didn’t receive the treatment. New long-term research even suggests that men whose testosterone levels are properly restored and monitored by doctors may actually have lower cancer rates.

But what about men who already have prostate cancer? This is where the discussion often becomes confused. For men with active prostate cancer, particularly early-stage disease, lowering testosterone remains an effective treatment. So how can this paradox exist with evidence that normal testosterone levels are not harmful?

The answer lies in how prostate cells react to different amounts of testosterone. When testosterone levels are very low, cancer cells can adjust by finding new ways to grow and survive. They become super-sensitive to any testosterone signals they can detect.

This is why many men eventually develop castration-resistant prostate cancer, where the disease progresses and can become more aggressive despite near-zero testosterone. Higher levels of testosterone may push these cancer cells into a more stable, slower growth state and, in some situations, may even destabilise them, promoting cell death.

Striking reversal

This discovery has led to a surprising change in treatment. In carefully chosen patients who are closely watched by doctors, testosterone is now being given back after prostate cancer treatment without increasing the chance of the cancer returning.

Even more surprisingly, doctors are testing a new approach in certain men with prostate cancer called bipolar androgen therapy, which switches testosterone levels between very low and very high. The idea is to use testosterone itself as a weapon to confuse and kill cancer cells that have learned to survive without it.

This is one of the most striking reversals in modern cancer treatment. Testosterone has shifted from a presumed villain feared to ignite prostate cancer, to a hormone whose effects are more complex than once believed, and even a possible ally in the fight against prostate cancer.

This evolution is finally reaching medical practice and drug regulation. On December 10, just one month after the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced the removal of black-box warnings from oestrogen products, the FDA organised an expert panel to consider whether longstanding warnings around testosterone use are similarly out of date. A large part of these discussions is about prostate safety and reflects how far the evidence has shifted.

None of this means testosterone replacement therapy – for men with low testosterone levels – is completely without risk. Men starting treatment should still get proper medical checks, have their prostate monitored regularly, and make decisions after talking things through with their doctor.

But the science has changed. The old belief that testosterone therapy increases prostate cancer or makes it worse is no longer backed up by modern research.

For men who genuinely have low testosterone, this change is important. It can remove unnecessary obstacles to getting care and gives them more safe, science-backed treatment options, which helps improve men’s health overall.

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

– ref. How testosterone went from prostate cancer villain to potential ally – https://theconversation.com/how-testosterone-went-from-prostate-cancer-villain-to-potential-ally-266519

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Magnus Marsden, Professor of Social Anthropology, University of Sussex

The Taliban’s morality police recently summoned four young men in the city of Herat in western Afghanistan for a “rehabilitation programme”. Their offence: “imitating actors” and “promoting foreign culture”. The young men had formed what they called the “Thomas Shelby Group”, after Cillian Murphy’s character in the popular TV drama Peaky Blinders – and the week before their detention they’d been observed strolling confidently around Herat dressed in black three-piece suits and leather gloves, smoking cigarettes.

The Taliban are well known for actively policing what they refer to as “Afghan cultural and Islamic traditions”. And the morality police’s role is to ensure the “promotion of virtue and prevention of vice”, according to the Sharia, Islam’s legal code – as interpreted by the Taliban.

The Taliban also emphasise their role in preserving the purity and dignity of their conception of Afghan culture. In recent weeks, videos on social media have depicted the morality police in Kabul ordering shopkeepers to remove billboards that include English terms written in Persian. They are apparently seen as enabling the influence of foreign values on Afghan culture.

The detention of these young men for promoting foreign culture is but one instance of the Taliban seeking to enforce a purified form of Afghan culture on people in the country in recent months.

At first glance it may seem surprising to hear, not only of an interest in Peaky Blinders in Afghanistan, but also of young men in one of the country’s most historic cities going to considerable lengths to procure and wear the show’s signature outfits.

But the fact is that despite the Taliban’s best efforts to depict Afghan culture as static and traditional, there has always been a connection and awareness in Afghanistan of what is going on culturally in the rest of the world. Those who think of Afghanistan as backward and isolated culturally are very mistaken.

Much recent scholarship demonstrates that Afghanistan is best understood as a place shaped through historic and ongoing global circulations of people, things and ideas.

Cultural exchange

Far from being tradition-bound tribespeople who take pride in only wearing local clothing, from the days when Silk Road merchants moved goods between Europe and Asia, people in Afghanistan have long incorporated global fashion trends into their own ways of dressing.

In the early 20th century, Afghanistan’s ruler Emir Habibullah Khan, who ruled from 1901 to 1919, introduced a uniform for members of his court based on styles of dress popular in British India.

In the era leading up to the second world war, urban people effortlessly adopted styles they encountered through foreign visitors and residents in the increasingly international city of Kabul. Many who travelled also brought home new trends from across Asia, Europe and America.

Despite the obvious displeasure shown by the country’s religious authorities, in this period the neatly trimmed “French cut” beard became popular among Kabul’s intelligentsia.

This culture and fashion exchange was not a one-way process. Clothes designed in Afghanistan played a significant role in shaping fashion trends in some of the world’s most cosmopolitan cities, including Paris, Los Angeles and London.

For much of the 20th century, the thirst for fur coats in Europe and America was quenched through the import from Afghanistan of Persian lamb pelts from the prized Karakul sheep.

The popularity of Karakul fur expanded in Britain after Nasr Allah Khan, a son of Afghanistan’s Emir Abdur Rahman Khan (who ruled from 1880 to 1901), presented Queen Victoria with a gift of 80 pelts during his 1894 visit to Britain.

Artisans in Afghanistan knew how to turn the pelts of Karakul lambs into a soft and glossy fur-like material. Millions of skins were used to make coats for sale across Europe and North America until as recently as the 1980s. These included the famed “Afghans”, beloved of hippies in Europe and North America in the 1960s.

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Read more:
Friday essay: how ‘Afghan’ coats left Kabul for the fashion world and became a hippie must-have

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Popular culture

In this way, culture in Afghanistan has been shaped by the circulation of people, capital, things and ideas – and this is embedded in the country’s social and cultural fabric. Even a movement as assertive as the Taliban will confront obstacles in its attempts to limit this circulation and impose rigid and bounded ideas of Afghan culture on the country’s diverse and globally oriented population.

A good example of how this attempt to control Afghan culture was subverted during the Taliban’s previous period of rule (1996–2001) was the craze for the Hollywood blockbuster, Titanic. Cinema, television and music were banned (as were barber’s shops).

But underground video shops flourished, and Titanic became a popular symbol to show that one was aware of the wider world. Some bakeries in Kabul are reported to have produced cakes decorated to resemble the ill-fated ocean liner for consumption by the city’s globally connected residents on occasions such as birthdays and weddings.

The young men whom the Taliban deemed to be in need of rehabilitation are hardly isolated mavericks. They represent a key facet of culture in Afghanistan – a fluidity born of, and informed by, the country’s historic global connectedness.

This aspect of the country’s cultural dynamics has long interacted in complex ways with attempts to construct, maintain, preserve and purify what the authorities see as “tradition”. The four young men got away with a warning.

Like the Titanic cakes of the 1990s, the Peaky Blinders outfits are a way of making a statement that challenges the Taliban’s understanding of “Afghan culture” without being enough of an offence to land their wearers in serious trouble.

Magnus Marsden has received funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC).

– ref. The Taliban may not like Peaky Blinders, but its Afghan fans are part of a long history of cultural engagement with the world – https://theconversation.com/the-taliban-may-not-like-peaky-blinders-but-its-afghan-fans-are-part-of-a-long-history-of-cultural-engagement-with-the-world-272084

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Vahid Vahidinasab, Professor and Chair in Sustainability, Salford Business School, University of Salford

The amount of renewable energy produced around the world is increasingly exceeding demand – particularly from wind and solar sources. This presents a significant challenge when limited grid capacity and insufficient energy storage mean this clean power has to be curtailed, wasting the excess generation. The scale of this problem is substantial.

In the UK, for example, wind farms were forced to curtail 4.3 terawatt (trillion watt) hours of surplus energy – about 5% of their annual output – in 2023. This would have been enough to power 1.5 million homes for the year, so failing to harness it cost bill payers roughly £300 million and left some energy providers facing costly constraint payments.

Similar patterns are emerging across Europe, North America, Australia and other regions rapidly expanding their renewable capacity, where grid infrastructure has struggled to keep pace.

But on the Isle of Wight, off England’s south coast, a trial is under way that, in years to come, could help resolve this energy conundrum. It relies on “bidirectional charging” – the idea that electric cars don’t just have to be energy users; they can be energy storers and providers too.

By 2040, around 36 million electric cars and vans are expected on UK roads. Already, current models can store enough energy to power a typical UK household for between seven and ten days. All the anticipated electric vehicle (EV) batteries by 2040 would offer around 2.5 terawatt hours of storage – enough to store much of the UK’s surplus solar power generated at bright summer lunchtimes, or the excess wind on stormy winter nights.

For most of the time, of course, (about 95%, on average), these cars won’t be using any of that energy because they are parked. Our technology could put this EV downtime to use storing and recirculating surplus renewable energy.

EV owners won’t just be doing this out of the goodness of their hearts. It would also mean they could buy electricity at cheaper, off‑peak times, then store it for their own household use in peak times. A new study from the University of Michigan finds that vehicle‑to‑home (V2H) charging could save drivers up to US$5,600 (£4,200) over their EV’s lifetime – as much as 90% of its total charging costs.

Energy companies and grid operators also stand to gain. One analysis estimates that European power systems could save up to €4 billion (£3.5 billion) through the introduction of vehicle-to-grid (V2G) and other smart‑charging schemes.

Two-way technology

Most EVs and chargers currently only move electricity one way – from source to car. But at the Centre for Self-Sustaining Systems and Societies, our focus is on two-way technology that enables energy to flow between EVs and homes, hotels, businesses, as well as the National Grid itself. This is complicated technology – not least because the form of electricity in which batteries store electricity, direct current (DC), needs converting into alternating current (AC) before it can be pumped back into a home, hotel or grid.

EVs will also need adapting to support bidirectional charging – currently, only a few models offer this capability. Widespread adoption will require all EVs to be factory-designed with integrated bidirectional hardware, supported by clear regulatory standards and strong market incentives.

On the Isle of Wight, our technology – part of the Europe-wide DriVe2X programme – is testing four bidirectional chargers at two hotels and a visitor boat mooring. One reason the Isle of Wight was selected for this test is its annual influx of tourists.

The island attracts more than 2 million visitors each year, meaning there are major fluctuations in demand for power between its low and peak tourism seasons. But many visitors bring EVs with them, and these could potentially store and circulate some of the extra power the island requires during their stay.

Our test drivers (a mixture of visitors and local residents) are able to schedule their departure times and minimum battery levels, so that our bidirectional charging system can store and circulate energy while retaining enough charge for the EV’s next trip. This addresses a fear that is sometimes expressed about this new technology – the risk of discovering a flat-battery just as you wish to set off on your journey.

The trial, which is moving into its final stage, has been given a community-first mindset through our local partner Future Isle of Wight, a community-owned company that is helping to shape how this technology can be scaled in a way that benefits local residents.

Across Europe, other DriVe2X test sites are exploring potential two-way energy hotspots. At Porto Airport in Maia, Portugal, a long-stay car park is testing how this technology can manage waves of passengers flowing in and out of an airport terminal. In Hungary’s capital Budapest, vehicle-to-home technology is being tested in a number of smart homes.

While there are now more than 100 V2G test projects around the world, they remain small in scale. Key challenges include developing affordable smart chargers and hassle-free grid connection regulations, as well as protecting consumer confidence on issues such as battery warranties, privacy, and fair payment for the power their EVs provide.

Nonetheless, I believe bidirectional EVs could move from niche pilots to everyday life within the next two decades. In July, the UK government suggested that households and businesses could be providing the country with up to 75 gigawatts of flexible power by 2050 – of which more than half (40 gigawatts) would come from EVs. That is roughly the output of 40 large nuclear reactors – enough to power Britain’s total electricity consumption during a peak winter period.

But this future depends on daily life working smoothly. EV drivers will need to wake up with enough charge, understand when their vehicle is powering the house, and see they are saving money – all without worrying about battery wear, confusing markets or privacy risks. We hope our Isle of Wight trial can play a small but important role in realising this energy-efficient future.

Vahid Vahidinasab receives funding for the DriVe2X research and innovation project, which is co-funded by the European Commission and UKRI under grant numbers 101056934 and 10055673, respectively.

– ref. Two-way electric vehicle charging at scale could stop renewable energy being wasted – here’s how it works – https://theconversation.com/two-way-electric-vehicle-charging-at-scale-could-stop-renewable-energy-being-wasted-heres-how-it-works-272373

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Lee Mattocks, Senior Lecturer, Fashion, Knitwear and Textile design, Nottingham Trent University

With January sales around the corner, another flood of unwanted clothes risks drowning our wardrobes and the planet.

The average person now discards around 16kg of textile waste annually and a mountain of fabric equivalent to thousands of landfills accumulates each year.

But the EU is bringing in new laws surrounding fast fashion. More responsibility is being put on manufacturers to reduce material waste and it’s becoming more important to invest in clothes we’ll cherish.

That’s why the emotional value of fashion plays a crucial role in creating a more sustainable wardrobe.

By understanding why we keep certain garments, we can extend their lifespans and rethink sustainability. Designing fashion to be emotionally durable and less likely to be dumped will not just benefit personal connections to cherished items but also the brand’s bottom line because companies will be fined for non-compliance with regulations (for example, for the destruction of unsold textiles).

Emotional attachments could be as influential as sustainability regulations if they help us make more informed choices about what’s in our wardrobes.

After years of working in fashion, experiencing sample sales and loving the buzz of the Christmas bargain, I had my own mountain of clothes to confront during an unexpected house move last Christmas. Overwhelmed by clutter and house full of garments that didn’t “feel” good anymore I began Welcome to Our Wardrobe, a project exploring the reasons why people keep some items for longer than others.

Fashion professionals, designers, psychotherapists and everyday wearers contributed to my studies and reflected on the garments they kept the longest and shared personal stories and revelations through social media.

Each garment became a portal to an often candid story and an opportunity for self rediscovery through these hanged and folded moments. Very few items survived my own wardrobe study as most were redirected to charity shops after realising they were impulse buys or mostly ill-considered purchases that didn’t meet my needs. Most garments held strong family connections or were linked to a personal memory.

My own worn out but emotionally durable t-shirt held memories of a friendship that felt like a hug on those relentless days, reminding me my friend is always there at the end of the phone. Reflecting on these attachments shifted my own shopping habits. By focusing on meaningful purchases and connections rather than just this year’s must-have colour or trouser style, I felt better too.

Fast fashion, slow attachments

It’s not just about making clothes that last but about making clothes that matter. Jonathan Chapman, a leading professor of sustainable design, puts it simply: “We are consumers of meaning, not matter.” His theory of emotionally durable design suggests waste is not merely material problem but a symptom of a missing personal connection.

When our clothes have a deep emotional resonance they often endure. One participant reflected on a handmade gifted jumper that initially made her feel “too fat” and “too old” – she discovered she still loved it because it symbolised trust and important connections to a meaningful past relationship. Once she acknowledged her attachment to this jumper, she decided to wear it more often. That extended the garment’s life.

Otto von Busch, a Swedish professor of integrated design argues in his book The Psychopolitics of Fashion that clothing functions as a psychological tool through which people express identity, negotiate belonging and make sense of who they are.

Fashion designer and author Orsola de Castro co-founded Fashion Revolution, a fashion activism movement, in the wake of the 2013 Rana Plaza factory collapse in Bangladesh which killed more than 1,100 garment workers.

Fashion Revolution not only advocates for greater transparency in the fashion system but also endorses “radical mending” – the treasuring, reuse, rewearing and repairing of favourite items – to promote slow fashion. According to De Castro’s philosophy, the more we wear a garment, the more it becomes part of our lives.

Her call to mend and care for clothes while resisting fast fashion trends and production cycles echoes the findings of Welcome to Our Wardrobe. My research shows that inherited, classic or custom-handcrafted clothes were the most enduring pieces, not swayed by fast fashion or new sustainability strategies. Emotional attachment relies on items being present for a reason and not just a season. That can transform clothes into treasures that can be passed down through the generations.

To reduce consumption and encourage emotionally durable design, it’s important to consider how attachment between customers and clothing can increase a garment’s lifespan. Emotional durability may even underpin future legislation if adopted as a design principle rather than a post-purchase phenomenon.

Perhaps you own a top you just can’t throw away or a dress worn to a milestone moment that represents a happy memory. These garments often survive not just because they were well crafted but because they hold some emotional resonance relating to love, connection, comfort and friendship.

Reflecting on the clothes that we already treasure is the first step towards slowing down fashion. By understanding why certain pieces endure, the wardrobe begins to hold more meaning than just an unsustainable dumping ground for passing trends.

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Lee Mattocks runs Mattocks, a small sustainable leather bag company.

– ref. Treasure the emotional connections to the clothes you have and style could be a whole lot more sustainable – https://theconversation.com/treasure-the-emotional-connections-to-the-clothes-you-have-and-style-could-be-a-whole-lot-more-sustainable-270927

Source: The Conversation – UK – By David C. Gaze, Senior Lecturer in Chemical Pathology, University of Westminster

A marathon pushes the human body close to its limits. Legs tire, lungs burn and the heart works hard for hours on end. For years, that strain has raised an uncomfortable question: does running 26 miles actually damage the heart?

The strongest reassurance comes from a new ten-year study of 152 recreational marathon runners, published in the journal Jama Cardiology. Researchers checked the runners’ hearts before and after races, then tracked their heart health over the next decade.

They found that although the heart’s right ventricle – the chamber that pumps blood to the lungs – showed a short-term drop in pumping ability straight after races, it recovered within days. Crucially, over the ten-year follow-up period, there was no sign of lasting damage to heart function in these runners.

This finding is important because earlier studies had raised worries that long-distance exercise might damage the heart. Much of that concern came from blood tests taken after endurance events.

After a marathon, many runners show higher levels of a substance called troponin in their blood. Troponin is released when heart muscle cells are put under strain.

Doctors normally use troponin levels to help diagnose a heart attack. So seeing these levels rise after a race can look worrying and sometimes make it harder to tell whether someone is having a genuine medical emergency.

When troponin levels mislead

But context matters. In hospitals, raised troponin levels are only judged alongside symptoms, heart tests and scans. After long-distance endurance exercise, troponin often rises even when there is no sign of blocked arteries, a heart attack or lasting heart damage.

Studies show that many healthy marathon runners have troponin levels above the usual medical cut-offs after a race, despite normal heart scans and no symptoms of a heart attack.

This rise seems to reflect temporary strain on heart muscle cells, rather than permanent damage. Heart scans using ultrasound or MRI show that these changes are usually linked to short-term changes in how the heart fills or pumps blood, which settles with rest.

The right side of the heart seems particularly affected during marathons. It pumps blood through the lungs, where pressure rises sharply during sustained exercise. Several studies have shown that the right ventricle becomes temporarily enlarged and less efficient immediately after long races, before returning to normal.

What the new ten-year outcome study adds is reassurance that these repeated short-term stresses do not inevitably lead to long-term damage in most recreational runners. Over a decade of marathon running, heart structure and pumping ability remained within normal ranges.

That does not mean endurance running is without risk. Marathon running can expose hidden heart disease, particularly coronary artery disease. A tragic example was reported recently in the UK press, where a 42-year-old runner with chest pain was initially reassured and later died from a heart attack. In that case, the problem was not exercise-related troponin release but underlying coronary disease that was not identified as the cause of the elevated troponin.

This distinction is vital. Chest pain, breathlessness or collapse during or after exercise cannot be dismissed simply because someone is fit. In people with symptoms, raised troponin levels usually signal a very different process than the benign rises seen after a marathon in otherwise well runners.

Deaths during marathons are very rare. Large studies suggest there is about one death for every 100,000 runners, and this risk has fallen over time as medical support at races has improved. When a sudden cardiac arrest does happen, it is usually linked to an undiagnosed heart condition, rather than damage caused by running itself.

Very high-level endurance exercise

There is still a debate about very high-level endurance exercise. While most recreational runners show no lasting harm, some studies have found signs of scarring in the heart – called fibrosis – in athletes who have trained at very high volumes for many years.

Heart MRI scans have shown that many older endurance athletes have small areas of scar tissue in their heart muscle. In the recent Ventoux study – named after Mont Ventoux, one of the toughest climbs in the Tour de France – researchers looked at 106 male cyclists and triathletes over 50. Almost half of these athletes had detectable scarring, compared with very few in non-athletic participants.

This scarring was linked to a higher chance of abnormal heart rhythms, including some that can be deadly. But serious problems are still rare, and results differ a lot between people, suggesting factors like genetics, training intensity and how long someone has trained all matter.

Taken together, the evidence suggests that for most recreational marathon runners, the heart adapts rather than deteriorates. Temporary changes after races and short-term rises in troponin reflect stress, not injury.

Being fit doesn’t mean you can’t develop heart disease, and test results only make sense when considered alongside symptoms and medical checks. The marathon runner’s heart is strong, but it still needs careful assessment.

For most recreational runners, the evidence is reassuring. The heart adapts to marathon running rather than breaking down under it. Those temporary spikes in troponin after races reflect hard work, not damage, and decade-long studies confirm that with proper training, the heart stays healthy.

But fitness isn’t immunity. Chest pain, unusual breathlessness or feeling faint during exercise always needs proper medical attention. The marathon runner’s heart is resilient – but it still deserves respect and careful monitoring.

David C. Gaze 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. Do marathons damage your heart? Decade-long study finally settles the debate – https://theconversation.com/do-marathons-damage-your-heart-decade-long-study-finally-settles-the-debate-272371

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Marcelo R Santos, Senior Lecturer in Macroeconomics, University of Glasgow

When people talk about tax fairness, the focus is almost always on income. How much the rich earn, how heavily that income should be taxed, and how to make sure lower earners are protected. But there is an older idea that is quietly starting to get attention again. What if taxes were based not on what people earn, but on what they spend?

This is more than a technical tweak. A progressive consumption tax – where people who spend more face higher effective rates – can behave very differently from a progressive income tax. And according to economic research I co-authored with fellow researcher Carlos da Costa based on life-cycle behaviour, the consequences may be surprisingly large.

At first glance, taxing income and taxing consumption might look similar. If you earn £40,000 and spend £30,000, you could imagine taxing either amount and raising similar revenue. But people do not live one year at a time. They earn very unevenly over their lives – lower wages early in their career, higher wages later – and they tend to save in good years to stabilise their spending in leaner ones.

This basic feature of real life makes the choice between taxing income or taxing consumption much more important than it seems.

Progressive income taxes increase the marginal tax rate (the percentage applied within someone’s highest tax bracket) as earnings rise. This is designed to redistribute income towards lower earners. But it also creates an unintended effect: people are discouraged from working more in the years when they are most productive because those extra earnings are heavily taxed.

Over a lifetime, this discouragement flattens people’s earning patterns and reduces saving. When lots of people make these choices at once, the whole economy ends up with less investment, lower productivity and slower wage growth. These long-run effects are invisible in year-to-year statistics, but they matter greatly for overall prosperity.

What a progressive consumption tax does differently

A progressive consumption tax takes a different approach. It doesn’t penalise earning more in a particular year. Instead, it taxes people according to how much they spend overall. Someone who earns £70,000 but saves £25,000 would face a lower tax bill than someone who earns £50,000 and spends it all.

This creates an incentive to save in high-earning years. While higher saving might sound like it would slow the economy, in the long run it does the opposite. Saving provides the funds that businesses use to invest in new equipment, technology and expansion.

Over time, this raises productivity and – crucially – pushes wages up.
This mechanism is particularly important for lower-income households, who depend almost entirely on their earnings rather than capital income (from things like property) or investment returns.

Our analysis suggests that switching from progressive income taxation to progressive consumption taxation could make households noticeably better off. This could be roughly equivalent to a permanent 10% increase in living standards as a result of rising wages and families being better protected when their incomes fluctuate.

A policy reform that both strengthens the economy and improves financial security is rare. From our analysis, it looks like this approach could do both.

A common concern is that consumption taxes are regressive. A flat tax on spending would indeed fall more heavily on low-income households who spend all or almost all of the money they have coming in. But progressivity can be built into a consumption-based system.

In fact, our work shows that a progressive consumption tax can redistribute as much as a progressive income tax, but with fewer of the distortions that slow growth.

Put simply, it is possible to design a consumption-based system that is both fair and efficient. And it wouldn’t necessarily require radical reform. It may sound like a major overhaul, but many of the benefits could be achieved with practical, incremental reforms.

One example is income averaging. Instead of taxing each year’s earnings in isolation, consumption tax could be based on a multi-year average. The idea is that a person’s average income over time is a good proxy for how much they consume, since people tend to smooth spending even when earnings fluctuate.

Under this approach, taxes would be administered through the income tax system, and people would pay tax in much the same way as they do now. The key difference is that tax brackets would be applied to an income average rather than a single year’s pay. This better reflects how people actually spend over their lifetimes, and it reduces the penalty for working more or earning more in peak years.

The information needed to do this already exists in social security records, which track people’s earnings over time. Rather than collecting new data, governments would continue to use these records as they do now, while also using them to calculate income averages across several years as a proxy for how much they spend. No new bureaucracy would be required – it is simply an additional use of information that is already held.

But why does this matter now? Most advanced economies face the same long-term pressures: ageing populations, rising fiscal demands, stagnant productivity and intense debate about how to tax “fairly” without discouraging work and investment. These pressures are unlikely to disappear.

Rethinking not just how much to tax, but how to tax, offers a different way forward. A system that taxes consumption rather than income is not a silver bullet. But progressive consumption taxation deserves a far more prominent place in the public conversation about how to design a fair and prosperous tax system for the future.

Marcelo R Santos 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. What if we taxed what people spend, not what they earn? – https://theconversation.com/what-if-we-taxed-what-people-spend-not-what-they-earn-272392

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Alice Vernon, Lecturer in Creative Writing and 19th-Century Literature, Aberystwyth University

This year’s BBC Ghost Story for Christmas is an adaptation of E. F. Benson’s 1912 tale of vampiric horror and haunted sleep, The Room in the Tower.

The unnamed narrator begins the story by relating a recurring nightmare he has suffered for 15 years. In the dream, he has been invited to the mansion of the Stone family. The dream begins pleasantly, with card games, cigarettes and light conversation. But it always takes a turn when the family’s fearsome matriarch, Mrs Stone, tells the narrator that he’ll now be shown to his room for the night – the titular room in the tower. Upon entering the room, he is overwhelmed with abject horror, and wakes up before he sees the object of his fear.

While visiting a friend one stormy summer’s day, the narrator finds himself at the very home he saw at least once a month in his dreams. Sure enough, he’s led to the room in the tower, where he finds a hideous portrait of the demonic Mrs Stone. The portrait is removed from the room at his request, but leaves curious bloodstains on the narrator and his friend’s hands. During the night, however, the narrator’s sleep is once again disturbed by the nightmare made manifest.

Many ghost stories take place in bedrooms. One of the BBC’s first ghost stories adapted for television was M. R. James’ Oh Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad, which features a bumbling academic terrorised in his hotel room by a ghost quite literally wearing a bed sheet. Horror comes from a twisted reversal of what we expect to see and experience, and since the bed should be the place of utmost safety, it is ripe to be distorted into a place of existential dread.

Sleep, too, is a state of pure vulnerability. Those few breathless seconds after waking from a nightmare remind us just how defenceless we are. No tale of the supernatural from the early 20th century examines the way our troubled sleep can haunt us quite like The Room in the Tower.

Benson grew up with ghosts. His father, Edward Benson, was the archbishop of Canterbury. He was good friends with novelist Henry James, and allegedly told his son a spooky story he’d heard that James later turned into The Turn of the Screw (1898).

Benson’s mother was Mary Sidgwick, whose brother Henry was a founding member and first president of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR). The SPR’s aim was to investigate strange and paranormal phenomena, with particular interests in thought transference (or telepathy), visions and hallucinations, and ghosts and hauntings.

Begun in 1882, the SPR almost immediately set about collecting a massive amount of data under their Census of Hallucinations. They sent out a questionnaire to the public, and received thousands of responses over several years, some with fascinating anecdotes about being terrorised by ghosts and monsters in the middle of the night. The SPR compiled these in an issue of their periodical in 1894.

To read them in light of The Room of the Tower, it seems that Benson, too, knew what it feels like to be haunted by hallucinatory sleep disorders. Indeed, perhaps he even took direct influence from some of the anecdotes. The narrator in The Room in the Tower, being visited by a vampiric monster at the end of the story, describes himself as being “paralysed” – a typical sensation of sleep paralysis, which is often accompanied by a terrifying hallucination.

In Benson’s story, the narrator sees a “figure that leaned over the end of my bed”. In the SPR’s Census, a respondent referred to as Miss H. T. describes a horrifying visitation similar to the experience of Benson’s narrator. She wrote that she had seen the same figure three times, just as the narrator has the same nightmare over and over again. It would happen the same way every time; she would believe herself to be awake, and she would see a shimmer in the air that gradually solidified. Paralysed, she couldn’t move or scream to defend herself as the shape “took the form of mist and then developed into a dark veiled figure, which came nearer to me” and bent over the bed. Finally, the paralysis would lift, and the figure disappeared just as Miss H. T. threw her hands out towards it.

What both the Census and The Room in the Tower show is that ghosts don’t need to come from graveyards, gothic houses, or local legends. Often the most terrifying encounters, the experiences that prove most fruitful for ghost stories, are those our sleeping minds conjure up on the ethereal boundary between dreaming and waking.

The Room in the Tower will air on BBC One on Christmas Eve at 10pm, and will star Joanna Lumley as the terrifying Mrs Stone. For those of us prone to experience troubled sleep, it may well summon a nightmare of our own.

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

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

– ref. The Room in the Tower: the ‘real’ hauntings that inspired this year’s BBC Ghost Story for Christmas adaptation – https://theconversation.com/the-room-in-the-tower-the-real-hauntings-that-inspired-this-years-bbc-ghost-story-for-christmas-adaptation-272309

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Stefan Hanß, Senior Lecturer in Early Modern History, University of Manchester

What if the pages of an old book could tell us who touched them, what medicines they made, and even how their bodies responded to treatment?

Renaissance medical recipe books are filled with handwritten notes from readers who tested cures for everything from baldness to toothache. For years, historians have studied these annotations to understand how people experimented with medicine in the past. Our recent research goes a step further. My colleagues and I have developed a way to read not only the words on these pages, but also the invisible biological traces left behind by the people who used them.

Thousands of handwritten manuscripts and printed books survive from Renaissance Europe that record medical recipes used in everyday life. These were not rare or elite volumes. Many were printed medical “bestsellers” that circulated widely, then personalised by readers who added notes in the margins. Which recipes worked best? Which ingredients could be swapped or improved? Far from being static texts, these books were working documents. The Renaissance was an age of medical innovation, shaped by hands-on experimentation and repeated trials.

For the first time, we were able to sample and analyse invisible proteins left behind on the pages of these books by the people who handled them.

This work is a form of biochemical detective work. Every time a 16th-century reader touched a page, they deposited tiny traces of amino acids, the building blocks of proteins. These traces can now be sampled using specialised film diskettes produced by SpringStyle Tech Design, which gently lift material from the surface of paper without damaging it. We sampled printed German medical books from the 16th century now held at The John Rylands Research Institute and Library at The University of Manchester. The protein samples were analysed in laboratories at the Universities of York and Oxford, while the Rylands Imaging Laboratory used advanced imaging techniques to recover faded or obscured text.

Focusing on printed books matters. Because these volumes were produced in multiple copies, we can compare biochemical traces across similar texts, helping us distinguish between what the book prescribed and what individual readers actually did with it.

This combined approach allowed us to recover remarkable information about the people who used these books, the substances they handled and the remedies they prepared. When read alongside archival sources, it offers new insight into how Renaissance medicine worked in everyday life.

On pages recommending specific remedies, we identified protein traces from the ingredients named in the recipes themselves. Watercress, European beech and rosemary appeared alongside instructions for treating hair loss or encouraging the growth of head hair and beards.

This focus on hair is not surprising. With the rise of portraiture and the expanding trade in combs and mirrors, the cultivation of beards and new hairstyles became fashionable in the Renaissance. Hair was highly visible, socially meaningful and deeply connected to ideas of health and masculinity.

Wasteful recipes

Some findings were more startling. Near a recipe proposing an extreme treatment for baldness, we detected traces of human excrement.

This closely reflects Renaissance ideas about hair. In medieval and early modern medical thought, hair was understood as a bodily excretion, grouped with substances such as sweat, faeces and nails. As scholars have bluntly put it, “hair was shit”. From this perspective, using human waste to treat hair was not grotesque but logically consistent.

We also identified proteins from bright yellow flowering plants near recipes for dyeing hair blond. These plants were not listed among the written ingredients. We cannot identify the species with certainty, but their presence suggests readers were experimenting beyond the instructions on the page, guided by colour symbolism and perceived medicinal properties. Here, experimentation becomes visible not just in marginal notes, but in the biological record itself.

Other protein traces point to the use of lizards in haircare remedies. Lizards were classified in Renaissance natural philosophy as poikilothermic animals, meaning their body temperature changes with the environment. Hair growth was believed to depend on internal bodily heat. Increasing heat was thought to stimulate hair growth, while excessive heat could destroy it. The presence of lizard proteins suggests practitioners were actively testing these competing theories by processing animal materials into remedies.

Hippo teeth

Then there is the hippopotamus. We recovered proteins consistent with hippopotamus material on pages discussing dental problems. In the margins, readers complained about foul-smelling teeth, toothache and tooth loss. In Renaissance medicine, hippopotamus bone was believed to strengthen teeth and gums and was sometimes used to make dentures. Its presence suggests that readers in 16th- and 17th-century Germany had access to exotic medical materials traded across long distances.

Our methods combine close historical reading with laboratory analysis, allowing historians to study medical practice in ways that were not previously possible. They bring together forms of evidence that are usually kept separate: texts, bodies and materials.

Perhaps most intriguingly, we also identified proteins with antimicrobial functions, including molecules commonly found in human immune responses, such as those associated with inflammation and defence against bacteria. These proteins help the body fight infection. Their presence suggests that the people handling these books were not only preparing remedies but were themselves experiencing illness or healing, leaving traces of immune activity behind.

In this sense, we can glimpse immune systems reacting to disease and treatment on the pages themselves. We are only beginning to understand what this evidence can reveal, but this work opens up entirely new ways of studying how Renaissance medicine was practised, tested and lived.

This research has been generously funded by a John Rylands Research Institute Pilot Grant 2020–21 (PI Stefan Hanß) and is a result of interdisciplinary conversations that originated at the British Academy-funded event ‘Microscopic Records: The New Interdisciplinarity of Early Modern Studies, c. 1400–1800’ (British Academy Rising Star Engagement Award BARSEA 19190084, PI Stefan Hanß, https://sites.manchester.ac.uk/microscopic-records/).

– ref. What Renaissance readers left behind in haircare books – https://theconversation.com/what-renaissance-readers-left-behind-in-haircare-books-271561