Are you a parent to one child? Or are you considering having a child in the future, and wondering about what your family size should be?
Parents of only children are frequently asked when they are having another child, as if there is an expectation that they will be planning another – even though around 45% of families in the UK now have one child.
In research for my new book on only children, I asked over 3,000 parents who had one child about their reasons behind that decision. For some, having one child was a conscious choice. Parents enjoyed the lifestyle and balance that having one child brought, or wanted to limit their family for environmental reasons. Sometimes a difficult or distant relationship with their own sibling drove this choice.
Others, however, had wanted more than one child. Circumstances meant that they couldn’t, or had decided not to, have another baby.
These reasons were often deeply personal. Some parents had difficulties conceiving. Some had experienced miscarriage, baby loss or bereavement, meaning that their only child was the only child here. Others had such a difficult pregnancy or traumatic birth that they could not physically or psychologically experience another pregnancy.
There are all kinds of reasons for a family to have one child. Rido/Shutterstock
The cost of living also affected decisions. Many had made the decision that they couldn’t afford another child due to childcare, housing costs or job insecurity. Some had separated from the child’s other parent or been bereaved. Health problems, for parents or their child, were common, including disability and serious illnesses such as cancer. Health problems, for parents or their child, were common, including disability and serious illnesses such as cancer.
Some mothers talked about how difficult they found the postnatal period, lack of sleep, feeding difficulties and loneliness, resulting in postnatal depression. Some wanted another baby but their partner did not, or parents had experienced significant disagreements in how to parent and care for a child.
Explaining and feeling that you need to justify reasons to family, friends or even strangers who feel entitled to ask, can clearly be distressing. What’s more, parents of one child are likely to have heard that only children are at risk of being lonely, spoiled or being unable to make friends.
This is simply not true. These myths about one child families (a term many prefer to “only child”) have been around for a long time, but the evidence just isn’t there.
Research on only children
The few studies that have shown differences for outcomes for children with or without siblings are often small, flawed, or conducted at a time when there was a lot of social and political pressure to have more children.
More recent research shows very little difference at all. Only children do not have poorer social skills. They are not more selfish or narcissistic. They aren’t less happy in life. They may spend more time alone but are not more likely to describe themselves as lonely, which is an important distinction.
Children’s lives are affected by so many different factors. Where there is an absence of a sibling, a different, positive opportunity often fills it. Only children have more time to spend connecting with other family members of friends, more time for hobbies, more family money for activities that they prefer, or simply more focused time alone. Life might look different, but that doesn’t mean it’s worse.
Every child is made up of their own unique strengths and personality that is a culmination of genetics, home life and more. There are far more influential differences between only children’s lives than the shared experience of not having a sibling.
One aspect people often worry about is whether only children will feel the strain in the future when looking after ageing parents. Although some people find great support in their siblings, one study found that adult children may leave care or support for older parents to their siblings.
Although some only children do wish they had a brother or sister, it’s also important to remember that having a sibling isn’t a guarantee they will get along or support each other. Children who feel bullied by their siblings have an increased risk of depression and self-harm. When we wish for more siblings we are wishing for a good relationship and supportive person, and that isn’t always the case.
Research does however show a difference in people’s views of only children. One study asked people to rate characteristics of a hypothetical only child versus one with siblings. People were more likely to believe that only children were higher in narcissistic tendencies. They then tested this belief, finding no difference in narcissism scores between people who had a sibling or not. This is an excellent example of how people believe in the stereotype of the narcissistic selfish only child, but it’s not actually true.
These stereotypes are harmful and importantly not based in reality. Families increasingly come in all different shapes and make ups. Let’s focus on how we make sure more children can feel loved, connected and secure, rather than how many siblings they have.
Amy Brown receives funding from UKRI. She is a volunteer for the charity the Human Milk Foundation.
Source: The Conversation – UK – By James Rodgers, Reader in International Journalism, City St George’s, University of London
A vast amount of information has not necessarily meant more reliable information, writes James Rodgers, a former BBC correspondent who held postings in Gaza, Moscow and Brussels
On December 10, the year 2025 reached a murderous milestone. In 2024, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) had recorded 126 journalists and media workers killed, the highest number since the CPJ first began keeping records in 1992. In 2025, the figure was matched with three weeks of the year still to go.
One nationality, Palestinian, has paid by far the highest price. “Israel has killed almost 250 journalists since the Israel-Gaza war began in 2023,” the CPJ reported.
What does this mean for audiences’ understanding of a world where international affairs are dominated by war, the climate crisis and unpredictable politics?
As far back as the early years of the US, and through the European revolutions of the 19th centuries, information and freedom have been linked. In 1787, Thomas Jefferson wrote: “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”
Today, we have access to more media than at any other time in human history. But this vast amount of information has not necessarily meant more reliable information. Governments and tech companies striving to control the message often succeed.
Israel has banned international journalists entering Gaza. Palestinian journalists continue, at great risk, to report from the territory. Russia, meanwhile, has placed restrictions on reporting its “special military operation” – in a word, war – on Ukraine.
A generation ago, when the CPJ first began keeping data on journalists’ deaths, it was different. The fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the cold war allowed international media organisations freedom to work as never before in the former Soviet bloc.
As those countries embraced political change, they encouraged freer media to flourish within their new societies. True, these media were often influenced by political and business interests – the news media often are. But there was plurality where previously there had only been the party line.
The 1990s, imperfect though they were as a time of press freedom, were better than what has followed since. As the media academic and former foreign correspondent Peter Grestehas persuasively argued, the aftermath of 9/11 involved state power extending, “into control over information and ideas. They did that by loosening the definitions of what constituted ‘terrorism’ and ‘national security’”.
Greste’s words were informed by the price he had paid for his own journalism. In late 2013, along with two colleagues, Mohamed Fadel Fahmy and Baher Mohammad, he was detained in Egypt on terrorism charges. He spent 400 days in prison. The charges had resulted from the fact that he had spoken to the Muslim Brotherhood as part of his reporting.
“How do you accurately and fairly report on Egypt’s ongoing political struggle without talking to everyone involved?” he wrote at the time.
Information access
It is not new that governments seek to control media. What is new is that the US is so proudly among them. Jefferson would probably not like what the current US government is doing, especially its recent policy of restricting access to the Pentagon for reporters who themselves refuse restrictions on their reporting.
The words that follow Jefferson’s discussion of the relative merits of governments and newspapers are less well remembered: “But I should mean that every man should receive those papers and be capable of reading them.”
Outdated gendered language aside, that, today, is the problem. For while we have more and more media, we have far less media freedom.
In the age of mass media, news organisations have largely controlled the means of distribution. Today, the tech companies take the lead. Not everyone is receiving the “papers”. Where they are not formally censored, they are harder to find – and cost money, unlike social media content.
Algorithms may be adjusted to give us more cat videos and fewer questions. Governments and criminals place physical restrictions, up to and including death, on journalists’ work. Powerful politicians use legal action – or the threat of it – to silence trusted news organisations.
In my previous career as an international correspondent, I reported on wars in the former Soviet Union and the Middle East. In the 1990s and 2000s, journalists were often restricted by governments not wanting bad news reported – but rarely simply banned as they increasingly seem to be now.
In Gaza and in Russia, international journalists are unable to access places they need to tell the story. In both cases, courageous reporters from those countries risk danger and even death to try to tell the world what is happening.
The restrictions placed upon journalists today may mean that governments seem to be winning at the moment. Their desire to control confirms the power to challenge that journalism still holds.
James Rodgers 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.
You push back from the table after Christmas lunch, full from an excellent feast. You really couldn’t manage another bite – except, perhaps, a little bit of pudding. Somehow, no matter how much you’ve eaten, there always seems to be room for dessert. Why? What is it about something sweet that tempts us into “oh, go on then”?
The Japanese capture this perfectly with the word betsubara, meaning “separate stomach”. Anatomically speaking, there is no extra compartment, yet the sensation of still having space for pudding is widespread enough to deserve a scientific explanation.
Far from being imaginary, the feeling reflects a series of physiological and psychological processes that together make dessert uniquely appealing, even when the main course has felt like the limit.
A good place to start is with the stomach itself. Many people picture it as a fixed-size bag that fills steadily until it can take no more, as though another mouthful would cause it to overflow.
In reality, the stomach is designed to stretch and adapt. As we begin to eat, it undergoes “gastric accommodation”: the smooth muscle relaxes, creating extra capacity without a major increase in pressure.
Crucially, soft and sweet foods require very little mechanical digestion. A heavy main course may make the stomach feel distended, but a light dessert, such as ice cream or mousse, barely challenges its workload, so the stomach can relax further to make space.
Much of the drive to eat pudding comes from the brain, specifically the neural pathways involved in reward and pleasure. Appetite is not governed solely by physical hunger. There is also “hedonic hunger”, the desire to eat because something is enjoyable or comforting.
After a satisfying main course, physiological hunger may be gone, but the anticipation of a sugary treat creates a separate, reward-driven desire to continue eating.
Another mechanism is sensory-specific satiety. As we eat, our brain’s response to the flavours and textures on the plate gradually diminishes, making the food less interesting. Introducing a different flavour profile – something sweet, tart or creamy – refreshes the reward response.
Many people who genuinely feel they cannot finish their main course suddenly discover that they “could manage a little pudding” because the novelty of dessert re-engages their motivation to eat.
Desserts also behave differently once they reach the gut. Compared with foods rich in protein or fat, sugary and carbohydrate-based foods empty from the stomach quickly and require relatively little early breakdown, contributing to the perception that they are easier to accommodate even when you are full.
Timing plays a role, too. The gut-brain signalling that creates the sensation of fullness does not respond instantly.
Hormones such as cholecystokinin, GLP-1 and peptide YY rise gradually and typically take between 20 and 40 minutes to produce a sustained sense of satiety. Many people make decisions about dessert before this hormonal shift has fully taken effect, giving the reward system space to influence behaviour.
Restaurants, consciously or otherwise, often time dessert offerings within this window.
Layered onto these biological processes is the influence of social conditioning. For many people, dessert is associated with celebration, generosity or comfort. From childhood onwards, we learn to regard puddings as treats or as natural components of festive meals.
Cultural and emotional cues can trigger anticipatory pleasure before the food even arrives. Studies consistently show that people eat more in social settings, when food is freely offered, or during special occasions – all situations where dessert typically features.
So the next time someone insists they are too full for another mouthful of dinner but somehow finds space for a slice of cake, rest assured: they are not being inconsistent. They are simply experiencing a perfectly normal and rather elegant feature of the human body.
Michelle Spear does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
The festive season has a reputation for undoing good habits such as eating well and exercising. Normal routines disappear, days become less structured and exercise habits can fade. The solution to staying active is not more willpower, but smarter planning. Research shows that simple, practical strategies can help people stay active through Christmas and into the new year.
At this time of year, articles often focus on the calorie content of festive foods and drinks, alongside advice on how to “burn off” festive indulgence. However, guilt-based motivation is ineffective in the long term.
You are more likely to stick with exercise when it feels rewarding rather than forced. This is known as intrinsic motivation, which comes from enjoying the activity itself, rather than exercising due to pressure, guilt or external rewards. Behaviour change research shows that physical activity habits are more likely to last when they are easy to start and driven by intrinsic motivation.
For example, someone is more likely to maintain a running habit because it improves their mood or helps them decompress, rather than because they are trying to burn a specific number of calories.
To support intrinsic motivation, it helps to choose activities you enjoy or are curious about and avoid rigid rules. Exercises should match your current ability and offer a sense of progress, such as improvements in strength, technique or stamina. Clear, achievable progress increases enjoyment and commitment. Training with others, joining group classes or sharing progress can also help sustain motivation.
Most people do not stop exercising over Christmas because they lose motivation. Instead, their routines change. Late nights, travel, disrupted schedules, limited gym access or exercising in unfamiliar places create practical barriers. In many cases, exercise habits fade because of logistics, not a lack of desire.
In behavioural science, anything that makes a behaviour harder to start than it needs to be is described as friction. Even small obstacles can increase the effort, time or mental energy required to begin, making people more likely to delay or abandon the behaviour.
Friction is often subtle. Forgetting login details for a fitness app, not knowing what workout to do, or wondering whether there is enough time for a session to be “worth it” can be enough to derail exercise plans. Each small obstacle adds hesitation and increases the chance of giving up.
Reducing friction makes it far easier to maintain fitness over Christmas. This can be done by preparing in advance, simplifying choices and making the first step as easy as possible.
Prepare and plan ahead
Preparing ahead of time reduces delays and procrastination. Keep a gym bag packed or lay out workout clothes the night before. If you train with music or podcasts, have them ready. Create a default route for outdoor activities such as running or cycling so you don’t have to decide where to go.
When routines change, the type of exercise often needs to change too. Many people turn to social media or YouTube for ideas, but the sheer number of options can lead to decision fatigue, where repeated choices drain mental energy and make it more likely that exercise is postponed altogether.
To avoid this, bookmark a small number of go-to workouts on your phone and label them by duration and location. For example:
15 minutes | Bodyweight cardio | Home – Star jumps x 20 Mountain climbers x 20 Step-ups x 20 High skips x 20 Rest 1 minute Repeat for five rounds
Choose workouts for the week in advance where possible. Use a fixed rotation of three or four sessions, such as full-body strength, a 30-minute run, then full-body strength again. Limiting options reduces decision fatigue and makes starting easier.
Simplify
When time is limited or the gym is busy, effective workouts can still be completed in under 30 minutes using time-efficient training methods.
1. Circuits
In the gym, instead of resting between sets on one machine, move between exercises that target different muscle groups. For example, rotate between chest press, seated row, leg press, shoulder press, lat pulldown and a core exercise. If equipment is unavailable, substitute with a similar movement using dumbbells or bodyweight.
After completing a set, reduce the weight by 20% to 30% and continue until fatigue. Repeat for two to four drops.
4. Myo reps
Choose a weight you can lift for 12 to 15 repetitions. After the first set, rest briefly, then perform mini sets of three to five repetitions, rest for 20 seconds. Keep going until until you can’t complete 3 reps.
Drop sets and myo reps are effective for muscle growth. For maximum strength goals, traditional or cluster sets are more appropriate.
Metabolic conditioning
Metabolic conditioning involves short bursts of high-intensity exercise that challenge both muscles and the cardiovascular system. It is particularly useful when time is limited.
1. Circuit training
Plan a circuit of several exercises. Perform each exercise for 30 to 60 seconds then move to the next exercise. Rest for one to two minutes after completing all the exercises and repeat for multiple rounds.
2. Every minute on the minute circuits
At the start of each minute, complete a set number of repetitions and rest for the remainder of the minute before starting the next exercise.
3. Tabata intervals
Alternate 20 seconds of intense exercise with ten seconds of rest. Perform a total of eight intervals before resting for two to three minutes. Repeat this for two to three minutes series.
4. As many reps as possible
Select four or five exercises with target reps for each exercise. Set a timer for 12 to 20 minutes and cycle through the exercises continuously, aiming to complete as many rounds as possible.
Even during the disruption of the festive season, it is possible to stay active. Skipping exercise entirely until January risks losing fitness and breaking momentum. Evidence-based strategies that reduce friction and make exercise easy to start are far more effective than relying on willpower. By keeping workouts simple and accessible, you can maintain fitness through Christmas without having to start again in the new year.
Paul Hough 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.
Eighty years ago, Britain celebrated its first peacetime Christmas since 1938. It was a time of hope indeed, but a look through newspaper archives reveals a complex picture. Christmas 1945 was an austerity Christmas. One in which grief and suffering, remembrance and loneliness mingled with reunions, church attendance and muted celebration.
It was the first Christmas under the Labour government elected in 1945, though Prime Minister Clement Attlee did not address the nation. The Christmas address was by King George VI, who noted that Britons still had to “make a little go a long way”.
The government had negotiated a colossal loan from the United States because Britain was close to bankruptcy. The Times reported that extra meat, margarine, sugar and sweets “allocated in good time” would permit “a near approach to traditional fare in most homes”. However, rationing remained in force and for many, the top priority was simply to get back to their families.
On December 22, the mass circulation Daily Mirror reported that “with only three days to go till Christmas, mainline stations throughout the country were jam-packed with servicemen and civilians anxious to get home for the greatest get together holiday for six years”. It noted that “here and there was a lucky passenger with a turkey or goose wrapped in brown paper to take home for the Christmas feast”.
The Labour-supporting Daily Herald reflected that “You may not have a turkey or much coal. Toys are scarce and taxes heavy. But have you reflected how much better off we are than a year ago?”
It reported that the railway network was running “duplicate and triplicate trains” on some routes, but could not meet the demand for seats. The Daily Herald noted that “the first Christmas of the peace began with a battle – the battle of Waterloo”. There were “long queues four abreast at Euston” and parcels piling up at King’s Cross Station. Such scenes might feel familiar to today’s travellers trying to make it out of London in the days before Christmas.
Joy amid mourning
Some travellers would not reach their families. Staunch in its defence of servicemen, the Daily Mirror reported that a “War Office Muddle” meant that men who had “spent five Christmases abroad” were “still being sent overseas, despite a War Office promise that they would not be”. This situation arose because men were still required to fill essential posts.
Many such jobs were in Berlin. The Manchester Guardian’s correspondent reported from the German capital that Germany and Austria had no fuel to heat homes. The defeated nations faced “a Christmas of hunger or black market”. However, “in Berlin Christmas will at least be cheap. Bread is four pence a two-pound loaf, potatoes are three half-pence a pound”.
The Daily Mail remained cheerful. It reported a BBC broadcast of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Christmas Oratorio: “A young BBC singer stepped straight from the chorus to a leading part” in this performance. Gladys Ripley, a leading contralto, had fallen victim to “a severe cold”. Into her place stepped the unknown Miss Maud Baker who gave “a magnificent performance”.
Still, many citizens were mourning. Britain had lost about 348,000 military personnel and 70,000 civilians. Atomic bombs had brought about the surrender of Japan. Losses were mourned in churches across the land. The Times displayed pictures of choristers at Salisbury Cathedral practising for a carol service. Carols were sung on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. Many readers attended services at churches throughout the UK.
The Listener, a magazine published by the BBC, captured the mood in an editorial headlined, simply, “Christmas 1945”:
It would be useless to pretend that this, the first Christmas of peace, is all that we should like it to be. Our chief pleasure in it must indeed lie in the fact that it is the first peacetime Christmas for a very long time … Most of us can be happy, if not extravagantly merry this Christmas. Most of us, but not all. There will be gaps in many family circles, faces missing, some of whom will not be seen again.
Today, many people around the world are facing destruction and deprivation comparable to that which Britons experienced between 1939 and 1945. This Christmas, our thoughts as we enjoy peace and plenty should, perhaps, be with them.
Tim Luckhurst has received research funding from News UK and Ireland Ltd. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and a member of the Society of Editors and the Free Speech Union.
Source: The Conversation – UK – By Haian Dukhan, Lecturer in Politics and International Relations, Teesside University
The US military launched a wave of strikes against targets in central Syria on December 19 in response to an attack on US forces near the ancient city of Palmyra one week earlier. That attack saw a lone Islamic State (IS) gunman kill two US service members and one American civilian at a fortified base in the city.
The perpetrator, whose identity has not yet been released, had recently enlisted in Syria’s internal security forces. He had reportedly already attracted suspicion from local security leadership over his possible extremist sympathies.
The attack has exposed deep vulnerabilities within the Syrian transitional government’s security architecture. It also illustrates how IS has adapted from being a territory-holding “proto-state” into an insurgent movement designed to exploit Syria’s institutional weaknesses.
When the regime of Bashar al-Assad collapsed in late 2024, Syria’s new authorities faced the urgent and daunting task of imposing security across a country strained by institutional collapse and a complex network of competing armed groups. The new president, Ahmed al-Sharaa, moved quickly to assemble national security forces.
His government prioritised speed and territorial coverage over comprehensive vetting. Thousands of fighters from diverse former factions were absorbed into new security units in an effort to establish an immediate state presence.
The Palmyra attacker emerged from this process. He was one of roughly 5,000 individuals to be recruited into a desert-region security division. Despite concerns about IS infiltration being raised and the individual concerned being reassigned to guard equipment at the base, the security services were still unable to prevent the attack.
The incident underscores how deeply fragmented Syria’s security landscape remains one year after Assad. Kurdish-led forces, tribal and communal militias, armed Druze groups and remnants of former regime networks continue to operate with varying degrees of autonomy in different parts of the country.
This fragmented environment weakens command structures, complicates accountability and creates openings for infiltration by extremist groups. Security sector reform in such a context should be less about rapid centralisation and more about managing a hybrid and uneven security system. This is something the current transition has so far failed to achieve.
Logic of insurgency
While the Syrian transitional government has struggled to consolidate control and secure its territory, IS has been recalibrating its strategy. Having lost its territorial control in Iraq and Syria in 2019, IS has shifted from governing territory to waging a low-visibility insurgency.
Central Syria’s geography has helped IS adapt. Syrian state forces have struggled to penetrate the desert areas surrounding Palmyra. These areas offer conditions that favour insurgent mobility and concealment, such as difficult terrain and logistical links to former IS strongholds.
The objective of IS is no longer to rule, but to erode the legitimacy of the Syrian authorities. Its attack in Palmyra fits squarely within this logic, occurring as Syria was deepening cooperation with the US-led international coalition against IS. The group’s aim seems to be to disrupt emerging security partnerships and deter further international engagement with Syria.
The Palmyra attack places al-Sharaa’s government in a strategic bind. International partners like the US expect a professional and reliable security apparatus capable of preventing infiltration and protecting joint operations. And in the aftermath of the attack, the recruitment and vetting procedures of Syria’s internal security forces have come under scrutiny.
The US president, Donald Trump, said the attack took place in an area of Syria the interim government “doesn’t have much control over”. Then, a few days later, he added Syria to a list of countries subject to a full US travel ban. Part of Washington’s justification for the move was Syria’s continuing security challenges.
At the same time, the government faces significant domestic constraints. Aggressive purges or the abrupt restructuring of security forces risk destabilising the fragile coalition of armed groups upon which the state currently relies to maintain security, manage territorial control and counter possible threats from remnants of the regime.
It’s possible that rival power centres such as the Syrian Democratic Forces in the north-east or the Sweida Military Council in the south may also seize on the Palmyra incident to argue that the central government is unfit to exercise exclusive control over security. This would strengthen demands for decentralised or autonomous arrangements.
Moving forward, Syria’s transitional authorities will need to perform a difficult balancing act. They will have to accelerate meaningful security reform to satisfy international partners and counter IS, while managing internal power dynamics that remain unsettled and highly sensitive. This tension between reform and survival is precisely what IS seeks to exploit.
The Palmyra attack is a reminder that the defeat of IS’s territorial project did not bring lasting security. Syria’s transition now hinges less on battlefield victories than on the slow and contested process of building credible and accountable security institutions.
Until security reform moves beyond emergency measures and tackles the underlying weaknesses in the Syrian security apparatus, attacks like the one in Palmyra are likely to remain a persistent threat both to Syria’s stability and its international partnerships.
Rahaf Aldoughli’s research into armed groups in Syria is funded by XCEPT.
Haian Dukhan does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Source: The Conversation – UK – By Amy Stevens, Research Associate, School of Sociological Studies, Politics and International Relations, University of Sheffield
Pseudonyms are used throughout this article. The authors’ interviews with hunt saboteurs and police officers were carried out on condition of anonymity.
Alison joined her local hunt saboteur group in her late 30s after seeing an anti-fox hunting stall at a local festival. At that time she had “no idea” that fox hunting was still taking place across the UK, despite it having been illegal in England and Wales since 2005 – and earlier in Scotland.
Alison has since made strong friendships through “sabbing” which, she admits, has become “close to almost an obsession” for her:
It’s normally a Saturday … We dress up. We make sure our camera batteries are charged, all the equipment is ready. We get into the sabotage cars, go to the location … and basically follow them in the field. The name of the game is to keep an eye on the hunt at all times with cameras, and observe what they are doing.
Numerous hunt saboteurs across the UK follow this routine throughout each fox hunting season, which runs from September to May. Time spent in the field following the hunt can be strained and perilous. “We drag each other out of the mud … and keep each other’s back,” Alison says.
Saboteurs deliberately attempt to disrupt the hunt, placing themselves in dangerous situations, often on foot as they run after hunters on horseback. As tensions run high, threats and physical assaults can come from bothsides of this long-standing argument. With some hunts now regularly employing private security, the levels of violence have reportedly escalated.
Our research on the changing nature of hunt sabotage is part of a broader study of “citizen-led policing”. We see this as a contemporary phenomenon in many different walks of life – from antisocial behaviour in neighbourhoods to acquisitive retail crime – whereby concerned citizens take action against what they regard as security issues which are not being adequately addressed. In some instances, the boundaries between concerned citizens acting with good intentions and vigilantism can become blurred.
The Insights section is committed to high-quality longform journalism. Our editors work with academics from many different backgrounds who are tackling a wide range of societal and scientific challenges.
In our conversations with saboteurs spanning the last three hunting seasons, many have reported being threatened by hunt members and supporters, physically assaulted, vehicles damaged, followed home, doxxed online and dead animals left at their properties. But what keeps them coming back, according to Stuart, is a unifying commitment to ending the “cruelty” of fox hunting: “Everything stems from that, and we must never lose sight of that.”
‘The law needs revisiting’
Lizzie is a middle-class professional working full-time in a demanding job. But she spends much of her spare time roaming farmland in the south of England, disrupting fox hunts and gathering evidence of law breaking.
In this sense, Lizzie is typical of many hunt saboteurs we have encountered in our research. She reflects a move away from hunt sabotage as an activity often seen as a clash of classes – a working-class struggle against upper-class hunt groups. She explains:
For a long time, hunt sabs were just seen as hippies that don’t work; just these nutty animal rights extremists. [But] there’s nurses, there’s social workers, there’s an electrician – we’re all working, we’re all in responsible jobs … I think the police are coming around to thinking this isn’t a class issue. [We] are just looking for the law to be upheld.
‘This isn’t a class issue’: saboteurs follow a fox hunt in Monmouthshire, January 2020. pwmedia/Shutterstock
Twenty years after Tony Blair’s government brought in the initial ban on hunting wild mammals with dogs under the Hunting Act (2004), Labour’s 2024 election manifesto included a promise to ban trail hunting in England and Wales, in order to end the “smokescreen” that both police and saboteurs claim allows illegal hunting to continue.
This has been followed through as part of the government’s new animal welfare strategy, launched on December 22. A public consultation will be held at the start of 2026 to seek views on the precise details of the ban, with the government yet to give a timeline for its introduction.
The existing powers afforded to the police regarding fox hunting have been described by senior police officer Matt Longman as a “leaky sieve”. In 2023, Longman, the National Police Chiefs’ Council lead on fox hunting crime, described the current Hunting Act as “not working effectively”, and claimed that “the simplest reason for the lack of prosecution is that the law needs revisiting”.
History of hunt saboteurs
The origins of hunt sabotage in the UK are not clear. There is some evidence that a group called Band of Mercy sabotaged shooting rifles in 1883. Around the same time, members of the Humanitarian League are said to have followed hunts to expose cruel practices.
According to the Hunt Saboteurs Association (HSA), the first documented saboteur in England was a man called Harrison who disrupted a grouse shoot on the Duke of Rutland’s land in 1893 and was arrested for trespassing. The first modern hunt sabotage took place in 1958, when members of the League Against Cruel Sports laid false trails to disrupt a stag hunt in the Devon and Somerset area.
In the 1970s and ‘80s, hunt saboteur groups were associated with anarchist movements and the punk music scene, as well as anti-vivisectionists. But according to Kat, that image of hunt saboteurs is a far cry from today’s saboteurs:
[Hunt supporters] push this theory that sabs are uneducated, unemployed, unwashed hippies. But it’s really interesting, the diverse group of people that belong to anti-hunting campaigning. You can have anyone from doctors, nurses, veterinary professionals, teachers – even farmers. I just don’t think [the hunters] would ever in a million years believe that I’m in a high-powered role in my industry.
Stuart, a member of a sabotage group in the south of England, is quick to distinguish the highly organised approach his group takes from some others operating today:
Some saboteur groups aren’t very organised. They’ve got these anarchic principles they work to … I believe in having large numbers, well trained, a structured training programme – and everyone knowing what they’re doing. It just seems to work.
Stuart raises concerns about new recruits being overly motivated by political concerns – people he describes as “class warriors” interested only in violence against an upper-class enemy:
I like to meet people to make sure they want to be in the group for all the right reasons, because sometimes you do get class warriors … It’s happened in some groups before. It’s not nice: someone’s turned up, gone out on their first or second hit, they’ve just gone up and whacked a huntsman and pulled him off his horse … You can’t do that.
A legacy of mistrust
The history of hunt sabotage is beset by violence against saboteurs by hunt members and supporters. Incidents of serious violence against saboteurs are perceived within the movement as going largely unpunished, with instances of saboteurs being killed or seriously injured having led to short custodial or suspended sentences – or, often, no prosecutions against hunt members and supporters at all.
Some of the most high-profile and controversial forms of protest on the issue of fox hunting have arguably been perpetrated by hunt supporters. In 2004, eight supporters stormed the House of Commons during a debate on hunting, disguising themselves as builders before confronting MPs. They received an 18-month custodial discharge, with the judge finding no evidence that their actions had resulted in either harassment or distress. In 2009, Lush Cosmetics stores were vandalised and staff verbally abused after the company worked alongside the HSA as part of an anti-fox hunting campaign.
Hunt saboteurs’ mistrust of the state was cemented further when the full scale of the undercover infiltration of saboteur groups by police officers was revealed during the spy cops scandal, which emerged in 2010. Several officers who infiltrated saboteur groups have been accused of inciting others to commit crimes and forming romantic relationships with saboteurs, all the while concealing their real identity. Saboteurs largely retain a deep mistrust of the state, as Stuart explains:
There is distrust … the Old Bill haven’t always helped themselves. In the ’90s, they were infiltrating groups like ours – committing statutory rape [on some] female activists [and we] haven’t forgotten about that … It’s diabolical, absolutely sick. So that’s the sort of thing that lingers on.
This deeply embedded sense of suspicion and antipathy from hunt saboteurs towards the police continues to affect relationships between the two – despite the fact they share, in theory at least, a common pursuit of holding fox hunters accountable to the law. Where positive relationships have been forged, the role of individual police officers has been key – overcoming decades of saboteur-police antipathy to build new alliances.
Reflecting on the support provided by saboteurs during prosecutions of hunts flouting the law, Dan, a police wildlife crime officer, tells us simply: “Without [saboteur] involvement, we’d have no chance.”
Forging unlikely alliances
At first, Kat is reluctant to meet us. We had been put in touch with her by James, a police wildlife crime officer with whom Kat had worked to bring about a hunt prosecution. When she finally agrees to meet us with her partner Carl, also a saboteur, they recount experiencing years of mistreatment at the hands of police officers, and of police protecting hunts while still treating saboteurs as the ones breaking the law.
After one particularly bad experience with the police – when they reported being threatened and having damage done to their vehicle – a friend and former saboteur put them in contact with James. Kat says he “really had his work cut out” with regards to building any sort of relationship with her and Carl.
James asked if they could share any footage of the hunting they had witnessed that season. With low expectations, they agreed to share what they had gathered and James drew on this footage to pursue and ultimately secure the conviction of hunt members. This success was a significant turning point for Kat in recognising there might be mutual benefits in working with the police. She calls James “the first police officer I’ve ever had anything positive to say about”, explaining:
He’s the first police officer that’s actually taken the time to very neutrally listen to what we have to say and look at the footage we’ve had. I have very low standards for the police … but he’s the first cop that’s ever done that.
At the time of the prosecution against the hunt, Kat had preferred to hide her saboteur identity in order to separate this from her professional life – particularly as she worked in a role which brought her into contact with rural businesses. Acknowledging these concerns, James agreed to put measures in place to make Kat and Carl feel safe at home. Kat explains:
James gave us personal protection alarms and alarms for the home, so that if we pressed the button we got an instant response, with the knowledge that we were witnesses.
Ultimately, the prosecution succeeded, giving Kat a sense that times really are changing. “Seeing the actual hunts coming to justice,” she says, “it does feel that maybe the tides are changing.”
Carl echoes this sentiment: “I’m not a fan of the police but I do feel that getting convictions against hunts is the way forward. It makes it very, very visible to the public, and to the government.”
Both Kat and Carl still view James as “one in a million” within the police. As Carl puts it: “If it had been any other copper, it wouldn’t have even got to court. They wouldn’t have wanted the evidence.”
And while Kat continues to bear the psychological scars of having been let down and mistreated by the police, she does sound slightly more hopeful about the potential for future collaboration with like-minded police officers:
If there are more officers like James out there who actually want to do their job, then hopefully we can play a key part in closing multiple hunts down or getting more and more convictions.
The ‘smokescreen’
Many police officers told us that collaborating with saboteurs is the only path towards enforcing the law against fox hunting. A combination of low investigatory resources, the difficulties of meeting evidential thresholds, and the resources that hunt members and supporters can bring to bear during court proceedings reduces the prospect of successful prosecution at every stage. As James put it:
I honestly think there is a need for [the saboteurs]. The hunts wouldn’t like me to say that – my boss probably wouldn’t like me to say that – but if the hunts were [only] trail hunting, there would be no need for the sabs at all.
The formulation of the UK’s current Hunting Act (2004) is also challenging. The legislation contains exemptions which allow for trail hunting – a practice only introduced after the act was passed. Using pre-laid scent trails which simulate real hunting is considered a compromise to allow the foxhound packs to be kept and traditions to continue in a way that is legally compliant. The law, however, does not make any provision for the accidental killing of a fox by hounds, making it difficult to prove a kill during a trail hunt was not accidental.
Anti-hunt groups have long accused trail hunting of being a legal loophole used to hide continued fox hunting. In 2020, a leaked webinar held by The Hunting Office, the sport’s now-defunct governing body, saw leading huntsman Mark Hankinson explaining: “It’s a lot easier to create a smokescreen if you’ve got more than one trail layer operating. That is what it is all about – trying to portray to the people watching that you’re going about your legitimate business.”
Hankinson was initially convicted of encouraging people to hunt illegally in October 2021, receiving a £1,000 fine, but later won an appeal against his conviction. According to Hankinson, his leaked words had in fact been referring to the practice of laying dummy trails to fool saboteurs – and the appeal judge accepted that the Hunting Office was committed to lawful hunting.
According to the police officers we spoke to, working alongside hunt saboteurs and using their evidence to build a case against any hunt that is breaching the law is critical to the likelihood of a successful prosecution.
According to James, the resources available to some saboteur groups can outstrip those available to the police when building up such evidence. “They use drones, they use cameras, they use bodycams,” he explained. “Their tactics obviously have worked because we’ve had quite a few convictions around the country.”
Saboteurs are not subject to the same legal stipulations as the police with regard to evidence capture. While the police must abide by the Regulations of Investigatory Powers Act (2000), which places a series of limits on the police’s capacity to carry out covert surveillance, saboteurs can operate with much more flexibility, including covert filming of illegal hunting. So long as saboteurs do not break the law in capturing their footage, their evidence can be used to support prosecutions.
Working with evidence captured by saboteurs also allows the police to pursue creative avenues for action. In some cases, they have been able to draw on measures designed to tackle antisocial behaviour as a mechanism to address issues linked to hunting – often referred to as “hunt havoc” – such as hounds running into private gardens or through school fields, as well as hunts blocking roads.
Police accused of bias by both sides
Police officers still find themselves navigating a complex terrain of suspicion, paranoia and sometimes outright hostility from saboteur groups. Even James, with successful prosecutions behind him and examples of productive collaborations with hunt saboteurs, reflected that:
Short of giving them a kidney, I don’t think they’ll ever fully [trust the police] … I think across the country it is changing and there are lots of prosecutions going through. But the past has tainted things with the sabs, unfortunately.
He admitted that some saboteurs will flatly refuse to work with him, despite repeatedly trying to explain to saboteur groups that their refusal to engage with police is counter-productive.
I’ve said to them: ‘If you don’t report it then it doesn’t look like it’s happened and then nothing’s going to ever happen.’ You can spend all your time slagging the police off and putting all over Facebook how rubbish the police are, but if you’re not reporting it to us, then it doesn’t look like an issue.
While these feelings are rooted in historical controversies, more recent scandals have reinforced accusations of police preferential treatment towards hunts. In 2024, senior officers in the Warwickshire police force were accused of agreeing a “secret deal” with the Warwickshire Hunt, after potential court proceedings against it were averted following a protocol agreed between senior officers and the hunt.
While an independent report later found that Warwickshire Police had acted with “clear operational independence” when dealing with the hunt, some rural crime officers were angry at what they alleged to Channel 4 reporters were senior officers in the force giving it preferential treatment and “deciding which laws to enforce and which ones not to”.
The contents of the protocol were only exposed after a campaign by saboteurs and local residents, who demanded that the policing of the hunt should be transparent. The protocol has since been dropped, and Warwickshire Police’s incoming chief constable, Alex Franklin-Smith, committed to seeking advice from other forces regarding trail hunting, which he said can be “a challenging area for policing”. But he added that when it comes to fox hunting: “Warwickshire Police will operate without fear or favour.”
Accusations of double standards are levelled at police from both sides of the hunt dispute. In recent years, hunt members and their supporters have frequently accused forces of lacking neutrality when policing fox hunting, with claims of biased practices levelled at some officers.
Matt Longman, the National Police Chiefs’ Council lead on fox hunting, has been subject to regular criticism from hunt supporters, some of whom have described him as an “activist” who displays “blatant prejudice” against hunting. A number of politicians have called for his removal, with former defence secretary Sir Ben Wallace commenting in 2024: “[Longman] is supposed to police without fear or favour. If he can’t then he should be removed, because that is part of this debate about two-tier policing.”
In fact, both the Hunt Saboteurs Association and the British Hound Sports Association have accused the police of two-tier policing in their approach to fox hunting – but the police officers we spoke to refuted accusations of bias on either side. Wildlife crime officer Dan said that while his job is “to uphold the law without fear or favour … the hunt [lobby] obviously massively think that I am anti-hunt”. He explained:
I hate the term ‘two-tier policing’ for obvious reasons … The hunting fraternity believe they are more entitled than others, and that does remain an issue. You can see that in some of the complaints we get.
A 2020 report by campaign group Action Against Foxhunting found evidence of police officers regularly turning a blind eye to law-breaking by hunts. In a foreword to the report, former police officer and animal cruelty investigator Richard Barradale-Smith wrote:
The systemic failure in dealing with hunting crimes since the hunting act came into force has been deliberate. The legislation introduced was designed to make the act virtually unenforceable and successive chief constables and senior officers across the country have chosen to turn a blind eye to it ever since. This places many frontline officers sent to deal with those incidents in an impossible position.
James, Dan and the other officers we spoke to all acknowledge that the legacy of poor police practices has created a deep institutional mistrust of the police among hunt saboteurs. They also accept that some poor police practices continue, and that, as James puts it, saboteurs “don’t always get the best service from the police” – which can undermine relationships carefully built between individual officers and saboteur groups.
But they were unanimous in saying that police-saboteur collaboration is the foundation from which successful convictions of illegal fox hunting must be built, as saboteur evidence is almost always the trigger that starts an investigation. The HSA has recognised this, claiming that in the last five years, all convictions of hunt groups have been the result of evidence gathered by saboteurs.
Yet for all the successful convictions described to us in our research, many more examples were recounted of investigations being discontinued for a variety of reasons.
Meanwhile, the new fox hunting season is well under way. In the last season, there were a reported 411 incidents of foxes being chased or killed by hounds – a figure that some campaigners told us barely scratches the surface. This, inevitably, causes frustration for all involved and, at times, tests the fragile alliances between police and saboteurs.
Whatever happens while Labour is in power regarding the prospective ban on trail hunting, saboteurs tell us they will not leave the field until they are confident that no animal will be hunted and killed again. Continuing their complicated alliance with some police officers will be a key step in achieving this goal.
Familiar bars of chocolate have been getting more expensive, and often smaller. Is this really just because cocoa has become more expensive, as is often claimed in the media?
In the UK, a Cadbury Dairy Milk “family” bar has shrunk from 200g to 180g since 2021. In the same period, the price has risen from £1.86 to about £2.75, a price increase of around 65% once you account for the smaller size. Over the same period, overall consumer prices have risen by around 21%.
Much of the media coverage of these changes points in the same direction: higher cocoa prices, often linked to climate change and disease damaging cocoa harvests, particularly in West Africa. One recent article about Maltesers (made by Mars) described increases as the “direct result” of wholesale cocoa prices.
Cocoa prices have indeed risen sharply in recent years. But on their own, they do not fully explain why the prices of chocolate products have risen so much, nor why they remain high even as cocoa prices have eased from their peak.
Before the recent spike, international cocoa prices had been trading for several years at around US$2,400 to US$2,600 (£1,800-£1,950) per tonne. But by spring 2024, they had quadrupled, briefly trading above US$10,000 per tonne in December 2024 and January 2025. This reflected poor harvests, plant disease, and heavy rains and heat in major producing countries such as Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana.
Since that peak, cocoa prices have fallen by nearly half and are now twice their pre-spike level at around US$6,000 per tonne. This reflects expectations of better supply, as weather conditions improve in West Africa and new plantings in Ecuador reach maturity.
Wholesale prices for sugar and whole milk powder also rose after 2021, though by smaller multiples than cocoa, and have since eased from their recent highs.
But the price of a chocolate bar at the checkout reflects more than its ingredients. It includes processing, packaging, energy, transport, staff costs, marketing and the profit margins of both manufacturer and retailer.
How costs have changed
Analysis by the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority of food and grocery manufacturers’ costs shows that, for many processed foods, ingredients are less than half of the production costs, with further costs added along the supply chain.
What happened to Dairy Milk?
To show how changes in ingredient costs compare with prices for consumers, my price calculations focus on a single example: Cadbury Dairy Milk, the UK’s favourite chocolate brand.
By combining international wholesale prices for cocoa, sugar and whole milk powder with a simplified recipe (based on Dairy Milk’s minimum cocoa and milk‑solids percentages of 20% and 23%, with sugar making up the remainder), I estimated the cost per 100g of milk chocolate of these key high‑cost ingredients. It rose from around 10p-15p in late 2021 to 20p-30p at the peak.
In December 2021, a 200g Dairy Milk family bar in a large supermarket cost about £1.86 – roughly 93p per 100g of chocolate. By late 2025, the standard family bar was 180g and typically cost around £2.75, about £1.53 per 100g. This is a rise of 60p per 100g, or about 65%.
The increase in retail chocolate prices until early 2024 was around half the rise in wholesale ingredient costs. But after that, further hikes in retail prices were much less clearly justified by ingredient costs alone. Even at their highest point, ingredients added only about 10p-15p per 100g relative to 2021 – yet by late 2025, the retail price per 100g was about 60p higher than in 2021.
The aspect of this increase not explained by ingredients reflects other costs and choices, including higher energy and packaging costs, higher wages, and decisions by manufacturers and retailers about margins and pack sizes.
One of these choices is “shrinkflation”: keeping the price broadly similar while reducing the size of bars and tubs, as with Dairy Milk’s move from 200g to 180g. This size reduction alone contributes roughly a quarter of the increase in the price per gram of chocolate.
Cocoa prices have since fallen by about half from their peak, and wholesale sugar and whole milk powder prices have also eased. But Dairy Milk has not become cheaper, nor has the family bar’s size increased back to 200g.
Of course, Cadbury is not the only company to do this. And while the price rises over the past 18 months cannot be explained by wholesale ingredient costs, Mondelez, Cadbury’s owner, reports that its gross profit margin fell from around 40% a year earlier to about 30% in the latest quarter, even as it raised prices.
Mondelez previously said its chocolates continued to be “much more expensive to make” and so it had slightly reduced the weight and increased the list price of some products. There is no suggestion that the company is misleading the public on the reason for price rises.
Record cocoa prices are real, and they have clearly pushed up the cost of making chocolate. And cocoa production in future may again be hit by climate, disease or other shocks, leading to fresh spikes in ingredient prices.
But other pressures and pricing choices have also contributed to how much consumers must now pay for their favourite chocolate – and how sticky those higher prices have proved to be.
Peter Alexander does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Source: The Conversation – UK – By Jessica Mary Bradley, Senior Lecturer in Literacies and Language, University of Sheffield
Pain is not experienced equally. Nor is it believed equally.
Research consistently shows that chronic pain conditions disproportionately affect women and people assigned female at birth. Yet the ways pain is recognised, recorded and treated within healthcare systems puts women at a disadvantage. Research repeatedly demonstrates that women and girls face greater barriers to diagnosis and treatment, with practitioner scepticism contributing to unequal access to care.
A 2024 study by researchers at King’s College London found that women were not only less likely than men to be prescribed pain relief, but also less likely to have their pain scores formally recorded. The authors suggest this disparity is driven by enduring biases around gender and pain intensity, including assumptions that women may “over-report” their symptoms. Similarly, a 2024 parliamentary report by the Women and Equalities Committee identified what it termed “medical misogyny”, describing how the normalisation and dismissal of women’s pain leads to delayed diagnoses and diminished quality of life.
These gendered experiences of bodies and pain are not new. They have long been interrogated by writers, poets and artists, from Frida Kahlo’s uncompromising self-portraits of physical suffering to Tracey Emin’s ongoing, autobiographical explorations of illness, vulnerability and endurance.
Women’s embodied experiences of pain – how pain is felt, understood and lived through the body – sit at the heart of Divine Archives. This is the first solo exhibition by Yorkshire-based interdisciplinary artist Emily Ryalls, which is currently showing at The Art House in Wakefield.
Working across photography, sculpture and performance, Ryalls explores the blurred boundaries between artist and subject, often through close collaboration with others. Her work brings individual experiences into collective dialogue.
The exhibition is also rooted in place. The workshops that led to Divine Archives took place in the grounds of the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, where Ryalls recently completed a residency. Ryalls designs artistic processes that invite participants to perform with the natural environment, their bodies and their memories. While self-portrait sessions focused specifically on medical contexts, other making processes – including ceramics and cyanotype printing – were used to explore wider lived experiences of pain.
Curated by the gallery’s co-executive director, Damon Jackson-Waldock, the exhibition offers a multi-sensory document of this collective experience of creating. On show are multimedia artworks, films projected onto large transparent screens, remnants of ceramic pots, and large-scale cyanotype prints. Visitors are invited to participate and to explore the creative processes and outputs.
With Divine Archives, Ryalls draws on her own knowledge and experiences as a creative practitioner and researcher (she recently studied for an MA in the University of York’s Centre for Women’s Studies). Building on previous work in which she explored her own engagements with healthcare systems (and experience of failures of recognition of pain symptoms), Ryalls brings together a collective of 46 women to co-create, using photography and film to document the experience.
In the book she produced to accompany the exhibition, Ryalls describes this practice as “the act of archiving”. She encouraged her collaborators to use the collective space to think about bodies as “beautiful and radical archives”. Ryalls will continue to develop these themes, practices and ideas through a Pilgrim Trust-funded creative health project, Photovoices.
Archives of the human body are presented here as partial, messy, complex and intertwined, foregrounding the intricate connections between the individual and the collective. They show us a possible way forward, a reworking of how women’s experiences might be made visible and audible, challenging failures of recognition.
Emily Ryalls: Divine Archives is at The Art House Wakefield until March 7 2026.
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Jessica Mary Bradley has worked with The Art House including research and evaluation for diverse community arts-focused projects since 2022.
Jessica Mary Bradley receives funding through the British Academy / Leverhulme small grants scheme (2025) in collaboration with the Wellcome Trust.
The shape of the universe is not something we often think about. But my colleagues and I have published a new study suggests it could be asymmetric or lopsided, meaning not the same in every direction.
Should we care about this? Well, today’s “standard cosmological model” – which describes the dynamics and structure of the entire cosmos – rests squarely on the assumption that it is isotropic (looks the same in all directions), and homogeneous when averaged on large scales.
But several so-called “tensions” – or disagreements in the data – pose challenges to this idea of a uniform universe.
We have just published a paper looking at one of the most significant of these tensions, called the cosmic dipole anomaly. We conclude that the cosmic dipole anomaly poses a serious challenge to the most widely accepted description of the universe, the standard cosmological model (also called the Lambda-CDM model).
So what is the cosmic dipole anomaly and why is it such a problem for attempts to give a detailed account of the cosmos?
Let’s start with the cosmic microwave background (CMB), which is the relic radiation left over from the big bang. The CMB is uniform over the sky to within one part in a hundred thousand.
So cosmologists feel confident in modelling the universe using the “maximally symmetric” description of space-time in Einstein’s theory of general relativity. This symmetric vision for the universe, where it looks the same everywhere and in all directions, is known as the “FLRW description”.
This vastly simplifies the solution of Einstein’s equations and is the basis for the Lambda-CDM model.
But there are several important anomalies, including a widely debated one called the Hubble tension. It is named after Edwin Hubble, who is credited with having discovered in 1929 that the universe is expanding.
The tension started to emerge from different datasets in the 2000s, mainly from the Hubble space telescope, and also recent data from the Gaia satellite. This tension is a cosmological disagreement, where measurements of the universe’s expansion rate from its early days don’t match up with measurements from the nearby (more recent) universe.
The cosmic dipole anomaly has received much less attention than the Hubble tension, but it is even more fundamental to our understanding of the cosmos. So what is it?
Having established that the cosmic microwave background is symmetric on large scales, variations in this relic radiation from the big bang have been found. One of the most significant is called the CMB dipole anisotropy. This is the largest temperature difference in the CMB, where one side of the sky is hotter and the opposite side cooler – by about one part in a thousand.
This variation in the CMB does not challenge the Lambda-CDM model of the universe. But we should find corresponding variations in other astronomical data.
In 1984, George Ellis and John Baldwin asked whether a similar variation, or “dipole anisotropy”, exists in the sky distribution of distant astronomical sources such as radio galaxies and quasars. The sources must be very distant because nearby sources could create a spurious “clustering dipole”.
If the “symmetrical universe” FLRW assumption is correct, then this variation in distant astronomical sources should be directly determined by the observed variation in the CMB. This is known as the Ellis-Baldwin test, after the astronomers.
Consistency between the variations in the CMB and in matter would support the standard Lambda-CDM model. Discord would directly challenge it, and indeed the FLRW description. Because it is a very precise test, the data catalogue required to perform it has become available only recently.
The outcome is that the universe fails the Ellis-Baldwin test. The variation in matter does not match that in the CMB. Since the possible sources of error are quite different for telescopes and satellites, and for different wavelengths in the spectrum, it is reassuring that the same result is obtained with terrestrial radio telescopes and satellites observing at mid-infrared wavelengths.
The cosmic dipole anomaly has thus established itself as a major challenge to the standard cosmological model, even if the astronomical community has chosen to largely ignore it.
This may be because there is no easy way to patch up this problem. It requires abandoning not just the Lambda-CDM model but the FLRW description itself, and going back to square one.
Yet an avalanche of data is expected from new satellites like Euclid and SPHEREx, and telescopes such as the Vera Rubin Observatory and the Square Kilometre Array. It is conceivable that we may soon receive bold new insights into how to construct a new cosmological model, harnessing recent advances in a subset of artificial intelligence (AI) called machine learning.
The impact would be truly huge on fundamental physics – and on our understanding of the universe.
Subir Sarkar receives funding from the UK Research & Innovation (UKRI) councils.
