Source: The Conversation – UK – By Thankom Arun, Professor of Global Development and Accountability, University of Essex
Keir Starmer’s first visit to India was a chance to talk about trade, technology and a closer relationship. The UK prime minister said he was impressed by the country’s “sheer scale” and impressive economic growth.
He may be fairly envious of that growth which, at 7.8% for the first quarter of the year, is several times higher than the UK’s. The country is projected to become the world’s third-largest economy by 2030, with an estimated GDP of US$7.3 trillion (£5.5 trillion). Starmer may also have noticed that one of India’s biggest economic successes is in the burgeoning sector of financial technology, where it is in direct competition with the UK.
Commonly referred to as “fintech”, financial technology involves digital tools and software which make things like banking and investing more efficient and accessible. For years, London has been celebrated as a global hub.
But our research suggests that India’s very different approach to fintech may be a more resilient and forward-looking model – and one which offers important lessons for the UK and its government.
For in the UK, fintech is almost entirely a London-based affair. The capital attracts more than 80% of the country’s investment in the sector, and is home to most of its startups.
But the cost of this success is that other parts of the UK lag behind. Our study shows that this concentration limits innovation and employment outside of London. In effect, the city’s “superhub” status may now be holding back the next stage of national fintech development.
India’s story looks very different. Rather than revolving around a single big city, fintech has evolved across a broad range of regional hubs. Bangalore, Mumbai and New Delhi lead the way, but newer centres such as Telangana and Tamil Nadu are also rapidly emerging.
This spread of growth is not accidental. It reflects years of government investment in digital public infrastructure across the country, as well as a great deal of foreign investment.
We found that between 2000 and 2022, India pulled in US$144 billion compared to Britain’s US$82 billion, reflecting growing investor confidence in India’s fintech market.
That investment is also much more widely spread out in India, where we found a much more balanced and resilient innovation landscape compared to the UK. The outcome is not only faster growth, but more development throughout the country.
Overall we found that the trajectory of India’s fintech sector appears to be more sustainable and regionally dispersed than the UK’s – a clear validation of the country’s “digital-first” strategy, which was launched ten years ago.
We also noted the success of direct government involvement in platforms like the Unified Payments Interface (a game changing initiative which allows instant money transfers between any two bank accounts using a smartphone and now processes over 12 billion transactions a month).
Indian innovation
For the UK, our research concluded that although London’s dominance in fintech has served the country well, it now risks becoming a bottleneck. A fintech sector model built around a single global city limits regional opportunities and undermines national productivity.
If the government’s broader “national renewal” agenda is to succeed, fintech policy could become a test case for rebalancing the economy. That means encouraging investment in regional clusters and directly supporting innovation outside London.
But the two countries could also help each other out. Together, they could create one of the most dynamic fintech partnerships in the world.
As well as trade and investment, such a collaboration could provide a dynamic model for inclusive, technology-driven growth, linking Britain’s financial expertise with India’s digital ingenuity.
For the global fintech landscape is changing. The era of a dominant hubs, whether London, New York or Singapore, is giving way to a more decentralised model. And India’s rise shows that the future of finance lies not in concentration, but in connectivity.
Sustainable innovation depends not just on capital and talent, but on geography, inclusion, and the ability to share the digital dividends of growth. If Keir Starmer looks east for inspiration and partnership, he may find that India’s fintech journey offers precisely the blueprint the UK needs – one that proves there is greater strength to be found not in one hub, but in many.
Source: The Conversation – UK – By Deborah Fry, Professor of International Child Protection Research and Director of Data at the Childlight Global Child Safety Institute, University of Edinburgh
Around 5 million children across western Europe report having been raped or sexually assaulted by the age of 18, according to the latest data gathered by Childlight, the Global Child Safety Institute. That’s about 7% of the child population.
In south Asia, data for India, Nepal and Sri Lanka suggests the figure rises to 12% of children – more than 50 million young people in those three countries alone.
The online picture is equally alarming. In western Europe alone, one in five children (19.6%) say they have faced unwanted or pressured sexual interactions online before adulthood.
The data also reveals that over 60% of all child sexual abuse material in western Europe (and 30% globally) is hosted in the Netherlands.
These shocking figures come from Childlight’s latest Into the Light index. As Childlight’s director of data, and as a professor of international child protection research, I have spent nearly 20 years studying the patterns of child sexual exploitation and abuse worldwide. What our data shows is both deeply troubling and a call to urgent action.
How we measure the scale
In 2024, we launched the inaugural Into the Light index – the first comprehensive global report of child sexual exploitation and abuse. It introduced a new framework, the first regional prevalence estimates and indicators of child sexual abuse material.
The 2025 edition goes further. It covers both online and offline abuse and country-level data for 41 countries in western Europe and south Asia, incorporating the analysis of:
89 studies which used survey methods to identify victims of rape and sexual assault
crime statistics and child helpline data
global child sexual abuse material trends, including AI-generated imagery and hosting patterns.
For western Europe, we reviewed 48 studies from 19 countries, finding that between 3.7% and 9.6% of children reported being raped or sexually assaulted by the age of 18. For south Asia, representative data from India, Nepal and Sri Lanka shows around 12% of children were raped or sexually assaulted by 18 – 14.5% of girls and 11.5% of boys.
What the data reveals
Our research points to widespread abuse and some keys issues emerged.
AI-generated child sexual abuse material is rising: reports rose 1,325% between 2023 and 2024, amid growing concerns about deepfake images placing children’s faces onto sexual material. This rise was seen in reports to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, which rose to over 67,000 in 2024, from 4,700 reports logged in 2023.
Meanwhile, familial abuse is leading to the creation of new child sexual abuse material, with a large proportion of identified material depicting immediate family members.
Behind these numbers are real children, millions who stay silent out of fear, guilt or loyalty to family members. Yet the consequences are lifelong, affecting mental health, physical health and even life expectancy.
Childlight, hosted by the University of Edinburgh and the University of New South Wales, is the world’s first independent global data institute dedicated to protecting children from sexual exploitation and abuse.
As I have written before, the fight to keep young people safe from harm has been hampered by how data differs in quality and consistency around the world. Our aim is to work in partnership with many other organisations to help join up the system and close the data gaps.
What can be done
The good news is that solutions exist and momentum is building, with 30 governments globally pledging action to improve online safety for children since an intergovernmental summit in Colombia last November.
The legislation is showing promising signs. The EU Digital Services Act and the UK Online Safety Act now require platforms to assess child risk, report incidents and publish transparency data. Australia’s eSafety Commissioner has also compelled firms to publish reports revealing how they are failing to track the problem.
Enforcement is having an impact. In April 2025, Kidflix, one of the largest paedophile platforms in the world, was shut down through an international Europol-backed operation, with servers seized and perpetrators arrested.
Prevention is working too. The Barnahus model in Europe, for example, brings together police, health and social services to support children in a child-friendly environment. It has been linked to more perpetrators being charged and convicted.
In addition, “blocklist” technology which acts as a virtual shield is thwarting 3 million attempts to view illegal sexual images of children online every week. Lists of known online addresses which host child sexual abuse material are compiled and shared by organisations including Internet Watch Foundation, so they can be blocked by major internet service providers, shutting down access to harmful images.
Urgency matters
The law must require proactive detection and removal of child sexual abuse material. Education and open conversations that empower children and families must be supported and encouraged. And finally we must invest in prevention models that work.
In the UK, that could mean extending the law on criminalising paedophile manuals to include material generated by AI. It could mean a Barnahus expansion, and it certainly should mean reforming the Criminal Injuries Compensation Scheme so all victims of child sexual abuse (including those harmed “virtually” through technology) are recognised and supported.
Child sexual exploitation and abuse is not inevitable. Like other public health crises, it is preventable and can prevent a lifetime of trauma with benefits for children, families, communities and economies.
But prevention depends on first understanding the true scale and nature of the problem. Our data is a spotlight, exposing what too often remains hidden in the shadows.
Deborah Fry receives funding from Human Dignity Foundation.
Give me control of a nation’s money supply, and I care not who makes its laws. (Mayer Amschel Rothschild, founder of the Rothschild banking dynasty.)
Throughout history, control over money has been one of the most powerful levers of state authority. Rulers have long understood that whoever issues and manages the currency also commands the economy and, by extension, society itself.
In Tudor England, Henry VIII’s “Great Debasement” between 1542 and 1551 reduced the silver content of coins from more than 90% to barely one-third, while leaving the king’s portrait shining on the surface, of course. The policy financed wars and courtly extravagance, but also fuelled inflation and public distrust in coinage.
Centuries earlier, Roman emperors had resorted to similar tricks with the denarius, steadily reducing its silver content until by the 3rd century AD, it contained little more than trace amounts, undermining its credibility and contributing to economic instability.
Outside Europe, the same pattern held. In 11th-century China, the Song dynasty pioneered paper money, extending state control over taxation and trade. This was a groundbreaking innovation, but later dynasties such as the Ming over-issued notes, sparking inflation and loss of trust in the currency.
Such episodes underline a timeless truth: money is never neutral. It has always been an instrument of governance – whether to project authority, consolidate control or disguise fiscal weakness. The establishment of central banks, from the Bank of England in 1694 to the US Federal Reserve in 1913, formalised that authority.
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Today, the same story is entering a new digital chapter. As Axel van Trotsenburg, senior managing director of the World Bank, wrote in 2024: “Embracing digitalisation is no longer a choice. It’s a necessity.” By this he meant not simply switching to online banking, but making the currencies we use, and the mechanisms for regulating it, entirely digital.
Just as rulers once clipped coins or over-printed notes, governments are now testing how far digital money can extend their reach – both within and beyond national boundaries. Of course, different governments and political systems have very different ideas about how the money of the future should be designed.
In March 2024, then-former President Trump, back on the hustings trail, declared: “As your president, I will never allow the creation of a central bank digital currency.” It was a campaign moment, but also a salvo in a much larger battle – not just over the future of money, but who controls it.
In the US, the issuance of currency – whether in the form of physical cash or digital bank deposits and electronic payments – has traditionally been monopolised by the Federal Reserve (more commonly known as “the Fed”), a technocratic institution designed to operate independently from the elected government and houses. But Trump’s hostility toward the Fed is well-documented, and noisy.
During his second term, Trump has publicly berated the Fed’s chair, Jerome Powell, calling him “a stubborn MORON” over his interest rate policies, and even floating the idea of replacing him. Trump’s discomfort with the Fed’s autonomy echoes earlier populist movements such as President Andrew Jackson’s 1830s crusade against the Second Bank of the United States, when federal financial elites were portrayed as obstacles to democratic control of money.
In March 2025, when Trump issued an executive order establishing a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve, he signalled the opening of a new front in this institutional battle. By incorporating bitcoin into an official US reserve, the world’s largest economy is, for the first time, sanctioning its use as part of state financial infrastructure.
For a leader like Trump, who has consistently sought to break, bypass or dominate independent institutions – from the judiciary to intelligence agencies – the idea of replacing the Fed’s influence with a state-aligned crypto ecosystem may represent the ultimate act of executive assertion.
Such a step reframes bitcoin as more than an investment fad or criminal fallback; it is being drawn into the formal monetary system – in the US, at least.
America’s crypto future?
Bitcoin is, by a distance, the world’s most valuable cryptocurrency (at the time of writing, one coin is worth just shy of US$120,000) having established a record high in August 2025. Like gold, its value is ensured in part by its finite supply, and its security by the blockchain technology that makes it unhackable.
For most who buy bitcoins, its key value is not as a currency but a speculative investment product – a kind of “digital gold” or high-risk stock that investors buy hoping for big returns. Many people have indeed made millions from their purchases.
But now, thanks in particular to Trump’s aggressively pro-crypto, anti-central bank approach, bitcoin’s potential role as part of a new form of state-controlled digital currency is in the spotlight like never before.
Trump’s framing of bitcoin as “freedom money” reflects its traditional sales pitch as being censorship-resistant, unreviewable, and free from state control. At the same time, his blurring of public authority and private financial interest, when it comes to cryptocurrencies, has raised some serious ethical and governance concerns.
But the crucial innovation here is that Trump is not proposing a truly libertarian system. It is a hybrid model: one where the issuance of money may become privatised while control of the US’s financial reserve strategy – and associated political and economic narratives – remains firmly in state hands.
This raises provocative questions about the future of the Federal Reserve. Could it be sidelined not through legal abolition, but by the growing relevance of parallel monetary systems blessed by the executive? The possibility is no longer far-fetched.
According to a 2023 paper published by the Bank for International Settlements, a powerful if little-known organisation that coordinates central bank policy globally: “The decentralisation of monetary functions across public and private actors introduces a new era of contestable monetary sovereignty.”
In plain English, this means money is no longer the sole domain of states. Tech firms, decentralised communities and even AI-powered platforms are now building alternative value systems that challenge the monopoly of national currencies.
Calls to diminish the role of central banks in shaping macroeconomic outcomes are closely tied to the rise of what the University of Cambridge’s Bennett School of Public Policy calls “crypto populism” – a movement that shifts legitimacy away from unelected technocrats towards “the people”, whether they are retail investors, cryptocurrency miners or politically aligned firms.
Supporters of this agenda argue that central banks have too much unchecked power, from manipulating interest rates to bailing out financial elites, while ordinary savers bear the costs through inflation or higher borrowing charges.
In the US, Trump and his advisers have become the most visible proponents, tying bitcoin and also so-called “stablecoins” (cryptocurrencies designed to maintain a stable value by being pegged to an external asset) to a broader populist narrative about wresting control from elites.
The emergence of this dual monetary system is causing deep unease in traditional financial institutions. Even the economist-activist Yanis Varoufakis – a long-time critic of central banks – has warned of the dangers of Trump’s approach, suggesting that US private stablecoin legislation could deliberately weaken the Fed’s grip on money, while “depriving it of the means to clean up the inevitable mess” that will follow.
Weaponisation of the dollar
Some rival US nations also feel deep unease about its approach to money – in part because of what analysts call the “weaponisation of the dollar”. This describes how US financial dominance, via Swift and correspondent banking systems, has long enabled sanctions that effectively exclude targeted governments, companies or individuals from global finance.
These tools have been used extensively against Iran, Russia, Venezuela and others – triggering efforts by countries including China, Russia and even some EU states to build alternative payment systems and digital currencies, aimed at reducing dependency on the dollar. As the Atlantic put it in 2023, the US appeared to be “pushing away allies and adversaries alike by turning its currency into a geopolitical bludgeon”.
Spurred on by these concerns and an increasing desire to delink from the dollar as the world’s anchor currency, many countries are now moving towards creating their own central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) – government-issued digital currencies backed and regulated by state institutions.
While fully live CBDCs are already in use in countries ranging from the Bahamas and Jamaica to Nigeria, many more are in active pilot phases – including China’s digital yuan (e-CNY). Having been trialled in multiple cities since 2019, the e-CNY now has millions of domestic users and, by mid-2024, had processed nearly US$1 trillion in retail transactions.
A key part of Beijing’s ambition is to use the digital yuan as a strategic hedge against dollar-based clearance systems, positioning it as part of a wider plan to reduce China’s reliance on the US dollar in international trade. Likewise, the European Central Bank has framed its digital euro – which entered its preparation phase in October 2023 – as essential to future European monetary sovereignty, stating that it would reduce reliance on non-European (often US-controlled) digital payment providers such as Visa, Mastercard and PayPal.
In this way, CBDCs are becoming a new front in global competition over who sets the rules of money, trade and financial sovereignty in the digital age. As governments rush to build and test these systems, technologists, civil libertarians and financial institutions are clashing over how best to do this – and whether the world should embrace or fear the rise of central bank digital currencies.
Trojan horses for surveillance?
The experience of using a CBDC will be much like today’s mobile banking apps: you’ll receive your salary directly into a digital wallet, make instant payments in shops or online, and transfer money to friends in seconds. The key difference is all of that money will be a direct claim on the central bank, guaranteed by the state, rather than a private bank.
In many countries, CBDCs are being pitched as more efficient tools for economic inclusion and societal benefit. A 2023 Bank of England consultation paper emphasised that its proposal for a digital pound would be “privacy-respecting by design” and “non-programmable by the state”. It would not replace cash but sit alongside it, the BoE suggested, with each citizen allowed to hold up to a capped limit digital pounds (suggested at £10,000-£20,000) to avoid destabilising commercial bank deposits.
However, some critics see CBDCs as Trojan horses for surveillance. In 2019, a report by the professional services network PWC suggested that CBDCs, if unchecked, could entrench executive power by removing intermediary financial institutions and enabling programmable, direct government control over citizen transactions. According to the report, this could mean stimulus payments that expire if not spent within 30 days, or taxes deducted at the moment of transaction. In other words, CBDCs could be tools of efficiency – but also of unprecedented oversight.
A 2024 CFA Institute paper warned that digital currencies could allow governments to trace, tax or block payments in real time – tools that authoritarian regimes might embrace. The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) has called the advent of this “programmable money” inevitable.
Imagine, for example, a parent transferring 20 digital pounds to their child’s CBDC wallet, but with a rule that this money can only be spent on food, not video games. When the child uses it at a supermarket, their payment is programmed so that the retailer’s suppliers and the tax authority are paid instantly (£15 to the shop, £3 to wholesalers, £2 straight to the tax office) with no extra steps. In theory, at least, everyone is happy: the parent sees the child spent the money responsibly, the suppliers are paid immediately, and the retailer’s tax bill is settled automatically.
In technical terms, programmable payments such as this are straightforward for CBDCs. But such a system raises big questions about privacy and personal freedom. Some critics fear that programmable CBDCs might be used to restrict spending on disapproved categories such as alcohol and fuel, create expiry dates for unemployment benefits, or enforce climate targets through money flow limits. The BIS has warned that CBDCs should be “designed with safeguards” to preserve user privacy, financial inclusion and interoperability across borders.
Even well-intentioned digital systems can create tools of surveillance. CBDC architecture choices, such as default privacy settings, tiered access or transaction expiry can all shape the extent of executive control embedded in the system. If designed without democratic oversight, these infrastructures risk institutional capture.
Some CBDC pilots – including China’s e-CNY, the Sand Dollar and the eNaira – have been criticised for omitting clear privacy guarantees, with their respective central banks deferring decisions on privacy protections to future legislation. According to Norbert Michel, director of the Cato Institute’s Center for Monetary and Financial Alternatives and one of the most prominent US voices warning about the risks of CBDCs:
A fully implemented CBDC gives the government complete control over the money going into, and coming out of, every person’s account. It’s not difficult to see that this level of government control is incompatible with both economic and political freedom.
Fears of mission creep
The concerns being raised about central bank digital currencies extend beyond personal payment controls. A recent analysis by Rand Corporation highlighted how law enforcement capabilities could dramatically increase with the introduction of CBDCs. While this could strengthen efforts to stop money laundering and the financing of terrorism, it also raises fears of “mission creep”, whereby the same tools could be used to police ordinary citizens’ spending or political activities.
Concerns about mission creep – the idea that a system introduced for limited goals (efficiency, anti-money laundering) gradually expands into broader tools of control – extend into other areas of digital authoritarianism. The Bennett School has cautioned that without legal and political safeguards, CBDCs risk empowering state surveillance and undermining democratic oversight, especially in an interconnected global system.
It is not anti-technology or overly conspiratorial to ask hard questions about the design, governance and safeguards built into our future money. The legitimacy of CBDCs will hinge on public trust, and that trust must be earned. As has been highlighted by the OECD, democratic values like privacy, civic trust and rights protection must all be integral to CBDC design.
The future of money
Predictably, the public view of what we want our money to look like in future is mixed. The tensions we see between centralised CBDCs and decentralised alternatives reflect fundamentally different philosophies.
In the US, populist rhetoric has found a strong base among cryptocurrency investors and libertarian movements. At the same time, surveys in Europe suggest many people remain sceptical of replacing a central bank’s authority, associating it with stability and trustworthiness.
For the US Federal Reserve, the debate over bitcoin, decentralised finance (“DeFi”) and stablecoins goes to the heart of American financial power. Behind closed doors, some US officials worry that both the unchecked use of stablecoins and a widespread adoption of foreign CBDCs like China’s e‑CNY will erode the dollar’s central role and weaken the US’s monetary policy apparatus.
In this context, Trump’s push to elevate crypto into a US Strategic Bitcoin Reserve carries serious implications. While US officials generally avoid direct comment on partisan moves, their policy documents make the stakes clear: if crypto expands outside regulatory boundaries, this could undermine financial stability and weaken the very tools – from monetary policy to sanctions – that sustain the dollar’s global dominance.
Meanwhile, the Bank of England’s governor, Andrew Bailey, writing in the Financial Times this week, sounded more accommodating of a financial future that includes stablecoins, suggesting: “It is possible, at least partially, to separate money from credit provision, with banks and stablecoins coexisting and non-banks carrying out more of the credit provision role.” He has previously stressed that stablecoins must “pass the test of singleness of money”, ensuring that one pound always equals one pound (something that cannot be guaranteed if a currency is backed by risky assets).
This isn’t just caution for caution’s sake – it’s grounded in both history and recent events.
During the US’s Free Banking Era in the middle of the 19th century, state-chartered banks could issue their own paper money (banknotes) with little oversight. These “wildcat banks” often issued more notes than they could redeem, especially when economic stress hit – meaning people holding those notes found they weren’t worth the paper they were printed on.
A much more recent example is the collapse of TerraUSD (UST) in May 2022. Terra was a so-called stablecoin that was supposed to keep its value pegged 1:1 with the US dollar. In practice, it relied on algorithms and reserves that turned out to be fragile. When confidence cracked, UST lost its peg, dropping from $1 to as low as 10 cents in a matter of days. The crash wiped out over US$40 billion (around £29 billion) in value and shook trust in the whole stablecoin sector.
But Bailey’s crypto caution extends to CBDCs too. In his most recent Mansion House speech, the Bank of England governor said he remains unconvinced of the need for a “Britcoin” CBDC, so long as improvements to bank payment systems (such as making bank transfers faster, cheaper and more user-friendly) prove effective.
Ultimately, the form our money takes in future is not a question of technology so much as trust. In its latest guidance, the IMF underscores the necessity of earning public trust, not assuming it, by involving citizens, watchdog groups and independent experts in CBDC design, rather than allowing central banks or big tech to shape it unilaterally.
If done right, digital money could be more inclusive, more transparent, and more efficient than today’s systems. But that future is not guaranteed. The code is already being written – the question is: by who, and with what values?
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The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Imagine if your smartwatch didn’t just tell you how many steps you’ve walked or calories you’ve burned, but how many heartbeats you’ve “spent” each day. According to a recent study, that number might one day become another marker of health – a “heartbeat budget” that could, in theory, tell you if you’re overspending your most vital resource.
The idea of a lifetime heartbeat limit has floated around for decades. It’s based on an old myth that the heart comes with a fixed number of beats, often said to be about 2.5 billion, so every extra one you use brings you closer to running out. Thankfully, that’s pretty roundly accepted now to be untrue.
Exercise doesn’t shorten your life by making your heart beat faster. If anything, people who exercise tend to have lower resting heart rates and live longer. But the new research, published in JACC: Advances, borrows that same metaphor in a modern, data-driven way.
The scientists behind the study analysed fitness-app data from elite athletes, comparing resting heart rates with total daily beats. They estimated that endurance-trained athletes “save” around 11,500 heartbeats per day compared with untrained adults, thanks to lower resting rates.
But those savings don’t last. A single Tour de France stage can cost riders about 35,000 extra beats – according to the researchers’ estimates – reflecting just how hard the heart works during a competition.
This push and pull, saving beats at rest, spending them during exertion, is what researchers call heartbeat consumption. The concept is simple: your total beats per day reflect how your heart responds to everything you do, from sleep to stress to sport. Fitness trackers already measure heart rate continuously, so it wouldn’t take much to start summing those beats and turning them into a new health metric.
But does it actually mean anything? That’s where things get murkier. The study’s authors admit their analysis was small and observational. They didn’t track participants’ health outcomes, only patterns in their heart rate data. A high daily heartbeat count could mean someone is active, or it could reflect anxiety, poor fitness, caffeine or heat. Without context, the number itself tells us little.
Still, the idea has intuitive appeal. Heart rate is one of the clearest windows into how our body is coping with life’s demands. A persistently high resting heart rate has been linked to an increased risk of heart disease, stroke and early death.
Meanwhile, variability in the timing between beats, known as heart rate variability, is a well-established indicator of stress and emotional wellbeing. Thinking in terms of “beat consumption” could help people visualise that connection between physical and mental load.
Athletes already know the power of that balance. Training too hard, too often, can elevate resting heart rate, reduce heart rate variability and blunt performance – a classic sign of overtraining.
Lighter, so-called active recovery sessions, where the heart rate stays low, are known to speed recovery, improve overall performance and stabilise mood. If a “heartbeat budget” helps people notice when their ticker is working overtime, it might encourage gentler activity days before burnout hits.
What the data doen’t tell us
There are also implications for people living with chronic conditions. Some health apps already use heart rate thresholds to help users avoid overexertion, especially when fatigue or heart strain can make recovery costly. In that sense, tracking heartbeat consumption could serve as a safety signal rather than a competition, a way of knowing when the body needs to slow down.
But as with most bright new ideas in fitness science, a note of caution is needed. The JACC authors acknowledge that they used fitness tracker data from a small sample of highly trained cyclists and runners. That’s a narrow slice of the population.
They didn’t measure blood pressure, oxygen levels or recovery biomarkers – all of which matter for heart health. Translating those findings into advice for ordinary smartwatch users will take larger, long-term studies.
Then there’s the philosophical question: should we really treat heartbeats as a finite commodity? Exercise “spends” heartbeats in the short term but often “earns” more life in the long run.
A long-distance runner’s heart might beat more times in a single day, but fewer times across a lifetime, because endurance training lowers resting rate and improves cardiac efficiency. In that sense, using your heart isn’t the problem, but not using it might be.
Heartbeat consumption, at least for now, remains a metaphor in search of meaning. Still, it’s a poetic one. Whether or not your fitness tracker or smartwatch ever starts counting total beats, the message behind it is simple: pay attention to how your heart behaves across the day. It’s not about saving beats – it’s about spending them wisely.
Tom Brownlee 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.
I’ve long been fascinated by one of the most stubborn patterns in biology: males and females rarely live the same length of time. In humans, women nearly always outlive men, with an average advantage of about five years worldwide today. This pattern holds across history, from 18th-century Swedes to contemporary Japanese – though the magnitude of this sex-difference can vary considerably.
Humans are not alone in showing such sex biases in longevity. Across the Tree of Life, sex differences in longevity are widespread, but they are neither uniform nor always female-biased.
And a new study study led by evolution researcher Johanna Staerk, published in Science Advances, conducted the most comprehensive analysis of sex differences in longevity in birds and mammals. The study offered new insight into why these differences evolved and found these differences are more pronounced in the wild than in zoos.
Among mammals, females generally live longer. The recent comparative study examined 528 mammal species in zoos and found that 72% showed a female life expectancy advantage, averaging 12% longer lives for females. In the wild, where environmental pressures are stronger, the female advantage was even greater: around 19%.
In my own work with the Compadre animal demographic database and with wild populations, I’ve seen the same female advantage emerge time and again. Wild female African elephants often live into their 60s, while males rarely exceed their late 40s. This is in part because males spend much of adulthood in risky solitary ranging and competing through combat. Similarly, in moose, females live twice as long (17-22 years) as males.
Genetics plays a key role. Male mammals are the heterogametic sex (meaning males have an X and a Y sex chromosome), so males are more likely to inherit recessive x mutations. Also high levels of testosterone can suppress immune function.
However, the clearest evidence points to sexual selection. In polygynous mammals (males compete for access to harems of females) such as red deer or lions, males grow large bodies and weaponry, and fight for mates, which reduces their survival chances.
The reversal in birds still surprises students when I teach life-history theory. Biology rarely hands us neat rules.
Across the 648 avian species studied in zoos by Staerk and colleagues, in 68% of them males outlived females, with an average 5% male advantage. In the wild, the gap widened to over 25%.
Female birds are the heterogametic sex (ZW chromosomes), which may expose them to greater genetic risks. More importantly, many female birds pay heavy reproductive costs. Egg production, incubation and chick rearing demand enormous energy. In some species such as ducks and songbirds, this burden translates into shorter female lifespans.
The exceptions are illuminating. Raptors like buzzards and eagles often show a female advantage. In the wild, female tawny owls live longer. But in zoos the advantage shifts to males. The reason is not yet known.
Beyond fur and feathers
Previous research has shown insects have vivid contrasts in longevity. In many moths and mayflies, females live only a few hours or days as adults, exhausting themselves in egg laying, while males persist days or weeks longer. Insects who live in highly organised colonies reverse this pattern: ant and bee queens can live decades, far outlasting short-lived male drones.
Here, the colony shields queens from many ecological risks, such as the need to evade predators when out looking for food, illustrating how social organisation can radically alter the relationship between sex and survival.
Amphibians and reptiles are known to showcase mixed patterns. Male frogs often die younger due to the costs of calling and combat at breeding sites, whereas female frogs sometimes pay higher survival costs through egg production.
Fish often show flexibility in sex roles, alongside variability in female and male lifespans. In stickleback fish, males provide sole parental care, defending nests at great cost. They often die shortly after the breeding season, while females survive to reproduce again. Conversely, in species where females produce enormous clutches, their shorter lives balance the equation.
Humans in context
Across cultures and history, women live longer than men. In 21st-century Japan, female life expectancy exceeds 87 years, compared to 81 for men. Among Hadza hunter–gatherers, who live in Tanzania, women live longer than men too.
Social and medical advances, such as better maternal care, have widened the human female edge in modern populations.
Intriguingly, the human “female advantage” is smaller than in apes, probably because sexual selection is weaker in humans. Female chimpanzees and gorillas live substantially longer than males, often by more than a decade. Indeed, men face fewer risks from mate competition than chimpanzees.
Why does sex-based longevity differ so much?
There are two main hypotheses. First is the heterogametic sex hypothesis, as mentioned above, which predicts that the sex with two different sex chromosomes (XY in mammals, ZW in birds) suffers shorter lives. However, this fails to explain the exceptions, such as long-lived female raptors.
Second are life history and sexual selection trade-offs. Traits that increase reproductive success often reduce survival. Among mammals, males die younger when they invest heavily in competition, size or weaponry. Among birds, females pay with their lives for egg production and parental care. The new study supported this explanation. Non-monogamous mammals with significantly larger males show the largest female advantage.
Who wants to live forever anyway
A longer life does not necessarily translate into better quality of life. In humans, although women live longer almost everywhere, they often spend more years in poor health compared to men, burdened by chronic conditions such as osteoporosis, dementia or autoimmune disorders. Similarly, in some nonhuman animals, females survive longer but may experience prolonged periods of reduced reproduction or physical performance.
A “female advantage” in survival may therefore come with hidden costs.
So, do females live longer than males across the Tree of Life? Often, yes, but not because of a universal law. The patterns are the messy product of chromosomes, hormones, competition, care and chance. That’s what makes it such an interesting question to study.
Source: The Conversation – UK – By Michael Collins, Reader in American Studies and Chair of The British Association for American Studies, King’s College London
When Jack Kerouac published On the Road in 1957, he presented the novel as the product of a single marathon writing binge. It was a method he had been working on since the late 1940s that his friend Allen Ginsberg dubbed “spontaneous bop prosody”.
Despite the manuscript actually being a synthesis of years of ten years of notes and fragments (as this film shows), the press went mad for the myth of spontaneous prose. What could be more exciting at the height of the cold war than presenting the US as the place of ultimate freedom and possibility, something apparently unavailable to non-western or socialist nations?
On the Road seemed to be an organic, undiluted product of America. It poured out raw and thick from the mind of a man whose voice was marketed as a synthesis of the repressed forces that lay buried beneath the veneer of American postwar prosperity. The US “culture industry” burned heavy diesel in the promotion of Kerouac.
There were naysayers. Other writers like Truman Capote loathed the book. Of the Beat generation in general he once quipped: “None of them can write, not even Mr Kerouac … [it] isn’t writing at all – it’s typing”.
There were also many conservative critics that denounced the work’s sexual morality. But here was the cleverness of the “culture industry”. These critics could be rendered as an older cultural elite unable to grasp the significance of the novel. Or even as dried-up husks of an obsolescent religious right. This was the late fifties; a new world was coming. Better get off the freeway if you can’t stand the speed.
The trailer for Kerouac’s Road: The Beat of A Nation.
However much his fans might cling to this vision of the novel, Kerouac does not have the reputation now he did in the 1960s and 1970s. Waves of feminist criticism, ecological theory and a more cautious stance in literary culture toward the American political project have left him something of a fossil.
It is intriguing, therefore, to see the director of Kerouac’s Road, Ebs Burnough (former deputy social secretary to the Obama White House), return to this mythologisation of the American open road. Does something of Kerouac’s Americana still exist, the film asks, in the era of Black Lives Matter (BLM), of militarised police, at a time when those conservatives who were once so easy to denounce have taken control of the public discourse?
Burnough’s film attempts to synthesise two competing narratives that do not quite hold together. First, it’s a strong (if not wholly original) account of the reception of Kerouac’s novel and the author himself. It uses interviews with celebrity fans, the American writer Joyce Johnson (a former girlfriend of Kerouac’s who has superb things to say about life for the “Beat” women) and Kerouac’s biographer Ann Charters.
Second, the director interweaves three micro-narratives of contemporary American road trips that have some rather loose relationship to the ideas of freedom Kerouac is held to represent. One follows a young Black man from Philadelphia who is in the process of leaving the poverty of his home city for the promises of Morehouse University (the reverse narrative of Kerouac who dropped out of Columbia). Another is a couple who are living on the road to re-energise their marriage. Another shows a woman’s reunion with her abusive father.
The principal issue is that the film cannot reconcile its nostalgia for Kerouac’s era with the true historical and political conditions of the contemporary US.
For one, Kerouac’s novel is anything but an account of American plurality. On the Road has a relentlessly over-determined first-person voice that is notable for its blind spots far more than the truly expansive panoramic vision of American life Burnough takes to it be.
To its credit, the film does address the fact that really, at core, On the Road is about one man’s (the narrator Sal Paradise) obsession with another (Dean Moriarty). Yet there is nothing much here about the irony that the very obsession with unfiltered first-person speech, which Kerouac’s novel made so fashionable in American literature, has since toxified. It is now associated with masculine “free speech” and the suppression of alternatives that define contemporary political discourse.
Today, Sal Paradise would have a podcast. And I am not convinced, swathed in deep misogyny and violence as the novel is, that it would be much different from some of the worst of the manosphere.
On The Road is an exercise in resource extraction (of people, especially women, fuel and landscape, seen as salve to the troubled male soul). This is what makes it interesting as a cultural account of the 1950s. In the film, only the singer-songwriter Natalie Merchant (who is predictably brilliant, insightful and wise) and the comic and cultural critic W. Kamau Bell come close to seeing this.
The Trayvon generation
At 25 minutes in the director overdubs Joyce Johnson speaking about the Beat generation as the voice of the underclass of the 1950s on to an image of Amin (the Morehouse student) wearing a BLM hoodie.
It is hard to know if the director is being ironic, or if what the poet Elizabeth Alexander has called “the Trayvon generation” (after Trayvon Martin, the 17-year-old African-American boy who was fatally shot by his neighbour in 2012) is meant to be seen as a Beat generation in utero. The chasm economically and socially between the conditions of the later 1940s-50s and the present day make this parallel seem highly dubious. Most Black men in the contemporary US would not risk crossing the country at 70mph while drinking and driving a Chevy, as Sal Paradise does in On the Road.
The film does address the pervasive culture of violence in contemporary America at moments. One of most poignant interviews is with Amin’s mother who is worried about her son being shot. Yet, the film does not suggest this could be the responsibility of the police. The fault, it seems to imply, lies within the community. This is an egregious misrepresentation of the purpose of BLM, and seems at best politically muted from the director.
The film is very unwilling to undertake the critique needed to measure the distance between the Beats and Trump’s America. Indeed, it actually reproduces many of the flaws of Kerouac himself in being so optimistic about the US. The problems of the world today are not solved by a road-trip anymore than they were in 1957.
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Michael Collins 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.
What if the problem with social media isn’t just how much we use it, but when? A new study suggests that scrolling and posting through the small hours may be a red flag for mental wellbeing – and the effects could be as significant as binge drinking.
For the study, published in Scientific Reports, my colleagues and I analysed the Twitter (now X) habits of 310 adults and discovered that those who regularly posted between 11pm and 5am showed meaningfully worse mental wellbeing than daytime users. This finding challenges the current policy obsession with screen time limits and points toward a more nuanced understanding of how social media affects our mental health.
Australia has passed a law to ban social media for anyone under 16, with 68% of the population supporting the new law. Similar proposals are being debated across the western world, where policymakers cite rising concern about youth mental health. But is the solution that simple? Science tells a more complicated tale.
Studies examining social media use have found associations with worse mental health, better mental health and even no change at all. And a large analysis of over 350,000 people found that while more time on social media was associated with poorer mental health, the effect was minuscule.
The trouble with this research is its fixation on amounts of time spent on social media. Two people might spend identical amounts of time on social media yet have completely different experiences – one scrolling passively, the other engaged in fraught late-night exchanges. The difference in behaviour matters, and so does the platform where it occurs.
Complete bans will eliminate harmful effects, but they also remove potential benefits. Many young people rely on these platforms to form and maintain friendships. For those already struggling mentally, social media can provide support, guidance and community that might otherwise remain out of reach.
On the other hand, late-night use could push back bedtimes, fracture sleep quality and consequently harm mental health. The harm may intensify with highly interactive activities – posting, messaging – compared with passive browsing.
Understanding what people do on social media – and crucially, when they do it – is essential to grasping its real effect.
Our study explored this using real-world Twitter data from participants in the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children, matched with detailed self-reported mental health measures. These include the Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Wellbeing Scale – a 14-item measure of how someone feels and functions. We produced statistical models, aiming to predict these measures of mental health from the average time of day our participants posted their tweets.
We found strong evidence that the time someone posts on Twitter was associated with their mental wellbeing. Posting time accounted for about 2% of the differences in wellbeing between participants. This may sound small, but it’s a similar effect size to that found for binge drinking in other research.
Regular nighttime tweeters (23:00 to 05:00) consistently reported worse mental wellbeing than those posting primarily during daylight hours.
We also looked at how posting times related to symptoms of depression and anxiety. While mental wellbeing captures the positive side of mental health, depression and anxiety reflect specific problems that can undermine it.
The links between posting time and these symptoms were weaker overall, but they varied by age and sex. For example, the relationship between posting time and anxiety was about twice as strong in older participants, with posting time explaining 1.3% of the differences in anxiety levels among older users compared with 0.6% among younger ones.
Critical questions remain. Are we witnessing the harmful consequences of late-night posting, or do people with worse mental health gravitate toward nighttime social media use? Do these patterns translate to other platforms or different demographics, particularly adolescents and children?
If nighttime social media use genuinely harms mental health, then targeted solutions could be valuable. TikTok recently launched “wind down”, which replaces the homepage for under-16s with calming music and breathing exercises after 10pm. And in the UK, the government is now considering legislation to restrict multiple platforms after 10pm for this age group.
Nighttime use demonstrates how policy and platforms can address potentially harmful behaviour without resorting to outright bans. It represents a shift away from crude measurements of screen time toward considering what people do, when and where they do it, and who they are.
This approach moves us beyond simple measurements, toward a better understanding of how our digital lives affect our mental health.
Daniel Joinson receives funding from the EPSRC (grant number EP/S023704/1)
Source: The Conversation – UK – By William Crozier, Duns Scotus Assistant Professor of Franciscan Studies, Durham University
Bruised by recent events, the Church of England has just entered a new era. Dame Sarah Mullally’s appointment as the first female archbishop of Canterbury is momentous. But Mullally has an enormous challenge ahead of her in healing the wounds that afflict her church. Restoring trust in the church’s senior leadership and preventing the church from fracturing over issues of sexuality and gender will be at the top of her agenda.
Mullally’s appointment comes on the heels of a period of crisis in the church. The former archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, was forced to resign following revelations about how he and other senior church leaders handled historic cases of child abuse.
Mullally made clear that her first task will be to restore confidence in the church’s senior management and safeguarding processes: “As archbishop, my commitment will be to ensure that we continue to listen to survivors, care for the vulnerable, and foster a culture of safety and wellbeing for all.”
As the first female archbishop of Canterbury, Mullally faces a unique set of challenges. A former chief nursing officer for England, Mullally was one of the first women to be made a senior bishop in a diocese when she was made bishop of London in 2018. While many in the Church of England have welcomed women priests and bishops, some – particularly on the traditionalist Evangelical and Catholic wings of the church – continue to oppose women’s ordination.
Mullally’s role in guiding the global Anglican family is also complicated by the fact that many of its member churches do not accept women bishops and priests. Senior Anglican leaders from Africa and Asia have openly criticised her appointment, both because she is a woman and because of her views on same-sex marriage.
Mullally will have to try and build bridges with those who oppose women priests and bishops – and who thereby deny her right to hold the office of archbishop – while assuring them that the church can still provide suitable provisions for them.
Leadership culture
Along with restoring trust in the church’s safeguarding processes, Mullally must also heal divisions within the church’s hierarchy over leadership culture. In the weeks leading up to Welby’s resignation, both he and the archbishop of York, Stephen Cottrell, were accused of using “coercive language” by the bishop of Newcastle, Helen-Ann Hartley.
According to Hartley, both archbishops showed a “complete lack of awareness of how power dynamics operate in the life of the church”. Mullally is now in a position to encourage reconciliation within the church’s hierarchy, and to lead it in a way that fosters mutual respect and accountability.
Mullally must also encourage more people to join the priesthood, especially among the under-40s. Key here will be attracting new vocations not only to the parish system, but to “non-stipendary” forms of ministry – priests who hold down regular secular jobs while helping out in local churches. Mullally may have a unique advantage in this respect, given that she was a non-stipendary priest prior to resigning her post as chief nursing officer.
While overall church attendance has declined in recent decades, the trend has reversed slightly in the last few years. In 2024, some 582,000 people regularly attended Sunday services, up from 574,000 in 2023. Mullally’s task will be to help foster this growth, while finding new ways of communicating to a radically changing society.
Same-sex marriage
Currently, the Church of England does not conduct same-sex marriages, nor does it allow its clergy to enter them. In 2017, however, it launched Living in Love and Faith – a project to “listen, learn and respond to changing views” on gender, marriage, relationships and sexual identity.
In light of this, the House of Bishops – one of the church’s main systems of government – voted in 2023 to allow the clergy to offer prayers of blessing for same-sex couples. Mullally was one of the bishops who voted for this move.
Many in the church, including several bishops, are pushing for the church to go further and conduct same-sex marriages. A poll of clergy taken in 2023 by the Times revealed that 49.2% of Church of England clergy would be willing to conduct same-sex weddings. Others, though, oppose any change to the current doctrine, arguing that such a move would contradict both the Bible and tradition.
As archbishop, how Mullally steers the church on this issue will be one of the defining characteristics of her tenure. But she herself cannot change church doctrine. Only the General Synod – the church’s chief governing body – has the power to do this.
Adding an extra degree of complexity is that, as the new archbishop of Canterbury, Mullally is also the spiritual leader of the 85 million-strong global Anglican communion.
Present in 165 countries, the Anglican communion consists of 42 member churches. Some of these, including the Scottish and Canadian Episcopal Churches, already permit same-sex marriage. Others, however, oppose it. Laurent Mbanda, the archbishop of Rwanda, said Mullally had “repeatedly promoted unbiblical and revisionist teachings regarding marriage and sexual morality”.
Should the Church of England – as the “mother church” of the Anglican communion –move towards same-sex marriage during Mullally’s time in office, it is possible that the already deeply divided Anglican communion could fracture irrevocably.
William Crozier 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 Christina Wilkins, Lecturer in Film and Creative Writing, University of Birmingham
Shows about men still dominate our television screens. But the stories being told are starting to change, with more room for vulnerability and portrayals of male mental illness. These changes include explicit mentions of diagnostic categories and male characters with mental illnesses in the lead role.
In the last few years in the UK and the US, male-centred shows such as The Bear (2022-), Ted Lasso (2020-), Barry (2018-23), The Boys (2019-26), Succession (2018-23), Baby Reindeer (2024) and Slow Horses (2022-) have been hugely popular. It is telling that of these series, at least four explicitly deal with male mental illness.
While researching my new book, Male Mental Illness in Contemporary Culture (due out late 2025), I found that male mental illness is made much more explicit within the comedy genre, particularly in the UK.
For series in the US, male mental illness is more often used as a plot device rather than being the focus of the story itself. And even then, it may reinforce stereotypes. For example, the Netflix show Unstable (2023) focuses on Ellis (Rob Lowe) and his mental breakdown following the death of his wife. Very often his mental health struggle is presented as eccentricity and oddness, giving him an excuse to behave strangely rather than dealing with his experience.
The trailer for Unstable.
These stereotypes emerge from the dynamics of the television industry, particularly in the US. Men historically outnumbered women in the industry three to one in US-produced television. Despite this improving in recent years to women taking 43% of the roles onscreen in US television, traces of the past remain. Much of the research focuses on US examples, with a gap around how men onscreen are presented in the UK.
With the overrepresentation of men, it might be assumed there is more variety of masculinity onscreen. However, research in 2017 into the depiction of men onscreen in the US has shown men often upholding old-fashioned ideals of masculinity, noting that the men on our screens are “likely to be shown as dominant and in the prime of their lives”.
For mental health and mental illness, this has an impact. Men’s expected roles in society conflict with their experience of mental illness.
Differences between cultures
There appears to be a difference in UK and US portrayals. In the US, recent series that are categorised as “about mental health” include Apple TV+’s Shrinking (from the team involved with Ted Lasso, another series that engages with male mental health) as well as Unstable.
While these shows are based on the idea of the central male protagonist struggling mentally, this is due to grief from the loss of their spouses. Their struggles are mainly communicated through eccentric behaviour, rather than engaging with their emotions.
By contrast, recent UK series that have explored male mental health and illness – still in the vein of comedy – have done so with more attention to the details of illness itself. One of the best examples is Big Boys (Channel 4, and now on Netflix), which follows Jack (Dylan Llewellyn) as he starts university.
The trailer for Big Boys.
Jack is trying to navigate the death of his father, coming out and starting a new chapter. But it is the portrayal of his friend Danny (Jon Pointing) that is the most interesting. Danny is a lad type, whose swagger functions as a central part of his character. But we’re also shown his struggle with depression, including the mundanities that aren’t always covered onscreen: the alarms for medication, the side effects of that medication, the friends who check in and help out during an episode.
Unlike other portrayals of men onscreen, Big Boys presents a character whose struggles aren’t just played for laughs. Instead, Danny’s character addresses the very real details of the mental illness experience.
The differences between the UK and the US could be down to how mental health is viewed in each country. Surveys in the UK found in 2021 that nearly three quarters of people believed stigma towards those with a severe mental illness has not improved in the last decade.
Even more recently, a survey by Mind in 2024 found that 51% of the UK population believes there is a great deal or fair amount of shame associated with mental health conditions. The specifics of this stigma are highlighted by other surveys, which have found that “negative attitudes towards people with mental illness [are] more common among men”.
The American response in some surveys looks different. In 2019, the American Psychological Association claimed that Americans were becoming more open about mental health. But the same survey found that a third of respondents still saw people with mental illness as someone to be scared of.
There are many similarities here between the way mental illness is viewed between the two cultures, with stigma remaining something to be countered, and a recurrent part of charity campaigns. The differences between the portrayals on television suggests something to do with understandings of masculinity and expectations of what male mental health and illness looks like.
For now, Big Boys offers something different. But there is still room for more portrayals to engage with the experience in more detail without resorting to stereotypes.
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Christina Wilkins 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.
Most environmental scientists believe that chemical pollution can and is negatively affecting people and wildlife, according to my team’s recent survey.
We surveyed 166 environmental scientists across academia, government and industry and found that industry scientists working in environmental toxicology were reluctant to use behavioural studies when assessing the risk posed by chemicals. There are several possible reasons for their reticence.
As a society we have known for centuries that chemical pollutants can affect our behaviour. The terms “mad as a hatter” and “crazy as a painter” entered the English language due to observations of psychotic behaviour caused by occupational exposure to mercury and lead. Around the world, lead has been removed from water pipes because it can reduce cognitive ability in children.
Restrictions of alcohol and drug consumption exist while people are driving because it increases the risk of accidents. But previous research highlights that behaviour is rarely used to assess the effects of pollution on wildlife.
There are approximately 350,000 different chemicals in everyday domestic and industrial use. Before these chemicals are licensed for use, governments or industries conduct experiments to assess the potential risk to the environment.
Unfortunately in many incidences, chemicals have reached the market without a thorough assessment of the harm they may cause to the environment. That includes plastic additives – chemicals added to plastics to give them certain properties such a flexibility, heat resistance, colour and UV protection.
Scientists have estimated that there are over 16,000 chemicals known to be within plastics or used to make them. Two-thirds of these chemicals do not have sufficient data on their toxicity.
Toxicity tests typically involve a limited number of animals including fish, crustaceans and algae. They are exposed to particular chemicals to assess their effects on survival, growth and reproduction. As as means of protecting the wider environment, risk assessments determine what the safe levels of these chemicals might be in the environment.
Many insects play a vital role in pollination, but this is compromised by agricultural chemical use. LeicherOliver/Shutterstock
However, they aren’t assessed to determine whether they change an animal’s behaviour. Studies into the effects of prescribed and illegal drugs taken to deliberately alter human behaviour has driven questions over their environmental consequences.
Many pollutants that mimic and act like hormones also alter behaviour. For example, synthetic oestrogens and androgens can alter the reproductive behaviour of fish. Antidepressants and anti-anxiety medications alter the behaviour of many aquatic organisms.
An animal’s behaviour is critical to its survival. A split-second decision while driving on the road may cause or prevent a traffic collision and could mean the difference between life or death. Similarly, if an animal isn’t behaving normally, it might struggle to escape predators, find food or attract mates.
Reasons for reluctance
We found there could be many reasons why industry toxicologists are reluctant to embrace behavioural studies.
First, industry scientists were more sceptical that behavioural studies are repeatable. Some expressed concern about the reliability of toxicity metrics.
While some scientists share these concerns, efforts are being made internationally to standardise methodology. The pharmaceutical industry already uses behavioural tests in drug design which suggests some acceptance to their credibility.
Second, all of the scientists we questioned agreed that adding behavioural tests to existing chemical contamination assessments would increase costs for both industry and government. Although it may affect profit margins, we argue that not adding behaviour to the suite of tools to assess chemical safety comes with cost to human health and the environment.
Industry may also be apprehensive about adopting behavioural testing due to fear of what scientists may find out about existing chemicals. Could there be a chemical in our everyday products that increases the likelihood of dementia, anxiety or depression?
For example, some scientists are starting to link pollution with incidences of neurological disorders, anxiety and some have correlated even higher rates of crime.
Developing internationally standard toxicity tests can take years if not decades, so existing tests need to incorporate behaviour. This will hopefully reduce time, costs and ethical concerns while at the same time maximising the available information to protect human health and the environment.
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