Category: The Conversation – UK

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Lucy van Dorp, Principal Research Fellow, Microbial Genomics, UCL

There’s no nice way to put it: small children are snotty. A research study that tested children for multiple respiratory viruses every week for a year found that under-fives are carrying one or more viruses 50% of the time. A child aged 15 months will have 12-15 colds per year and eight or nine of those will show symptoms, such as a runny nose. If parents feel their small children are sick with a cold half the time, that’s backed up by evidence.

Our new study brings together information from different sources to understand how the immune systems of small children differ from adults, why children pass germs around so effectively and what parents can do to help.

Babies and toddlers are encountering a whole host of infectious diseases for the first time, which makes them more likely to have symptoms; this can make them more likely to pass these bugs on to others. We also found that going to nursery often accelerates a natural process of building up immunity that would otherwise take place at school. Finally, we highlighted vaccination as a major tool to reduce childhood sick days.

It’s worth saying that most of the evidence we reviewed is from studies conducted before COVID showed up. We don’t yet know whether COVID adds another virus to this mix.

Children experience about twice as many bouts of diarrhoea and vomiting per year as adults (two on average). Having an under five in your household increases your risk as an adult of having diarrhoea and vomiting three- to fivefold.

Children also pick up multiple viruses and bacteria that can cause rashes or skin infections. By 12 months of age, 70% of children have antibodies to the two viruses (HHV6A and 6B) that cause most cases of roseola (a common infection, usually causing high temperature and a rash). By age five, 65% of children in the UK have antibodies to varicella-zoster virus (chickenpox). In short, twelve colds, two rounds of diarrhoea and vomiting and one or two rash illnesses is typical between 12 and 24 months of age, with or without nursery.

Nursery bugs

But parents aren’t exaggerating when they say that starting at nursery leads to children and infants passing more germs around than might be caught at a birthday party or baby class. The process of picking up germs that cause colds, stomach bugs and rashes is sped up by starting at nursery and continues for one to two years.

However, this is a trade off against disease later.

Studies have shown that children who attend nursery have fewer infections when they start primary school than children who did not attend nursery. The idea that nursery gets bugs out of the way before starting school has evidence behind it. Whether or not this is a good thing may come down to parents’ opinions.

In some cases, delaying the age children get an infection for the first time is beneficial, such as for RSV, the cause of bronchiolitis. For others, earlier infection or vaccination (such as for varicella-zoster virus, the cause of chickenpox) seems to lead to milder symptoms than if infection is delayed to later in childhood.

We think it’s important for parents’ employers to know that all small children get ill frequently, and that this is entirely normal – their immune systems are barraged with new infections and they must develop immunity to those infections that can’t be prevented with vaccination. It’s not an indicator of poor hygiene at a nursery or parents being precious. Children can transmit before and after they show symptoms, simply keeping ill children home isn’t enough to stop transmission.

Beyond better support from employers, how do we make this situation better for young children and their parents and carers? We found in our research that vaccination is one of the most effective things we can do to prevent children from becoming sick and to reduce their symptoms.

With large outbreaks of measles in the US and UK, ensuring that young children receive their recommended vaccines, such as MMRV (for measles, mumps, rubella and, since early 2026, chickenpox) has never been more important. Between January 1 and March 6 2026, 34% of England’s measles cases were in the one to four years (nursery) age group. In summer 2025, over 96% of measles cases were in unvaccinated people.

In the future, vaccination programmes could even be designed to delay infection to the age at which it is safest for children to contract each specific infection, based on whether they are likely to be exposed at nursery.

Finally, we want to reassure parents that age, better hand hygiene and a more experienced immune system mean that rates of illness for nursery children go down by 50% each year of attendance. Things can only get better.

Lucy van Dorp receives funding from the UKRI Future Leaders Fellowshp Programme.

Charlotte Houldcroft receives funding from the Cambridge-Africa ALBORADA Trust and the European Research Council.

– ref. If you think your toddler’s often ill, you’re right – what going to nursery means for catching colds and building immunity – https://theconversation.com/if-you-think-your-toddlers-often-ill-youre-right-what-going-to-nursery-means-for-catching-colds-and-building-immunity-275587

Source: The Conversation – UK – By David Lewis Thomas, PhD Candidate in Political Theory, University of Sussex

News of the intended removal of Winston Churchill’s image from the five pound note by the Bank of England has outraged some commentators and politicians. Reform UK’s Nigel Farage called it “the definition of woke”. Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch said the plans to replace historical figures with wildlife would be “erasing our history”.

As an anti-counterfeit measure, the Bank of England is replacing the historical figures on the next series of banknotes with wildlife. The wildlife to appear will be chosen after a public consultation.

Technically, of course, removing Churchill from a banknote would not erase him from history. Even if his reputation is at times questionable, the fact of his leadership through the second world war is not. What removing him from a banknote does threaten is something far more personal: the collective memory through which many people understand not just Churchill and Britain, but themselves.

Crucially, the Churchill presented in popular culture is not meant to be understood in historical terms. History involves research, debate and revision. The Churchill that most people encounter through television, school and national commemoration has instead entered mythology.

Empirical scrutiny of Churchill’s political record or his personal character becomes irrelevant. What matters is his image: hero, saviour of the free world, bastion of empire, epitome of the “bulldog spirit”. For those who have internalised this image, any criticism of Churchill is an attack on the very foundations of British identity.

It’s notable that this foundational identity does not seem to apply to Jane Austen or Alan Turing – the other famous images on British banknotes.

The late philosopher Bernard Stiegler has a useful way of understanding how these images become formative. Stiegler argued that human experience is constructed through three layers of attention. The first is our direct perception of a situation. Our second is personal memory, through which we organise our understanding of the past. The third layer, what Stiegler calls tertiary retentions, are external recordings of memory such as archives, media and institutions. It’s this third layer that shapes our collective, national identity.

What Churchill means to Britons

It’s baby boomer Britons who think positively of Churchill more than other generations. For those who grew up in the mid-20th century, mass media created a national narrative through shared cultural experiences. In the 1970s and early 1980s, there were still only three TV channels, meaning millions watched the same events simultaneously. Major sporting finals, royal weddings and state funerals became the cultural glue that held British identity together.

Churchill’s state funeral in January 1965 illustrates the scale of this. Around 25 million Britons watched on television, while another million lined the streets of London for the funeral cortege. Globally, an estimated tenth of the world’s population tuned in. For many viewers, the event – and the attention given to it – reinforced Churchill not just as a historical figure, but a symbol of national greatness. Such formative memories continue to shape that generation’s take on contemporary society.

This massified behaviour, as Stiegler calls it, blurs the boundaries between personal and national identities as the viewer is caught up in a synchronised memory. Media, schools and family life repeat the same narratives, reinforcing memory until they become part of the cultural fabric. Over time, the figure at the centre of that narrative ceases to be a complex historical figure, and becomes more of a cultural product. Debates over how Churchill is represented become a contestation of how people understand Britain’s past and their own place in it.

It is precisely such performance that we have seen this week. Those protesting the removal of Churchill’s image – much like those outraged at the defacing of Churchill’s statue in Parliament Square – are really protesting the undermining of their identity, which is constructed through these memories.

We see these memories and the identities they construct as universal truths or common sense. Yet they are memories that are both forged – in the sense of produced through participation – and forgery – in the sense that they are partly engineered by media narrative, and as such are inauthentic. Memories are not pictures of past events. They are images mediated by institutions: schools, newspapers, technology and their preferences.

Where once a handful of broadcasters shaped national memory, social media now channels audiences into competing communities, each with its own values and preferred memories. In this age of digital memory formation. Churchill’s image is – like all collective memory – not fixed. The Churchill myth, once widely shared, now sits within a contested cultural landscape.

The claim that history is being rewritten is better understood as a cry of defiance that a collective memory is being erased, and with it a personal identity, integrity and validity. The Churchillian identity is one that valorises domination and military strength as a measure of success. As new memories shape new expectations and identities evolve, we would do well to find new measures for understanding ourselves.

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

– ref. Taking Churchill off the banknote isn’t ‘erasing history’ – but it is a matter of identity – https://theconversation.com/taking-churchill-off-the-banknote-isnt-erasing-history-but-it-is-a-matter-of-identity-278561

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Sheena Cruickshank, Professor in Immunology, University of Manchester

A new immunotherapy drug has demonstrated early promise in a recent prostate cancer clinical trial. The drug, called VIR-5500, is a “masked T-cell engager”. This type of immunotherapy ignites our own immune arsenal to fight cancer.

In the trial, which is still in progress and has not yet undergone peer-review, patients with advanced prostate cancer who had failed to respond to other treatments were given VIR-5500. Remarkably, initial findings showed that in the patients who received the highest doses, 82% saw reductions in their PSA (prostate specific antigen) levels – a commonly used measure of prostate cancer.

Strikingly, nearly half of the patients within this group also showed tumour shrinkage at both the primary tumour sites as well as in metastatic tumours (tumours which had spread from the prostate into different parts of the body).

Cancer cells have mechanisms to evade being eliminated by our immune system. But immunotherapies boost our immune system’s capacity to fight cancer. They do this by combatting these evasion strategies.

Various immunotherapies have demonstrated phenomenal success in recent years. Yet many cancers, such as prostate cancer, remain difficult to treat exposing the need for more effective immunotherapies.

T-cell engagers are a specific type of immunotherapy that works by anchoring immune cells, called T-cells, and cancer cells together by engaging molecules on the surface of both cell types. This enforced proximity prompts the T-cells to produce toxic cancer-killing chemicals and generate a cascade of inflammatory processes that promote cancer killing.

There are now over 200 different T-cell engagers, many of which are in clinical trials to treat a range of tumours including multiple myeloma, leukaemia and lung cancer.

T-cell engagers

T-cell engagers are not just being trialled for cancer. They may also help with treating other viral conditions, such as hepatitis B, which can cause life-long infection. As in cancer, the virus can evade our immune responses – but T-cell engagers can promote more effective clearance of virally-infected cells.

Despite the great promise surrounding T-cell engagers, the vigorous inflammation they trigger can also be a double-edged sword. In some cases, it can cause a serious inflammatory condition called cytokine release syndrome.

Cytokines are protein messengers released by cells that can drive inflammation. Normally, their release is tightly controlled – but in cytokine release syndrome, the response is excessive and uncontrolled. This can lead to multi-organ failure with potentially life-threatening consequences.

Similar toxic inflammatory side-effects can be seen with other immunotherapies. It’s likely the condition is driven by the potent, acute activation of an immune response.

This is why T-cell engagers and other immunotherapy drugs need to be refined, to ensure their effects are less toxic.

One way of doing this involves producing versions of immunotherapies that are inactive but can be activated once inside tumours.

This is done by covering the drug in a “mask” that prevents it from engaging both the T-cells and cancer cells. When the drug enters tumours, molecules that are abundant in cancers can break down this mask, allowing the drug to engage its target cells. VIR-5500, the drug used in this recent, promising prostate cancer trial, is one of many new masked T-cell engagers.

As such, masking creates an effective drug that may also be safer. Tumour-specific activation should restrict the anti-cancer, inflammatory response to within the tumour, preventing widespread inflammation.

It may also enable the T-cell engagers to be more selective towards cancer cells, as some of their targets may also be expressed by normal healthy cells. This could simultaneously reduce toxicity and improve anti-cancer potency.

An additional benefit of masked immunotherapies is that the conversion from the inactive to active drug in the body takes time. This changes how the drug is dosed within patients.

In the clinic, T-cell engagers are often given in small doses that then need to be escalated to prevent acute immune over-activation. But the mask would allow the drug to be released more slowly, making delivery simpler and safer. The mask itself may also prevent the drugs from being broken down in the body and may extend their lifespan.

An important finding in this recent trial for prostate cancer was that most patients who received the highest doses of VIR-5500 suffered only mild inflammatory side effects. Given the known toxicity associated with T-cell engagers, this is an exciting finding – suggesting the masking is working to reduce the risks of excessive inflammation.

If further research proves that masking T-cell engagers creates safer, more effective drugs, then we can expand what we can do with them. They can be combined with more traditional cancer therapies, such as chemotherapy or radiotherapy, which may prove even more effective in eliminating cancer.

Other masked T-cell engagers have also shown early clinical promise in prostate cancer and trials have begun in numerous other cancers including pancreatic, colorectal and lung cancer.

As these trials are all ongoing, it’s too early to know the full extent of clinical success here. Early trials also only test within a small number of patients. The data has also not yet faced the scrutiny of peer-review and have only been presented at an oncology conferences.

Nevertheless, the initial results represent great hope for treating cancers that have proven otherwise difficult to treat with other immunotherapies.

Jonathan Worboys receives funding from Wellcome and the BBSRC.

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

– ref. Masked T-cell engagers: cancer immunotherapies for the future? – https://theconversation.com/masked-t-cell-engagers-cancer-immunotherapies-for-the-future-277437

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Lucy van Dorp, Principal Research Fellow, Microbial Genomics, UCL

There’s no nice way to put it: small children are snotty. A research study that tested children for multiple respiratory viruses every week for a year found that under-fives are carrying one or more viruses 50% of the time. A child aged 15 months will have 12-15 colds per year and eight or nine of those will show symptoms, such as a runny nose. If parents feel their small children are sick with a cold half the time, that’s backed up by evidence.

Our new study brings together information from different sources to understand how the immune systems of small children differ from adults, why children pass germs around so effectively and what parents can do to help.

Babies and toddlers are encountering a whole host of infectious diseases for the first time, which makes them more likely to have symptoms; this can make them more likely to pass these bugs on to others. We also found that going to nursery often accelerates a natural process of building up immunity that would otherwise take place at school. Finally, we highlighted vaccination as a major tool to reduce childhood sick days.

It’s worth saying that most of the evidence we reviewed is from studies conducted before COVID showed up. We don’t yet know whether COVID adds another virus to this mix.

Children experience about twice as many bouts of diarrhoea and vomiting per year as adults (two on average). Having an under five in your household increases your risk as an adult of having diarrhoea and vomiting three- to fivefold.

Children also pick up multiple viruses and bacteria that can cause rashes or skin infections. By 12 months of age, 70% of children have antibodies to the two viruses (HHV6A and 6B) that cause most cases of roseola (a common infection, usually causing high temperature and a rash). By age five, 65% of children in the UK have antibodies to varicella-zoster virus (chickenpox). In short, twelve colds, two rounds of diarrhoea and vomiting and one or two rash illnesses is typical between 12 and 24 months of age, with or without nursery.

Nursery bugs

But parents aren’t exaggerating when they say that starting at nursery leads to children and infants passing more germs around than might be caught at a birthday party or baby class. The process of picking up germs that cause colds, stomach bugs and rashes is sped up by starting at nursery and continues for one to two years.

However, this is a trade off against disease later.

Studies have shown that children who attend nursery have fewer infections when they start primary school than children who did not attend nursery. The idea that nursery gets bugs out of the way before starting school has evidence behind it. Whether or not this is a good thing may come down to parents’ opinions.

In some cases, delaying the age children get an infection for the first time is beneficial, such as for RSV, the cause of bronchiolitis. For others, earlier infection or vaccination (such as for varicella-zoster virus, the cause of chickenpox) seems to lead to milder symptoms than if infection is delayed to later in childhood.

We think it’s important for parents’ employers to know that all small children get ill frequently, and that this is entirely normal – their immune systems are barraged with new infections and they must develop immunity to those infections that can’t be prevented with vaccination. It’s not an indicator of poor hygiene at a nursery or parents being precious. Children can transmit before and after they show symptoms, simply keeping ill children home isn’t enough to stop transmission.

Beyond better support from employers, how do we make this situation better for young children and their parents and carers? We found in our research that vaccination is one of the most effective things we can do to prevent children from becoming sick and to reduce their symptoms.

With large outbreaks of measles in the US and UK, ensuring that young children receive their recommended vaccines, such as MMRV (for measles, mumps, rubella and, since early 2026, chickenpox) has never been more important. Between January 1 and March 6 2026, 34% of England’s measles cases were in the one to four years (nursery) age group. In summer 2025, over 96% of measles cases were in unvaccinated people.

In the future, vaccination programmes could even be designed to delay infection to the age at which it is safest for children to contract each specific infection, based on whether they are likely to be exposed at nursery.

Finally, we want to reassure parents that age, better hand hygiene and a more experienced immune system mean that rates of illness for nursery children go down by 50% each year of attendance. Things can only get better.

Lucy van Dorp receives funding from the UKRI Future Leaders Fellowshp Programme.

Charlotte Houldcroft receives funding from the Cambridge-Africa ALBORADA Trust and the European Research Council.

– ref. Your toddler is likely to get 12 or more illnesses in their first year at nursery – but they’ll build immunity, too – https://theconversation.com/your-toddler-is-likely-to-get-12-or-more-illnesses-in-their-first-year-at-nursery-but-theyll-build-immunity-too-275587

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Henry Taylor, Associate Professor, Department of Philosophy, University of Birmingham

What can you see right now? This might seem like a silly question, but what enters your consciousness is not the whole story when it comes to vision. A great deal of visual processing in the brain goes on well below our conscious awareness.

Some studies have probed the unconscious depths of vision. One source of
evidence comes from the neurological condition known as blindsight, which is caused by damage to areas of the brain involved in processing visual information. People with blindsight report that they are unable to see, either entirely or in a portion of their visual field. However, when asked to guess what is there, they can often do so with remarkable accuracy.

For example, in an experiment published in 2004 on someone with blindsight, a black bar was displayed in the portion of the visual field to which the person was blind. The person was asked to “guess” whether the bar was vertical or horizontal.

Despite denying any conscious awareness of the bar, the participant could answer correctly at a level well above chance. The participant even showed evidence of being able to pay attention to the bar – they were faster to respond when an arrow (placed in a healthy area of their visual field) correctly indicated the location of the bar.

The most popular interpretation (though not the only one) is that people with blindsight can see these objects, but not see them consciously. They see what is there, but it all goes on unconsciously, below their awareness.

The phenomenon of inattentional blindness seems to show you can see without the information crossing into your consciousness. Anyone can experience inattentional blindness. The phenomenon has been known about for a long time, but we can most easily get a handle on it by looking at a well-known experiment reported in 1999.

In this experiment, participants are shown a video of people playing basketball, and told to count the number of passes between the players wearing a white shirt. If you’ve never done this before, I urge to you stop reading now and watch the video.

In many cases, people are so busy counting the passes that they completely miss a large gorilla walking across the middle of the scene and beating its chest, then walking off. The gorilla’s right there, in the centre of your visual field. Light from the gorilla enters your eyes, and is processed in the visual system, but somehow you missed it, because you weren’t paying attention to it.

The gorilla has more to teach us. In another experiment reported in 2013, radiologists were given a series of lung scans. They were told to look for nodules (which show up as small light coloured circles) on each scan. In one of the scans, a large picture of a dancing gorilla was superimposed on top of the lung scan. In this study, 83% of the radiologists failed to spot it, even though it was 48 times bigger than the average nodule they were looking for. Some of them even looked directly at the gorilla and still didn’t notice it!

The interpretation of these experiments is controversial. Some scientists suggest that in these kinds of cases, you consciously see the gorilla, but immediately forget it (although a dancing gorilla in someone’s lung doesn’t seem like the kind of thing you’d forget). Others argue that you see the gorilla, but the information never made its way into consciousness. You saw the gorilla, but unconsciously.

Let’s assume that in the case of blindsight, and inattentional blindness, the information is seen, but didn’t make it all the way to consciousness. Then, the question is: what makes some information conscious, rather than the information that stays unconscious? This is one of the central questions for consciousness studies in philosophy, psychology and neuroscience.

The brain’s loudspeaker

There’s no agreement on which is the best theory of consciousness, but in my
opinion, the strongest contender is the global neuronal workspace theory.

According to this theory, consciousness is all to do with a particular area of the brain which is the seat of the “workspace”. The workspace is a system with a small capacity, so it can’t hold a lot of information at any one time. The job of the workspace is to take unconscious information and broadcast it to lots of different networks all across the brain. Global neuronal workspace theorists say that broadcasting the information in this way is what makes it conscious.

The job of the workspace is to act like the brain’s loudspeaker, and consciousness is the information that gets broadcast. The workspace takes unconscious information and boosts it so that many of the different systems in the brain hear about it and can use that information in their own processes. The late philosopher Daniel Dennett used to call consciousness “fame in the brain”. The workspace idea is similar.

One of the most striking implications of the global neuronal workspace theory is how little information makes it to consciousness. Since the workspace has quite a small capacity, it follows that we can only ever be conscious of a little at a time. We might think there’s a rich visual world in front of us, full of details, all of which we’re conscious of, but really – according to the theory – we’re only ever conscious of a small portion of that.

Some philosophers and scientists have objected to the theory on these grounds. They suggest that consciousness “overflows” the workspace: we are conscious of more information than can “fit” into the workspace at any one time. Even with these debates still ongoing, I think the global neuronal workspace theory gives us a reasonably clear answer to the question of what consciousness is for, and how it interacts with other systems in the brain.

In our brains, consciousness is only the tip of a very large iceberg. But the global neuronal workspace theory might give us insight into what makes that tip so special.

Henry Taylor has received funding from the Leverhulme Trust.

– ref. Human vision: what we actually see – and don’t see – tells us a lot about consciousness – https://theconversation.com/human-vision-what-we-actually-see-and-dont-see-tells-us-a-lot-about-consciousness-276310

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Renaud Foucart, Senior Lecturer in Economics, Lancaster University Management School, Lancaster University

Four years after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the world is bracing for another energy crisis. The US-Israel bombing of Iran and then the blockade of the strait of Hormuz have forced up the price of oil. The price of natural gas in Europe has also risen sharply.

In the UK, Prime Minister Keir Starmer has announced a £50 million package to support consumers who heat their homes with oil. The government is also considering a U-turn on the decision to increase fuel duty (currently almost 53p per litre of petrol or diesel) in September after a 15-year freeze. Other taxes would need to go up to compensate.

But the main question concerns what will happen to electricity prices this summer. A sustained crisis could push prices higher for both households and businesses. It could also push the Bank of England to avoid interest rate cuts, making mortgages more expensive. And the government could even end up paying part of everyone’s bills directly as it did between 2022 and 2024, piling up tens of billions of pounds of public debt.

To secure most of the future production of electricity – wind farms or new nuclear power stations for instance – the government signs what are known as “contracts for difference” with electricity producers. These contracts fix the price of electricity for decades, typically above expected wholesale prices.

These guaranteed prices correspond roughly to the expected average cost of producing electricity. Unlike gas, once a wind farm is built, each additional unit of electricity costs almost nothing to produce. So, without a guaranteed price, renewable producers would fear having to sell the electricity for free and never recouping their investment.

Consumers are shouldering the risk

The UK is not as sunny as somewhere like Spain and so will never get very cheap solar power. It is also trying to build new nuclear power plants, but the first attempt (Hinkley point C, currently expected to begin delivering electricity in 2030) is so expensive that the French state-owned energy operator EDF lost £10 billion in the process. Future projects now ask taxpayers to take most of the risk and pay upfront in the form of higher bills.

Consumers mostly notice these extra costs added to their bills (called “environmental levies”) when gas prices are low. The levies currently make up 6.5% of a typical bill, which is down from 13% after the government shifted some costs so that they would be paid for through general taxation.

So given that they’re paying upfront for the infrastructure, consumers might expect renewables to cut their bills when gas prices spike. But that is not how markets work: the price is set by the most expensive unit sold. Around 85% of the time in the UK this most expensive unit uses liquefied natural gas (LNG) transported by boat.

If one day the UK becomes like Spain where prices are mostly set by renewables (thanks to huge leaps in wind and solar), wholesale prices will often be zero. But consumers will still pay more, because they will still be charged the environmental levies that were put in place years before to invest in the infrastructure.

This is what led the CEO of energy giant E.ON, Chris Norbury, to declare in parliament that “even if the wholesale price was zero, bills would still be where they were today”. That’s true, but also a bit misleading.

Wholesale prices only go to zero because the country invested in renewables. The alternative – going back to more gas – would probably be much more expensive for everyone. It would certainly be more risky as the current conflict in the Middle East is illustrating.

Sunshine and wind do not need to pass through the strait of Hormuz and cannot be used as leverage by dictators. And what looks like a costly subsidy heaping pressure on billpayers in good times becomes insurance in a crisis.

During the peak of the energy crisis in 2022, the wholesale price of electricity was higher than the guaranteed one, and renewable generators paid money to the government instead of receiving subsidies. But because the government was helping out with everyone’s bills, consumers never saw the benefit.

In 2025 in the UK, less than a third of electricity was generated using gas. Replacing renewables with gas would mean building power plants and importing more gas at ever-higher prices and greater geopolitical risk.

Gas is cheaper in the US where fracking makes the country almost energy independent. But fracking is much harder in places that are as densely populated as England. The government is currently planning to ban it everywhere in the UK.

But the UK’s vulnerable situation also gives it a chance to innovate and export. The key is making sure that consumers pay a price that reflects the real cost of electricity at any given moment.

The more we switch from fossil fuels – heating, cars, trucks – to electricity, the more battery capacity we have to fill. The price signal (the gap between cheap and expensive electricity) gives industries and households a strong incentive to innovate and invest in storage.

Most people only care about their monthly bill and won’t adapt directly. But smart appliances, home batteries and vehicle-to-grid systems (where vehicles can store electricity and sell it back to the grid when required) will do it for them.

The UK can gain in efficiency what nature has not provided in resources. This could give Britain a chance to sell its innovations to the world. Selling services is what the UK does as a country, after all. The large majority of global investments in energy are in renewables, and there will be huge opportunities for the countries that figure out how to run a grid on intermittent electricity sources.

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

– ref. The UK’s high electricity prices are here to stay. But could they offer an opportunity? – https://theconversation.com/the-uks-high-electricity-prices-are-here-to-stay-but-could-they-offer-an-opportunity-278584

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Pedram Vousoughi, Post Doctoral Researcher in Biological Sciences, University of Limerick

Across Europe, many banks alongside motorways are planted with grass to stabilise soil and keep roadside landscapes tidy.

But there may be a better solution. Already some countries are experimenting with using moss in built-up areas to absorb air pollution. As countries search for nature-based solutions to climate and environmental challenges, roadside moss is starting to attract attention. So could mossy motorway banks work?

Moss could offer environmental benefits over grass, from trapping air pollution to slowing rainwater runoff during heavy storms.

Mosses are small plants that grow without roots or flowers. Instead of drawing nutrients from soil like most plants do, they absorb water and minerals directly from the air. They can grow in thin soils, shaded areas and exposed surfaces where grass often struggles. Once established, moss also requires very little maintenance. Unlike grass, moss grows slowly and stays low to the ground. This means roadside moss would require far less mowing, potentially reducing labour and maintenance costs along thousands of kilometres of roads.

Moss and air pollution

One of moss’s most fascinating features is its ability to absorb substances from the atmosphere. It can accumulate pollutants such as heavy metals.

Scientists have used moss for decades as a bioindicator – a living organism used to monitor environmental pollution. Experimental observations have shown that moss can also exhibit visible physical responses to air pollution. For example, moss exposed to highly polluted environments has been observed to change colour from fresh green to brownish.

Across Europe, the European Moss Survey uses moss samples to track air pollution levels in dozens of countries. Research shows moss can capture pollutants including nitrogen compounds and particulate matter, both of which are produced by traffic emissions. If moss grows beside busy roads, it may therefore help capture some airborne pollution before it spreads into surrounding ecosystems or nearby communities.

Another potential benefit involves water. Many moss species act like natural sponges. They can absorb several times their own weight in water and release it slowly over time. On roadside slopes, this property could help slow down rainwater runoff during heavy storms. Fast runoff from roads and embankments can overwhelm drainage systems and contribute to flash flooding. By temporarily storing water, moss could reduce the speed at which rainwater flows into roadside drains. The UK, for instance, has one of the densest road networks in Europe, and many major roads run close to towns and residential areas. Vegetation that can reduce pollution and water runoff could therefore provide environmental benefits.

Roadside vegetation can also play an important role in biodiversity. Road verges and embankments form long, connected strips of habitat that can support insects, mosses, lichens and other small organisms. In landscapes heavily shaped by agriculture or urban development, these narrow corridors can help species move between fragmented habitats. Moss-dominated banks may provide microhabitats for invertebrates and microorganisms that depend on moist, shaded environments. Although research on mossy roadside systems is still limited, increasing structural diversity along road verges could enhance ecological connectivity and contribute to wider efforts to support biodiversity in managed landscapes.

---

Read more:
An epic global study of moss reveals it is far more vital to Earth’s ecosystems than we knew

---

Moss thrives in cool, damp climates with frequent rainfall, conditions common across much of the UK, for instance. Shaded roadside slopes, especially where roads cut through hillsides or woodland, also favour moss growth. In such places, grass often struggles because soils are thin and sunlight is limited.

Best in shade

Despite its potential advantages, moss would not be a universal solution.

One problem is it grows slowly. Establishing a stable moss cover on new embankments could take several years.
Also, roadside environments can be harsh. Salt used for winter road de-icing can damage many moss species, and prolonged dry conditions may limit growth on exposed slopes.

Another issue is pollutant accumulation. Moss can absorb airborne pollutants, but these substances remain stored within the plant material. Over time this may require monitoring or periodic removal. Finally, moss generally prefers shaded and moist environments. On sunny or dry motorway banks, other vegetation may still be more suitable.

Road networks occupy vast areas of land, yet roadside vegetation is often managed simply to keep it short and tidy. Instead of treating roadside land as space that just needs mowing, it could be designed to capture pollution, manage water and support biodiversity.

Moss will not transform highways overnight. But small ecological changes along thousands of kilometres of roads could add up to meaningful environmental benefits. Sometimes, even plants at the edges of our motorways may help tackle pollution, flooding and climate change.

Pedram Vousoughi receives funding from Ireland’s Department of Climate, Energy, and the Environment for funding his current work under the FORESIGHT services contract for national agriculture and land-use modeling. He has also been granted EPS-IRC funding previously.

– ref. How moss could help roads cope with heavy rain and reduce air pollution – https://theconversation.com/how-moss-could-help-roads-cope-with-heavy-rain-and-reduce-air-pollution-277686

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Jennifer Fuller, PhD Candidate in Music, University of Sheffield

The Barbican Centre’s 2025-26 concert season, Fragile Earth: Sounds of a Living Planet, brings the connection between music and nature, and its vulnerability to climate change, to the fore.

The chamber orchestra Britten Sinfonia embraced the theme with their contribution, Nature and Rapture: Recycling Concerto, which took place on March 12 and 13. The concerto was written by Gregor A. Mayrhofer for the virtuosic percussionist Vivi Vassileva. Together, the pair have collected and tuned an enormous battery of percussion from repurposed rubbish.

The stage presented a striking array of litter, including an enormous plastic bottle marimba, a wall of tuned glass bottles, discarded flower pots, cooking pans and a washing machine drum.

The first movement, The Happy Tsunami of Wealth, emerged with the crackling and rustling of plastic bags as Vassileva threw them across the stage. She then, with astonishing accuracy, used makeshift single-use beaters such as corks, plastic lids and coffee capsules, throwing them at the traditional tuned percussion and leaving them discarded on the floor. The music built to a dense sound, described by Mayrhofer as “an insurmountable pile of acoustic rubbish”.

In the second movement, Meltdown Meltup, the mood of the piece moves from joy and abandon into reflection, recycling music from the first movement. It also references the theme from Charles Ives’s The Unanswered Question as recognition that we don’t have the answers yet, but we can’t just sit back and let this assault on our planet continue.

In the Plastic Bottle Cadenza, Vassileva performed a virtuosic cadenza with just two plastic drinking bottles that changed pitch as she released air from them. Mayrhofer and Vassileva have made something quite stunning out of rubbish. The beautiful sounds of the unique instruments provide quite the juxtaposition to the pile of used bottles, pans and pieces of non-descript metal with which they started.

In the final movement, Recycling Music, Mayrhofer continues to recycle existing themes within the composition. Several of these are taken from the advertising jingles of some of the biggest polluting corporations in the world – think soft drinks, fast food, coffee and communications companies. These themes weave into the performance like a musical naming and shaming.

The orchestra, soloist and conductor brought the performance to a peaceful close, quoting again The Unanswered Question, ankle deep in plastic bags, discarded lids and other rubbish. It was a visually and aurally striking end to a moving plea to take more care of our environment.

From the noise of pollution to the sounds of nature

The second half of the evening opened with a breathtaking performance of Einojuhani Rautavaara’s Cantus Arcticus: Concerto for Birds and Orchestra. Rautavaara combines recordings of birdsong, recorded in the Arctic Circle and the marshlands of Limnika, with the orchestra, creating an immersive experience of music and nature combined.

The first movement, The Bog, opens with two flutes calling and answering to one another. They’re soon joined by a recording of marsh birds. The movement evolves with instruments mimicking the birdsong.

I was completely absorbed by the sound-world, often unable to differentiate between true birdsong and the orchestral imitations.

Movement two, Melancholy, begins with the call of the shorelark, but transposed down two octaves, described by the composer as a “ghost bird”. This is accompanied by a chorale-like structure, first in strings only until it builds to a full orchestral sound that is almost overwhelming for a short time before quickly fading back to nothing.

The final movement, Swans Migrating, features the call of the whooper swan which builds to a cacophony of music and birdsong, fading in the final few moments of the piece. It is a beautiful expression of nature that was a striking contrast to the first half of the concert.

The concert closed with Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6 Pastoral, which is truly evocative of the environment. The five movements describe the countryside while portraying Beethoven’s emotional connection to nature.

I left the concert on a musical high, but also feeling reflective. To hear the sounds of nature as experienced by Beethoven, an early 19th-century nature enthusiast, in the same programme as the Recycling Concerto was extremely thought-provoking.

Musicians are increasingly using their craft to communicate the climate crisis. This potential to influence audiences in their attitudes to the environment is currently a subject of research, for example at the Influencing Environmental Values Through Music research group at the University of Sheffield.

In the orchestral music sphere, intentional programming to address the climate crisis is starting to become more common. Ensembles like the Orchestra for the Earth aim to inspire audiences to connect with and care for the natural world. Julie’s Bicycle is an international non-profit supporting creative organisations to take climate action in their practices, and in terms of engaging their audiences, and the Association of British Orchestras offers guidance to help orchestras operate sustainably.

If music can convey the message of environmentalism to audiences, as research suggests, then cultural organisations could be said to have a duty to take action. There is research that shows audiences for classical music are in decline and lack diversity. Further research explores the motivations of audiences attending cultural events: sustainability messaging could be a way to reach out to a new audience for whom this is an important issue.

Britten Sinfonia, with its innovative approach to programming and public engagement, is well placed to lead the way.

---

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

---

Jennifer Fuller receives funding from the Grantham Centre for Sustainable Futures.

– ref. A concerto played with trash: Barbican offers a masterclass in thought-provoking classical programming – https://theconversation.com/a-concerto-played-with-trash-barbican-offers-a-masterclass-in-thought-provoking-classical-programming-278482

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Andrew McInnes, Reader in Romanticisms, Edge Hill University

When Lizzy Bennet, the witty sister in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813), asks: “What are men to rocks and mountains?” she is thinking about ways of understanding self and world through the notion of the sublime.

The sublime was one of the key 18th-century philosophical ideas of Romanticism, balancing our physical insignificance next to something majestic like a mountain, with our imaginative capacity to conceptualise it. Lizzy is trying to get over her own and her sister Jane’s heartbreak by thinking beyond herself to the wider world of nature around her.

The philosopher Sianne Ngai claims that the notion of the sublime no longer holds any force. Instead, today’s culture replaces the idea with concepts that have a weaker emotional impact on us, such as the “zany”, the “cute” and the “interesting”.

For big hits, social media demands zany personalities and cute images. And to say something is “interesting” might actually indicate that you find the topic boring. In her book Our Aesthetic Categories, Ngai basically argues that 21st-century capitalist society has no time for the ecstatic experience of the sublime.

Although the new BBC TV series The Other Bennet Sister – adapted from Janice Hadlow’s 2020 novel – is a development and continuation of Austen’s novel, the programme steers clear of the sublime and the beautiful and focuses especially on the “cute”.

The Other Bennet Sister starts where Pride and Prejudice also begins. The local grand house Netherfield Park is being let at last, causing much excitement over the identity of the new tenant and the potential opportunities for socialising they may provide.

Focusing on Mary Bennet, the mousy pedantic sister who remains unmarried at the end of Austen’s novel, the TV drama quickly dispatches with the plot of Pride and Prejudice in the first two episodes. Mary is left standing with her mother and father as the rest of her sisters get married.

But Mr Bennet (Richard E. Grant) dies and the sisters’ cousin Mr Collins (Ryan Sampson) and his wife descend on Longbourn to claim the Bennet family home as their own. So Mary is sent to London to stay with her aunt and uncle, the kindly Gardiners in Gracechurch Street.

In London, Mary begins to to enjoy herself and have her own adventures, and crucially, find out who she is – if she’s not the witty one (Lizzy), the beautiful one (Jane), the good-humoured one (Kitty), or the lively one (Lydia). In this BBC incarnation, Mary is the cute, endearing one.

A different perspective

The first episode rewrites Austen’s novel from Mary’s perspective, with her cutting a lonely and drab figure next to the pastel couples of Lizzy and Jane, and Kitty and Lydia. Ruth Jones’s Mrs Bennet is transformed from a character beset by nerves to a woman with nerves of steel. She forbids Mary a cute romance with her optician, or from flirting with Mr Collins as the formidable matriarch has set her sights on him marrying Lizzy (who, of course, will not have the pompous bore).

The Other Bennet Sister makes Mary’s sisters seem distant and shallow, and focuses on her struggles with self-esteem in response to their lack of notice. Like Hill, the Bennet servant you can tell likes Mary best, you just want to give her a hug. In a neat twist, Hill is played by Lucy Briers, who played Mary herself in the BBC’s famous 1995 Pride and Prejudice series.

In London, Mary starts to overcome her awkwardness and self-consciousness under the care of the Mr and Mrs Gardiner, played with verve by Richard Coyle and Indira Varma. She nervously begins a romance with Mr Tom Hayward (Dónal Finn) only to discover he is already engaged.

The show hints heavily that this engagement has faded in intensity like Sense and Sensibility’s Edward Ferrars with Lucy Steele, though Amy Baxter, played by Doctor Who’s Varada Sethu, is far nicer than the two-faced Lucy. By the end of the fifth episode, before she is called away to look after her ailing mother, Mary has found herself in a love triangle.

Throughout the series, Mary wonders just who she is. The audience, along with sensitive characters like Mrs Gardiner, already know: she is kind, funny, caring and thoughtful. In today’s parlance, she’s cute.

There is a sublime moment when Tom tries to cheer Mary up from one of her bouts of self-doubt. He arranges for Mr and Mrs Gardiner and Mary to enter a secret garden, where he reads Wordsworth’s poem Composed Upon Westminster Bridge:

Earth has not any thing to show more fair:

Dull would he be of soul who could pass by

A sight so touching in its majesty:

This City now doth, like a garment, wear

The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,

Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie

Open unto the fields, and to the sky;

All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.

Mary is moved to tears and it is clear to the audience, if not Mary or even Tom, that when he uses Wordsworth’s words to describe London, he is also describing Mary. Again, for the viewer, this is cute.

It’s clear The Other Bennet Sister is shaping up to be a classic reimagining of Pride and Prejudice, transforming the overlooked Mary Bennet into something and somebody else: as bright and glittering as the Thames in Wordsworth’s poem.

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

Andrew McInnes received funding from AHRC for the Early Career Researcher Leadership Fellow project, ‘The Romantic Ridiculous, running from 2020-2022, and thinking about the funny side of Romantic Studies.

– ref. The Other Bennet Sister: this fresh take on Pride and Prejudice transforms the overlooked Mary – https://theconversation.com/the-other-bennet-sister-this-fresh-take-on-pride-and-prejudice-transforms-the-overlooked-mary-278555

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Andrew Moscrop, Primary Care Researcher, University of Oxford

British children are not getting shorter, despite claims to the contrary. In fact, they are getting taller.

But this is not good news. When my colleagues and I analysed national data on child height, we found that the trend is largely explained by rising childhood obesity and widening inequalities.

Claims that British children are becoming shorter than their European peers have circulated widely in recent years. These concerns were often linked to suggestions that poor diet and food insecurity were harming children’s growth. But when we examined the available data, we found that many of these claims relied on incomplete or misinterpreted evidence.

To understand what was really happening, we analysed height data from the child measurement programmes that operate across Britain. These programmes measure the height and weight of children in their first year of state school and again in their final year of primary education. In England alone, around 600,000 children aged four to five are measured each year. Children aged ten to 11 are also measured – another 600,000 pupils annually.

Together, these programmes create an unusually rich dataset. The annual measurement of more than a million children provides one of the most comprehensive sources of child growth data anywhere in the world. Using freedom of information requests and official releases, my colleagues and I obtained all available height data from these programmes.

The pandemic effect

When we analysed the data we found two surprising results.

First, child height increased dramatically during the COVID pandemic. At first we suspected this might be a quirk of the data. School closures disrupted measurement programmes, meaning children were often measured later than usual – and therefore at slightly older ages.

But even after correcting for the children’s ages at measurement, the increase remained. The rise in height during COVID was seen among boys and girls, across levels of deprivation and most ethnic groups and localities.

Average height of 11-year-olds in England

Why did child height increase during COVID? The answer appears to be obesity. Obesity causes hormonal changes that accelerate child growth, meaning that obese children often grow taller faster than their healthy-weight peers.

Lockdowns are already known to have led to a surge in childhood obesity. Our analysis suggests they also led to a surge in child height. Among girls aged 11 in England, average height increased from 146.6cm to 148cm between the 2019–20 and 2020–21 school years, while the proportion of overweight or obese children in this group rose from 35.2% to 40.9%.

The second surprising finding was that even before COVID, average child height in Britain had been gradually increasing. At first this appeared encouraging – particularly because the largest increases were seen among children living in deprived areas.

But again the explanation appears to be obesity.

In England’s most deprived areas, the average height of 11-year-old boys increased by 1.7cm – from 144.4cm to 146.1cm – between 2009–10 and 2023–24. Over the same period, the proportion of children who were overweight or obese increased from 37.7% to 43.3%.

Similar patterns can be seen in Scotland. Childhood obesity rates have increased in deprived areas while declining in more affluent ones, widening the health gap between them.

Height gains linked to childhood obesity do not signal better health. Obese children often enter puberty earlier and stop growing sooner, and they face increased risks of chronic diseases such as diabetes and heart disease later in life.

The role of inequality

These trends reflect deeper inequalities. While everyone’s access to outdoor spaces was restricted during the COVID lockdowns, poorer families face many other pressures that drive weight gain – and those don’t go away.

Children in deprived areas are more exposed to unhealthy food outlets and have fewer healthy food sources. They often have less access to safe outdoor spaces where they can play and exercise safely, and children’s services have been cut back – most severely in the areas that need them most.

British children may not be shrinking, but their growth is not good news.

Child height can no longer be assumed to signal good health. In Britain today, rising average height among children reflects rising childhood obesity and deepening inequality. If we want children to grow up healthy, we need to address child poverty, inequality and the environments children grow up in.

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

– ref. British children are getting taller – and obesity may be the cause – https://theconversation.com/british-children-are-getting-taller-and-obesity-may-be-the-cause-277917