The shape of the word bubble resembles the shape of an actual bubble, according to research participants. (Unsplash)
Think about a word that looks like its meaning. For instance, the word bed kind of looks like a bed, with the vertical lines resembling the posts at either end. Loop looks very loopy.
Some words are more subtly evocative — like blizzard, whose zigzagging letters might evoke something chaotic.
The term for this is “iconicity” and it has typically been studied in the sounds of words. For example, the word meow resembles the sound of a cat. The word teeny sounds like something small.
The letters we use in English (which is a Latin script inherited from the Roman alphabet) actually started out as visual symbols. They likely evolved from Egyptian hieroglyphs.
One possibility is that these Egyptian symbols were adopted by speakers of a North Semitic language, around 1800-1600 BC, into what is called the “Proto-Sinaitic” script.
Hieroglyphs from the tomb of Pharaoh Seti I, in Egypt’s Valley of the Kings. (Wikimedia Commons)
The letters have changed so much that these ancient origins aren’t relevant to reading English today. But there is some evidence that the shapes of letters have some relationship to the sounds they convey. For example, one study assembled letters for the sound /i/ (as in bee) and /u/ (as in boo) from 56 different languages and asked people to guess which was which. It turned out that people could do this, more often than expected by chance.
But this isn’t quite what I was interested in here. Rather than asking if the shapes of letters are related to the sounds of words, I was interested in whether those shapes are related to the meanings of words.
Bubble, hoop, wiggle
In this research, I asked participants to rate more than 3,000 words according to how much the shape of their letters resembled their meaning, using a scale of one to seven.
This is a common approach in the study of psycholinguistics. We often ask people to rate words on one dimension — for example, how concrete a word is, or how positive a word is — and then use those ratings to understand how people process word meaning.
The first thing to note is that there was agreement across participants, at least on par with ratings of other word properties in the past.
It’s easy to come up with explanations for these ratings. Puppy looks like it has legs and a tail. There is something wiggly about the two G’s in the middle of wiggle.
But can we actually tell how participants made their ratings? We can get some clues by looking at the kinds of words that get higher ratings.
Round letters, spiky letters
Words with high ratings tended to refer to things you can see. This makes sense if participants were actually considering a resemblance between the word and its meaning.
Getting more specific, when a word for a round thing contained round letters (for example, O, G and C), it was rated higher. When a word for a spiky thing contained spiky letters (like W, Z and X), it was rated higher. Words for small things tended to be rated higher when they contained fewer letters.
All in all, it seems like the ratings actually did capture a resemblance between the look of a word and its meaning.
This is all well and good, but does it matter? To answer this, I used threeexistingdatabases with information on how quickly people can process individual words. These are from studies that, for example, present participants with strings of letters (for example, spoon or flarg) and have them identify them as real or invented words as quickly as possible.
In all three databases, I found that people were faster and more accurate at processing words that looked like their meanings. This was after accounting for all kinds of things like how common a word is, how many letters it contains and how easy a word’s meaning is to picture. Not only that, these words tended to be learned at an earlier age.
Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Srdjan Vucetic, Professor, Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, L’Université d’Ottawa/University of Ottawa
Canada has been chosen to house the Defence, Security and Resilience Bank (DSRB). Originally dubbed “the NATO bank,” the new institution will help NATO and non-NATO countries more easily direct funding toward defence and security needs.
This translates to hundreds of new jobs in finance, research and analysis in Montréal, Ottawa, Toronto or Vancouver — all potential host cities.
This comes as a boost for Prime Minister Mark Carney, a former banker who has sought to craft a bold new foreign policy for Canada.
As Carney argued in his acclaimed Davos speech, the ongoing geopolitical “rupture” requires countries to “hedge against uncertainty.”
Carney’s emerging foreign policy doctrine extols the influence of middle powers alongside a commitment to “variable geometry” multilateralism — his term for the once controversial idea that institutions and coalitions should be shaped by the issue or mission at hand, rather than the other way around.
Could this approach also work in defence and security? Geography and history have bound Canada and the United States through countless formal and informal agreements, including a mutual commitment to come to each other’s defence in the event of an attack.
However strained relations between Canada and the U.S. have become, the partnership is not simply an either/or choice. Canada must instead carefully balance its relationships and interests.
The Carney government’s opening moves have included a sweeping expansion of military spending and security-related infrastructure, pushing investment toward levels not seen since the Cold War, alongside a landmark strategic defence and security partnership with the European Union and Canada’s first-ever Defence Industrial Strategy.
Combined, these initiatives reveal the core logic of the approach: to bolster Canada’s capacity for strategic autonomy over the long term.
In theory, changing where defence supplies come from is less complicated than helping Canadian companies find new markets.
Yet the hardest challenges still lie ahead.
Biggest obstacles
First, boosting current spending to meet NATO’s new spending target of five per cent of GDP will be impossible without a combination of cutting back non-defence expenditures, increasing taxes and borrowing more. No democracy can achieve this quickly without a declaration of a war economy.
The challenge for the government, therefore, is not just to spend more on defence, but to ensure new investments are aligned with the objectives set out in its policy and strategy documents.
Yet the Carney government is still working on these initiatives. The delay once again has to do with Trump.
From the new defence policy (last updated in April 2024) to the new intelligence priorities (first issued in September 2024) and — most significantly — a long-overdue national security strategy (last released in April 2004), these initiatives must set clear goals for the relevant government ministries and agencies while piloting the political interplay between the Trump White House and largely anti-Trump Canadian public opinion.
The Trump influence
This is a delicate dance in which every word matters. Before Trump, every new Canadian defence policy statement was predictable, emphasizing the same three roles — domestic; NORAD and other North American operations; and NATO and other multilateral operations.
Now the government often struggles to communicate even the prime minister’s own basic talking point — that intensifying rivalries among major powers makes Canada more vulnerable because of its deep dependency on its unreliable, unpredictable but powerful neighbour to the south.
The same goes for the new intelligence priorities statement. The 2024 version outlined 14 areas of focus, spanning Arctic security and cyber- threats to technological change and violent extremism.
The Carney government won’t entertain the idea of a “royal commission for securing Canada’s future” — which could be a comprehensive, non-partisan review of the nation’s long-term stability and adaptability in the new geopolitical context
This makes the long-awaited national security strategy even more important. Meant to guide resource allocation and capability development throughout at least Carney’s tenure as prime minister, this policy should not only fully acknowledge the scale of the security challenges confronting Canada but also assess the country’s comparative advantages and structural vulnerabilities as a middle power.
This, in turn, would require incorporating key dimensions of climate and economic security, as well as science and technology policy, into the strategic framework.
With some luck, this would mark a step forward in answering some of the most pressing questions about Canada’s future, including:
What security issues should Ottawa prioritize in its “variable-geometry” multilateralism?
If the Carney government is serious about both preparing for different scenarios and following through on its plans, clear communication will be essential.
Politicians and the public alike recognize the need to rethink the assumptions and decisions that have shaped Canadian life over the past 50 years, if not longer. The more Canadians understand why some risks are being prioritized over others, and why resources are being directed accordingly, the better equipped the country will be to handle what comes next.
Srdjan Vucetic has received funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Mobilizing Insights in Defence and Security (MINDS) program of the Department of National Defence. He is also the co-author, with Hager Ben Jaffel, of the forthcoming book Beyond Five Eyes Intelligence: An International Political Sociology.
Later, Pǎun’s father overheard police officers using a common racial slur while commenting on the supposed impossibility of a Roma person showing civic courage. This was not an aberration; it was a part of the same systemic racism that’s left the victims’ families without true justice six years later.
As sensory studies scholars who focus on racism and migration, we argue that racism is not only interpersonal or even simply structural, it’s also multi-sensory. It shapes how minorities see, hear and move through the world, with consequences that extend from everyday interactions to life-or-death institutional failures.
Systemic failures shaped the tragedy
The gunman , a firm believer in the “Great Replacement” theory, scouted out places where minorities were thought to gather — shisha bars, youth centres and kebab shops — to carry out his attack.
The aftermath and investigation into the event revealed how in Germany the devaluation of minority lives that drove the gunman’s worldview is also present in the way justice, media and politics operate.
What happened at the Arena Bar & Café, the final site of the attack, serves as another example for the families of the victims who argue that the racism in this tragedy is also evidence of systemic issues within policing. The exit had been illegally locked to facilitate police raids, largely driven, investigators found, by racial profiling linking hookah bars with criminality.
The London-based research agency Forensic Architecture, which uses architectural techniques and digital technologies to investigate human rights violations, revealed that five of the nine victims could have escaped through the emergency exit and survived.
There were questions about why it took hours to apprehend the perpetrator, even though his location was known. The special forces stood by his house and waited, which gave the perpetrator time to kill his mother and commit suicide. They never offered a reason for their delayed intervention.
Our research shows that racism is a multi-sensory experience that transforms the ways in which minorities feel and interact with the world. Qualitative research and statistics confirm that people face a loss of trust and the development of health issues when faced with institutional discrimination.
Multi-sensory racism can present through a visual categorization based on skin colour — the discomfort of entering predominantly white spaces, for example. It can manifest through olfactory perception such as comments on “smelly” foods.
It affects everyday social interactions like how and where people choose to safely socialize — and why they may prefer to spend their time within their own communities rather than “integrating.”
These experiences culminate in how institutional behaviour sets up or fails to sanction individual racism.
Beyond moments of tragedy
In the case of Hanau, the failure by politicians and police to acknowledge the ubiquity of the racist worldview that motivated the perpetrator and made his violence possible has prompted survivors and their families to begin a multi-pronged anti-racist effort.
Most prominently, the survivors founded Initiative February 19 Hanau to create a platform that pushes for social action and solidarity for the victims of racist violence. Guided by the principles of remembrance, investigation, justice and accountability, the initiative calls for state responsibility while embracing the notion of #SayTheirNames.
The hashtag underscores the importance of naming those who have been murdered as an act of resistance against racism and systemic violence.
Both Said Etris Hashemi — who still carries shrapnel from the perpetrator’s ammunition in his body — and Çetin Gültekin, brother of the murdered Gökhan Gültekin, released memoirs that deal with the inherent racism of German society and situate it within a broader political struggle of growing far-right movements and their popularity in Germany.
The 2025 documentary Das Deutsche Volk follows the lives of the survivors and their families over the years and captures the ongoing fight for a memorial in Hanau’s city centre.
At one point, Çetin Gültekin suggests a landmark that showcases the deceased as pillars encircling the Brothers Grimm National Monument. The indifference that follows this suggestion has been interpreted by advocates as a lack of recognition for dignified remembrance.
The Hanau attacks, and the ongoing struggle for recognition of migrants’ experiences in a system where German institutions often treat them as third-class citizens, expose a troubling fallacy. It was captured by the words of Ta-Nehisi Coates in his 2015 non-fiction book Between the World and Me: “Race is the child of racism, not its father.”
In societies where race is still treated as a biological fact — rather than a colonial construct used to place people into arbitrary hierarchies — and where structural inequalities are only beginning to be acknowledged, there is still limited understanding of racism as a multi-sensory reality that shapes the everyday lives of minorities.
The work of addressing racist injustice requires sustained, long-term institutional and social change.
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.
The Canadian men’s national soccer team has the unique opportunity to forge a different vision of Canadian national identity — one that looks quite different from what hockey has historically offered.
A lot of the national enthusiasm was likely stoked by Canada’s tense trade relationship with the United States and not Blue Jays players being directly representative of the lived experiences of most Canadians.
A squad built on multiculturalism
Canada’s men’s soccer team presents a different image: a racially diverse squad whose players embody stories of immigration, offering a more inclusive vision of what Canadian identity can look like.
It is precisely this multicultural framework that’s made the squad possible and given Canada unprecedented strength and depth.
The power of recognition
National sporting events are powerful vehicles for building shared identity. When people connect to sporting events in ways that make their sense of belonging to a country feel personal, sport becomes something more than entertainment.
This World Cup arrives at a politically charged moment, with the United States — a co-host alongside with Mexico — planning to involve immigration enforcement in tournament security. Canada’s multicultural squad offers a counter-narrative in a tournament already shadowed by debates about immigration and belonging.
For the millions of Canadians who immigrated to Canada or who carry their family’s immigration story as a major part of their sense of identity, the men’s national soccer team offers something that the men’s Olympic hockey squad and the Toronto Blue Jays never quite delivered: the possibility of seeing themselves in a more complete representation of Canada’s team.
That is not a small thing. It is, in fact, the realization of the full potential of sport in building Canadian national identity.
Noah Eliot Vanderhoeven 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.
Gold prices are at an all-time high, and we are very worried. As disease ecologists, it’s not the economic instability that concerns us, but the fact that a surge in gold mining could have a devastating impact on human health.
When Jair Bolsonaro became Brazil’s president in 2019, he made environmental deregulation a central tenet of his platform, claiming that environmental and Indigenous land protections hindered the country’s economic development. He also transferred the authority of Indigenous land demarcation from the National Indigenous Foundation (FUNAI) to the Agriculture Ministry.
Furthermore, he issued decrees aimed at deregulating small-scale mining activities in the Amazon region. The decrees made no distinction between regulated (therefore, legal) mining outside of Indigenous territory and mining within Indigenous land, which is universally illegal. Illegal miners flooded the Yanomami territory.
By January 2023, when Lula da Silva secured the Presidency as Bolsonaro successor, the number of illegal gold miners in Yanomami territory — the largest Indigenous territory in the Amazon — had surged to 20,000, roughly two-thirds the number of the local Yanomami population.
Malaria and the Yanomami health crisis
Weeks after Lula da Silva took office, independent news outlet Sumaúmareleased a dispatch citing shocking disease and malnutrition figures among the Yanomami. Threaded with images of suffering Yanomami people, the report motivated the president to declare a humanitarian crisis.
Dr. Andre Siqueira, a researcher from the Oswaldo Cruz research institute (Fiocruz) and a member of the team of doctors sent into the territory upon declaration of the crisis recounted: “The conditions of the population were devastating.” Nearly every person they tested was positive for malaria.
Even small increases in mining can cause a surge in malaria cases
The Sumaúma dispatch, and the Instituto Sociaombientalreport upon which it was based, linked the influx of illegal gold miners during the Bolsonaro administration to the Yanomami health crisis and the proliferation of malaria.
As researchers who focus on how trends in land use contribute to the spread of parasites, we suspected that gold mining and malaria were not separate contributors to the same crisis, but part of one system of cause and effect devastating the territory and its people.
Illegal gold mining can drive malaria in multiple ways. First, when miners tear down forests and open gashes along the edges of rivers to access gold deposits, they create the ideal breeding grounds for the mosquito species that transmits malaria in the Amazon.
Second, when miners travel to the territory, potentially from malaria hotspots across South America, they can carry the parasite into the territory and increase its transmission.
Finally, small-scale gold miners often use mercury to cheaply and easily extract gold particles. This mercury is dumped into waterways across the region, poisoning the people who rely on the rivers for water and for fish, weakening their immune systems and making them more susceptible to malaria infection.
We were shocked by the results. The relationship was far stronger than we suspected. We found that every 0.03% increase in mining led to a 20-46% increase in malaria one to two years later, resulting in a 300% increase in malaria in the Yanomami territory between 2016-2023.
Understanding the association between gold mining and malaria underpinning the Yanomami health crisis is only one part of the puzzle. We hope that this research can serve as a tool to empower Indigenous communities with information about their health and inform policies that protect both human health and the environment. Our data indicates that by preventing illegal mining within Indigenous lands can protect their health and other important natural and cultural heritage.
Improving healthcare access
The Lula government is engaging in important efforts to expel illegal gold miners and establish health centers in the Yanomami territory. Though hospitalizations for malaria have decreased slightly since 2023, malaria rates among Yanomami remain high due to the lagged effect we identified in our research and the difficulty of access to timely diagnoses and treatment in remote regions.
Researchers are making strides to close this accessibility gap. An international team has developed “malakits”, which empower community members without formal medical training to diagnose and treat malaria on site. Such efforts are of critical importance given that the lagged effects of illegal gold mining will continue to cause elevated malaria incidence unless communities have broad access to treatment.
Informed consumers can prioritize purchasing recycled gold or refrain from purchasing gold at all to send a signal that further illegal gold extraction is not worth the human toll. As with the Blood Diamonds campaign in the early 2000s, real change can come from spreading the word about the human and environmental cost of illegal mining and demanding ethical supply chains.
Appeals to protect the Amazon region are often made on environmental terms. We want to make the case that saving the people in Amazon is also a global health imperative. Protecting the forest, investing in Indigenous land rights, fostering healthy economic opportunities for rural communities, and interrogating the role of gold in our global economy are all part of preventing the continued spread of one of the world’s deadliest infectious diseases.
Daniela de Angeli Dutra was funded by a grant from the National Institutes of Health (USA) awarded to Professor Erin Mordecai.
Riley Casagrande não presta consultoria, trabalha, possui ações ou recebe financiamento de qualquer empresa ou organização que poderia se beneficiar com a publicação deste artigo e não revelou nenhum vínculo relevante além de seu cargo acadêmico.
Source: The Conversation – UK – By Andrew Gawthorpe, Lecturer in History and International Studies, Leiden University
Donald Trump and Xi Jinping are likely to discuss many issues as they meet this week in Beijing. But alongside trade, technology and the war in Iran, one topic of conversation will stand out – the future of Taiwan.
Taiwan has long been a sensitive issue in Sino-American relations. Beijing regards the island as a breakaway province which must be reunited with the mainland. The United States has long opposed such a step. Yet in recent months, Trump has fuelled speculation that he may be ready to change key aspects of US policy on the issue, potentially granting Beijing long-sought concessions.
Trump’s apparent readiness to make these moves means that Taiwan is one of the issues on which we might see the most significant policy developments at the summit. And that could happen simply through the famously voluble president uttering just a few simple words.
The president’s policy towards Taiwan has been inconsistent and seemingly more malleable than that of previous administrations. Advocates for Taiwan point out that his administration recently approved the largest ever US arms sale to the island. But at the same time, he has sowed doubts about the strength of his support for Taiwan’s independence.
US policy towards Taiwan has traditionally been based on two principles. The first is “strategic ambiguity”, which means that the US declines to explicitly state whether it would actively use its military to defend Taiwan from attack by China. This policy is supposed to deter China while also discouraging Taiwan from formally declaring its independence from Beijing.
The second principle is the “one China policy”. According to this policy, the US recognises Beijing as the legitimate government of China, while opposing any violent solution to its dispute with Taiwan. It also retains robust informal links to the Taiwanese government in Taipei.
Observers are concerned that Trump may water down these principles during his summit with Xi. For instance, he might state that the US not only “does not support” Taiwanese independence but actively “opposes” it. Or he might double down on previous comments he has made indicating that whether or not Xi invades Taiwan is “up to him”.
Trump has also explicitly stated that he will discuss future US arms sales to Taiwan with Xi during this week’s summit. This violates one of the so-called Six Assurances that the US has upheld towards Taiwan since the 1980s, and which were endorsed by the US Congress in 2016.
Even securing a discussion of arms sales would be a victory for Xi, who would welcome an opportunity to chip away at the Six Assurances. Presumably he would then try to weaken the US commitment to the other five, which include a US commitment not to change its position on Taiwan’s sovereignty.
More concretely, if Xi succeeds in making US arms sales to Taiwan a legitimate topic of negotiation in Sino-American relations, then he could head them off in the future by offering the US concessions in other areas. For instance, if Trump or a future president asks Beijing for its help settling a conflict like that in Iran, Beijing might demand an end to US arms sales to Taiwan as the price.
High stakes
Given Trump’s reputation as a formidable China hawk, his attitude towards Taiwan may seem surprising. But it’s actually part of a longstanding pattern.
In relations with China, Trump has arguably always prioritised economic issues, while appearing less concerned about the security of America’s regional allies. He has also raised doubts about whether Taiwan is even defensible. In his first term, he reportedly told aides that: “Taiwan is like two feet from China. We are 8,000 miles away. If they invade, there isn’t a fucking thing we can do about it”.
Trump is also both highly transactional and less focused on abstract principles of foreign policy than most previous presidents. He views America’s support of allies such as Taiwan as a gift that it gives them, one that is often not worth the cost. If he can achieve a concrete victory for himself today by trading away support for Taiwan tomorrow, he may well be willing to do so.
All of these developments matter because they make a violent conflict between China and Taiwan, potentially ultimately involving the US, more likely. If Trump makes concessions to Xi, it will be the latest signal that US support for Taiwan is wavering. That made be read in Beijing as permission to violently change the status quo. Even though such an act might belatedly then be met with force from Washington in response, it is made more likely by Trump’s stance today.
Even worse for Trump, the summit comes at a time when American power and the wisdom of its long-term strategy are being visibly called into question in the Middle East. The US is bogged down in an intractable conflict and has severely damaged its deterrent capacity in the Indo-Pacific by burning through advanced munitions at a high rate. Trump’s personal unpopularity is also rising at home amid the war and its economic fallout.
This weakened position makes it even more likely that Trump will want to strike a deal with Xi to help end the war in Iran or ease trade tensions to help the economy at home. Taiwan may be the price of that – and, ultimately, peace.
Andrew Gawthorpe is affiliated with the Foreign Policy Centre in London.
The government has set out its legislative agenda for the new parliamentary session in the king’s speech. Our panel of experts reveals the key points.
Measures to ease high living costs
Jonquil Lowe, Visiting Academic, The Open University
Surveys suggest that the cost of living is still a major concern for UK households, with energy and food prices topping the list of worries. In response, some campaigners have called on the government to use the energy independence bill announced in the king’s speech to break the link between electricity and gas prices and volatile global gas prices. And they want it to provide support, especially for low-income households, to switch away from heating homes with fossil fuels.
Among other measures, the bill aims to ensure landlords upgrade their properties to reduce tenants’ energy bills. These kinds of measure need to be introduced urgently if they are to save households from heftier energy bills expected this winter.
Other cost-of-living reliefs are welcome, although their impact may be small. For example, a move to “strengthen ties with Europe” may ease food inflation by reducing red tape and border checks on some imported foods.
The leasehold and commonhold reform bill (carried over from the previous parliamentary session) will help owners of leasehold flats and houses by capping ground rents at £250 a year, and then reducing them to a negligible amount after 40 years. Meanwhile, the social housing renewal bill aims to increase the stock of affordable social homes.
A ‘Bresignation’ bill: options for UK-EU closer relationship remain limited
Miriam Sorace, Associate Professor in Comparative Politics, University of Reading
The government clearly recognises that to improve the UK’s economic and trade security, strengthening ties with the European Union is paramount. But public attitudes are still characterised by “bresignation” rather than wholehearted “bregret”.
While support for rejoining the EU sits at around 55%, this obscures deep polarisation and strong conditionality. Support drops sharply in rejoining scenarios that require the UK to relinquish its previous opt‑outs, notably euro adoption and participation in the Schengen agreement on free movement. These would probably be among the concessions demanded by the EU, given public opinion across member states. Support for rejoining the single market (48%) or the customs union (50%) lags behind support for rejoining the EU and remains highly polarised.
The least polarising and most popular option is a broadly defined “closer relationship” with the EU, supported by around 63% of the public and even attracting a sizable minority (40%) of Reform UK voters (and 56% of previous Leave voters). Yet this plea reflects a degree of wishful thinking. Given the UK’s and EU’s red lines, marginal adjustments to the Trade and Cooperation Agreement are the only real options short of the various rejoin alternatives.
The status quo is widely disliked (only 33% prefer the current UK-EU relationship), but there is no other politically viable alternative to tinkering around the edges. “Closer relations” is not a concrete policy: it’s the default expression of living under sub-optimal constrained choice. In other words: “bresignation”. The UK is likely to remain locked into a status quo of continual negotiation with the EU for the foreseeable future, unless public opinion shifts towards accepting the significant concessions required to initiate rejoining negotiations.
Tourist taxes – England plays catch-up
Rhys Ap Gwilym, Senior Lecturer in Economics at Bangor University’s Business School
England is set to become the 26th country in Europe to introduce a tourist tax. The overnight visitor levy bill, announced in the king’s speech, follows recent moves in Scotland and Wales allowing local authorities to tax overnight stays.
In Scotland, Edinburgh will lead the way, adding a 5% levy to accommodation bills from July 24 this year. In Wales, Cardiff intends to introduce charges from April 2027: £1.30 per person per night in hotels and Airbnbs, and 75 pence in campsites and hostels. Such measures have proved controversial, with strong opposition from parts of the tourism industry.
The UK government has framed this as “the first step in a new era of fiscal devolution in England”. In practice, it is a modest one. Revenues are likely to be small relative to existing local taxes and mayors may place greater weight on reforms to council tax caps or business rate retention.
That said, international evidence suggests well-designed tourist taxes can work. Even modest revenues can help fund destination management, ease pressures on local communities and improve the visitor experience. The detail of the legislation will ultimately determine whether England achieves these gains.
Plans to make it easier to align UK law with EU agreements
Simon Usherwood, Professor of Politics & International Studies, The Open University
For all the talk from Prime Minister Keir Starmer of putting the UK at “the heart of Europe”, the proposed European Partnership Bill is a relatively modest and technical move. It would give the government powers to make adjustments to domestic legislation to ensure it complies with agreements being made with the EU. This would apply to those currently under negotiation (like youth mobility, food and veterinary standards, or emissions trading) or those that might be considered in future.
This streamlines a process that would have been necessary in any case, and remains reliant on those EU deals actually being struck. So there’s nothing particularly remarkable about the content. However, the repeated mention of “where it benefits the national interest” highlights how the government is trying to package this as something more.
Decisions about when to align are necessarily attached to decisions to sign up to deals with the EU, not to whether to make the domestic adjustments (which international law would consider to be an obligation). Much like Starmer’s flowery rhetoric in his speech on Monday, the substance doesn’t really match up.
Nationalising steel for security – but debts could burden the taxpayer
Phil Tomlinson, Professor of Industrial Strategy and Regional Development, University of Bath
Plans to nationalise British Steel offer some comfort to UK steel workers in the form of preserving jobs and providing stability. More pertinently, the move represents a renewed willingness for the state to intervene in a strategically important industry facing financial difficulties, high energy costs, fierce global competition and the challenges of the green transition.
Steel is a critical element in UK sectors such as car manufacturing and defence, infrastructure projects like railways, and low-carbon technologies including wind turbines. Nationalisation should offer the UK a degree of security over steel supply in an increasingly uncertain geopolitical climate.
The risk is that British Steel continues to lose out in global markets and makes substantial losses. This will impose a huge financial burden on the UK taxpayer, at a time when public finances are tight. But public ownership could align steel production with the UK’s broader industrial strategy goals, such as infrastructure development and net-zero targets.
And state financing could allow for long-term investment in new electric steel furnaces and decarbonisation. In the future, the government could use other levers to ensure a market for British Steel, such as strategies which favour UK-sourced, low-carbon steel for green infrastructure projects.
Plans to clean up our rivers and seas could be watered down
Alex Ford, Professor of Biology, University of Portsmouth
Water bills are rising, public anger over sewage pollution has not abated, and the government has now set out a major overhaul of water regulation in England and Wales in the king’s speech.
The proposed water reform bill signals a shift in emphasis. Rather than focusing solely on water companies, the legislation aims to address pollution more broadly, including contributions from agriculture and industry. This is a welcome change. The bill also promises a more unified regulatory system to end the fragmented oversight that has characterised the sector for decades.
Yet despite the language of reform, the vision looks less like a radical reset and more like a reboot of privatisation. This focus will worry campaigners, as it suggests continuity with an economic model widely blamed for under-investment, rising bills and environmental harm.
Immigration bill to tighten rules on right to family life
Joelle Grogan, Senior Visiting Research Fellow, University College Dublin
The government says the new immigration and asylum bill will “tighten the application” of Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights. The Article 8 right to family life is inherently restricted, and both national courts and the European Court of Human Rights generally defer to government migration policy. So more detail of the bill in future will be welcome.
The background briefing notes state that Article 8 is stopping the removal of those living illegally in the UK, saying that 86% of people from January to September 2022 who raised rights-based applications in detention were released. However, this highlights the lack of data – both on how many removals have been stopped by the ECHR and its connection with the number of illegal arrivals. Research on available data on the ECHR and foreign national offenders indicate that numbers are very low.
The bill will define family life to ensure that it is limited to the core family unit of spouse, parents and children. But the European Court of Human Rights emphasises the “dependence” of one family member on another (for example by providing sole financial support) in migration cases as the trigger for Article 8. So by defining “family unit” without the condition of “dependence”, the government may unintentionally widen the definition rather than narrow it.
Simon Usherwood has received funding from the Economic and Social Research Council, as a Senior Fellow of the UK in a Changing Europe initiative.
Alex Ford has received funding from UKRI research councils, EU, charities and industrial partners including the water industry.
Joelle Grogan, Jonquil Lowe, Miriam Sorace, and Phil Tomlinson 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.
When you think of outer space, you’re likely picturing stars, planets and moons. But much of space is filled with clouds of gas, plasma and stardust – known as interstellar clouds.
In the local parts of our galaxy alone there’s a complex of roughly 15 individual interstellar clouds. The Solar System is currently traversing one of them, aptly named the Local Interstellar Cloud. The origin and history of these clouds are believed to be tightly connected to the birth and death of stars. But we can see their imprints right here on Earth, in a place you might not expect – Antarctic ice.
My colleagues and I have been studying stardust trapped in old Antarctic snow and ice to trace the history of our solar neighbourhood, including the Solar System itself.
In a new study published in Physical Review Letters, we found a subtle clue that reveals our Solar System’s movement through the local interstellar environment over the past 80,000 years.
Looking down to see the sky
Astronomy usually looks outward. Telescopes collect light from distant stars and galaxies, allowing us to observe events across vast stretches of space and time. From these observations, we infer how stars live and die, how elements are formed, and how the universe evolves.
Instead of observing the light coming to us, we study the debris of exploding stars right here on Earth. As cosmic furnaces, stars forge many elements in their cores, from carbon and oxygen to calcium and iron. This includes rare isotopes (variants of chemical elements) such as iron-60.
When massive stars explode into supernovae at the end of their life, these elements are ejected into space and become interstellar dust.
Tiny grains of this dust then drift through the galaxy and occasionally find their way to Earth’s surface. Radioactive iron-60, a fingerprint of stellar explosions, is embedded within these grains. By searching for these atoms in geological archives on Earth, we can probe astrophysical events like supernovae long after their light has faded.
This is why Antarctica is so valuable. Its snow accumulates slowly and remains largely undisturbed, forming a layered record that stretches back tens of thousands of years. Each layer captures a snapshot of the material that was present in our cosmic neighbourhood at the time.
Finding stardust in Antarctic ice
When we studied 500kg of recent snow in Antarctica, we unexpectedly found this rare radioactive isotope. Where did it come from? There was no recent near-Earth supernova.
But our solar neighbourhood is filled with 15 clouds, with the Solar System currently traversing at least one of them. Is the stardust waiting in the clouds to be picked up by Earth? If yes, then the amount of stardust Earth collects should be related to their structure: the denser the clouds, the more iron-60 they contain. This was our educated guess in 2019.
To find out, we analysed a 300kg section of Antarctic ice, dating from 40,000 to 80,000 years ago. The process is painstaking. The ice needs to be melted and chemically treated to isolate tiny amounts of iron, including the iron-60 from the stardust.
Then, using the sensitive atom counting technique of accelerator mass spectrometry at the Heavy-Ion Accelerator Facility at Australian National University, we counted individual atoms of iron-60.
The expectation was straightforward: based on previous measurements from surface snow of Antarctica and several thousand-year-old ocean sediments, we anticipated a certain steady level of iron-60 deposition.
Instead, we found less. Not zero, but noticeably lower than expected.
This result suggests that less interstellar dust was reaching Earth during that period. This is a remarkable change on a comparatively short astrophysical timescale and does not fit the long timescales of the iron-60 deposits that landed here millions of years ago. Instead, we needed to look for a smaller, more local source for the isotope.
The Orion Molecular Cloud Complex is a type of interstellar cloud. NASA/JPL-Caltech
A fitting story
Naturally, astronomers are also quite interested in the clouds around the Solar System. Last year, a study reconstructing the history of the clouds arrived at the conclusion that they most likely originated in a stellar explosion. Furthermore, they found the Solar System has been traversing the Local Interstellar Cloud from sometime between 40,000 and 124,000 years ago.
If that’s correct, we would expect that the amount of iron-60 collected on Earth should have changed sometime in the same time period – between 40,000 and 124,000 years ago.
This is exactly what our results showed in Antarctica.
The story doesn’t fit perfectly, though. If these clouds did originate directly from an exploding star, we would expect way more iron-60 than we actually see in Antarctic ice.
Nevertheless, these clouds are imprinted in Earth’s geological record. If we look deeper and analyse even older ice, we might soon unravel the mystery of these local interstellar clouds, revealing their full history and uncertain origins.
Dominik Koll receives funding from the Australian Institute of Nuclear Science and Engineering (AINSE).
Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Sarah Foster, Program Leader, Project Seahorse and Senior Researcher, Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries, University of British Columbia
Bottom trawlers extract one-quarter of the world’s fisheries catches by weight and raise significant ecological, economic and social concerns. Given that, you’d think there would be an answer to basic questions in fisheries: how many fish species are being caught, and what are they?
In reality, though, bottom trawling is often proceeding blindly.
Bottom trawling is widespread and problematic. Gears operate by dragging large weighted nets across the ocean floor (some as wide as a 45-storey building is tall), sweeping up most of the life they encounter along the way and destroying habitat.
By far the biggest threat to seahorses is their incidental capture in bottom trawls. (Unsplash/Giulia Salvaterra)
We lead a conservation team called Project Seahorse, dedicated to ensuring there are more fish in the ocean in healthier ecosystems. We focus our work on securing healthy populations of seahorses — and to save seahorses, we have to save the seas.
By far the biggest threat to seahorses is their incidental capture in bottom trawls. As such, seahorses provide an index of the tremendous intensity of bottom trawling.
It was while developing a briefing on bottom trawl impacts that we realized no one knew the actual tally or diversity of fish getting caught up in nets. So we set out to provide an answer and in so doing unveiled more about the pressure bottom trawling is placing on marine species, ecosystems and fisheries worldwide.
Endangered species
Our research was anchored in tedious work as our co-authors took a deep dive into studies and reports hosted on the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) document repository, supplemented by an ad hoc exploration of additional literature.
The FAO is an intergovernmental organization that, among other things, collates worldwide fisheries data. We extracted more than 9,000 reports of fish species in bottom trawl catches, spanning from 1895 to 2021.
The first of our worrying findings is that a huge number of species are affected. We documented around 3,000 different fish species in bottom trawl catches but our modelled estimates suggest the true number could be double that.
Our data also showed that bottom trawls extract all or most species in some fish families. These include both the ocean’s most nutritious and commercially critical fish, such as jacks and croakers, and rare, distinct fish such as giant guitarfish and plough-nosed chimera.
Our second discovery is that many of the species we documented are already known to be of conservation concern. Among those on the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s (IUCN) Red List, about one in seven are classified as threatened or near-threatened with extinction. Bottom trawling was also cited in threat assessments for two-thirds of those species.
A giant guitarfish is among the species being caught by bottom trawling. (Sarah Foster)
Insufficient data
Our third finding was that there is limited information on the conservation status for many of the fish caught in bottom trawls. About one-quarter of the species we recorded were listed as “data deficient” or “not evaluated” by IUCN, meaning their conservation status is essentially unknown.
People tend to focus on the threatened species, which certainly need our attention; seahorses among them. However, we also need to be concerned about the species in trawls that lack conservation assessments, which may also be faring badly.
Finally, we found that many species are not even being recorded. Our database includes relatively few records of smaller demersal species (animals that live near the bottom of the sea), with fisheries often just lumping them together as “various” or “trash fish.”
As many fish are so often overlooked or ignored in catch records, we often don’t actually know what bottom trawlers are catching. When species are not recorded, we lose critical information about biodiversity, population status and ecosystem impacts, not to mention the loss of resources that people depend on for food and livelihoods.
Bottom trawl fisheries should be required to demonstrate that they are ecologically, economically and socially sustainable before being considered acceptable. As it stands, the burden of proof falls on those trying to demonstrate harm — not on the industry causing it. This needs to be reversed, paying full attention to all the fish in the nets.
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.
Source: The Conversation – UK – By Domenico Vicinanza, Associate Professor of Intelligent Systems and Data Science, Anglia Ruskin University
Illustration of a Mars mission that utilises nuclear propulsion.Nasa
Nasa is developing ways to use nuclear power to send spacecraft to their destinations. Nuclear propulsion could greatly reduce the journey time to Mars, perhaps cutting a voyage of more than six months to three or four months.
The idea of nuclear propulsion in space goes back to the cold war. But Nasa has been pursuing it more aggressively since Jared Isaacman took over as the agency’s chief in December 2025. Isaacman is a well-known advocate of the technology and says it can “truly unlock humankind’s ability to explore among the stars”.
In March 2026, the agency even announced an uncrewed, nuclear-powered mission to the red planet, targeted for late 2028.
Every spacecraft begins its journey fighting Earth’s gravity by burning chemical fuel. Rockets mix fuel with an oxidiser, ignite them, and force the expanding gas through a nozzle. According to Isaac Newton’s third law, when gas pushes downward, the rocket gets an equal push upward.
Chemical propulsion is powerful, reliable, and quite simply the only practical way to leave Earth’s gravity. But it comes with a severe limitation. Rockets must carry both their fuel and, in most cases, the oxidiser needed to burn it.
That means much of a rocket’s mass at launch is propellant, not payload. The longer and more ambitious the journey, the more propellant is needed, and the heavier the rocket becomes.
Nasa chief Jared Isaacman has repeatedly made the case for nuclear-propelled spacecraft. NASA/Aubrey Gemignani
Mars is far enough away that a long journey time, the threat to astronauts from cosmic radiation, the mass required to carry life-support systems and constraints on the return journey all pose serious problems for planning a mission.
This is why engineers keep looking for more sustainable alternatives to chemical rockets.
Nuclear thermal propulsion follows a three-step process. First, the nuclear reactor inside the engine splits uranium atoms to generate massive amounts of heat. Second, liquid hydrogen is pumped through the reactor core, where it flash boils and expands into a high-pressure gas. Third, this super-heated gas is blasted out of a nozzle at high velocities to push the spacecraft forward.
How does a nuclear thermal propulsion rocket work? (US Department of Energy)
According to the US Department of Energy, nuclear thermal propulsion can reduce travel times to Mars by up to 25% and, more importantly, limit a crew’s exposure to cosmic radiation. It would also widen the launch windows in which spacecraft can feasibly fly to Mars.
These depend on alignments of Earth and Mars that come along every couple of years. Greater flexibility with launch windows would allow astronauts to abort missions and return to Earth if necessary.
Nuclear electric propulsion, on the other hand, uses a nuclear reactor to generate electricity. This powers a type of engine called an ion thruster that accelerates charged atoms (like xenon) out of a nozzle. If nuclear thermal propulsion is the sprint approach, nuclear electric propulsion is the marathon option. Nuclear electric propulsion produces very low thrust, but it can run continuously for years.
This fuel efficient technology is perfect for sending robot explorers or heavy cargo (like habitats and food supplies) to Mars months before the humans arrive. In deep space, a small thrust applied for a long time can matter enormously.
Ion thrusters, which accelerate charged atoms out of a nozzle, are a key component of nuclear electric propulsion. Nasa / Jef Janis
A chemical rocket is like a powerful kick. Nuclear electric propulsion is more like a persistent hand on the shoulder.
It could make it easier to move heavy cargo through deep space, provide abundant onboard power, and remain effective far from the Sun, where the energy available to solar arrays is weaker.
This is the main idea behind Nasa’s Space Reactor-1 Freedom mission. SR-1 Freedom is a nuclear electric propulsion mission, which Nasa is currently targeting for launch in December 2028.
It would be the first nuclear-powered interplanetary spacecraft. It will journey to Mars to prove that nuclear energy can provide the sustained, high-efficiency power needed for deep space travel.
The SR-1 Freedom mission has been given a very ambitious launch date of 2028. Nasa
On arrival at Mars, roughly one year after its launch, SR-1 Freedom is expected to deploy the Skyfall payload. This is a set of small helicopter drones that will scout the Martian surface.
Nasa says the mission will establish nuclear hardware that can be used on other flights. It could also create a regulatory precedent and activate an industrial base for future systems based on nuclear fission.
For human exploration, the combination of both nuclear electric propulsion and nuclear thermal propulsion is very attractive. Because nuclear electric propulsion is incredibly fuel-efficient, it can move massive amounts of weight (habitats, years of food, rovers, and life-support machinery) using very little propellant.
It might not matter so much if cargo takes more than nine months to arrive on Mars. But our fragile human bodies mean that longer stays in space increase the risk of cancer from cosmic radiation and cause bone and muscle loss.
The second of these issues is because bones and muscles are not being exercised in microgravity. Nuclear thermal propulsion provides the high thrust needed to reach Mars in three to four months, drastically reducing these health risks.
Steep path
Despite the clear benefits, the path to the launch pad is steep, and the 2028 launch of SR-1 Freedom appears incredibly ambitious. A nuclear electric spacecraft needs a reactor, shielding, heat management, power conversion, radiators, electric thrusters, control systems and fault tolerance. Each of these components of the mission requires testing and careful integration for them to work together.
Reactor heat must be controlled without damaging other components. Thrusters
must operate reliably for months. Other factors can interact in ways that only emerge when spacecraft subsystems are put together. If SR-1 Freedom is to make its December 2028 window, Nasa has very little time to assemble a mission that would normally require years of design, integration and review.
If humans are to settle on Mars, space agencies will need faster ways of getting there. Nasa
Nuclear propulsion has spent more than 60 years somewhere between engineering reality and technological myth – even though the physics has always been sound.
What has proved harder is making the technology safe, affordable, licensable (able to meet regulatory safety standards) and ready to fly on a real mission schedule. So far, the US has launched only one fission reactor into orbit, SNAP-10A, in 1965.
SR-1 Freedom could create the pathway for more capable systems to follow. Nuclear electric propulsion will not make Mars easy. But it might start to break down barriers to travelling to Mars, and that is a prospect we should be excited about.
Domenico Vicinanza 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.
