Category: The Conversation

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Quynh Hoang, Lecturer in Marketing and Consumption, Department of Marketing and Strategy, University of Leicester

A Los Angeles jury has delivered a landmark verdict: Meta and YouTube were negligent in the design and operation of their platforms, causing a young woman known in court documents as Kaley, or KGM, to become addicted to social media.

The tech giants must now pay her a total of US$6 million in damages – $3 million compensatory and $3 million punitive.

She claimed the platforms’ design features got her addicted to the technology and exacerbated her depression, anxiety, body dysmorphia and suicidal thoughts.

The jury found that Meta bore 70% of the responsibility and YouTube 30%, meaning Meta will pay $4.2 million and Google’s YouTube $1.8 million. Both companies have said they will appeal.

The verdict came a day after a separate New Mexico jury ordered Meta to pay US$375 million for failing to protect children from predators on Instagram and Facebook.

Kaley filed her lawsuit in 2023, when she was 17. She claimed that she began using social media as a young child and alleged that features such as infinite scroll, autoplay, algorithmically timed notifications and beauty filters were addictive.

TikTok and Snap were originally named as defendants but settled before the trial began for undisclosed sums. Meta and YouTube proceeded to a seven-week trial in Los Angeles Superior Court.

The case is the first of three bellwether trials scheduled in the California state proceedings – test cases selected to gauge how juries respond to the core legal arguments – drawn from a pool of more than 1,600 plaintiffs, including over 350 families and 250 school districts.

The outcome of this first trial was always likely to have consequences far beyond one young woman’s case.

Bypassing big tech’s legal shield

The legal strategy that made this trial possible was a deliberate departure from previous attempts to sue social media companies. Historically, platforms have been shielded by Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, which protects internet companies from liability for content posted by their users.

The plaintiff’s lawyers sidestepped this entirely by arguing that the harm arose not from what users posted, but from how the platforms were engineered – treating Instagram and YouTube as defective products rather than neutral publishers.

The jury heard internal Meta documents that proved damaging. One memo read: “If we wanna win big with teens, we must bring them in as tweens.” Another showed that 11-year-olds were four times as likely to keep returning to Instagram compared with competing apps, despite the platform’s own minimum age requirement of 13.

A former Meta engineering director turned whistleblower, Arturo Béjar, testified about how features like infinite scroll exploit the brain’s reward system. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg himself took the stand – his first jury testimony on child safety – and was questioned about his decision to retain beauty filters despite internal research flagging their impact on young girls’ body image.

The jury rejected the companies’ central defence: that Kaley’s struggles were primarily the result of a difficult home life and pre-existing conditions rather than platform design.

In finding that the companies had acted with “malice, oppression or fraud”, they opened the door to the additional punitive damages that brought the total to US$6 million.

Both companies will appeal, and the process could take years. In the meantime, a second important trial is scheduled for this summer, and a separate federal case in Oakland involving school districts is also advancing. The pressure on platforms to settle the thousands of remaining cases will grow considerably.

Long-term impact?

For users, the immediate practical picture is less clear. Meta and YouTube are unlikely to make significant changes to their platforms while the appeals process plays out. Any redesign – if it comes – is likely to be incremental and carefully managed to minimise disruption to the engagement model that drives their revenues.

But there is a harder question the verdict does not answer: will it actually change anything? Meta and YouTube are companies worth hundreds of billions of dollars. A US$6 million damages award is not going to restructure the attention- and surveillance-driven economy.

My research on digital overuse – based on in-depth interviews with digital users and studies of online communities discussing digital overuse and detox – shows that even people who are fully aware of the problem and genuinely want to reduce their screen time find it extraordinarily difficult to do so.

This is not because they lack willpower, but because the features driving compulsive use are not bugs in the system. They are the system, built to maximise engagement and advertising revenue.

For years, big tech has placed the burden of managing screen time squarely on individuals and parents – encouraging screen time limits, digital detoxes, and parental controls while continuing to engineer products specifically designed to defeat exactly that kind of self-regulation.

The jury has pushed back against that logic. Whether courts, regulators, and legislators will push hard enough to force genuine structural redesign remains to be seen. However, the European Commission has already made the preliminary finding that TikTok’s addictive design features are in breach of the EU’s Digital Services Act.

What this verdict does, at minimum, is shift the ground. For the first time, a jury has confirmed what researchers have argued for years: this is not a story of weak willpower or bad parenting. It is, at least in part, a story of deliberate product design. That matters – even if the real fight is still to come.

Quynh Hoang 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. Landmark lawsuit finds that social media addiction is a feature, not a bug – https://theconversation.com/landmark-lawsuit-finds-that-social-media-addiction-is-a-feature-not-a-bug-279390

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Jonathan Este, Senior International Affairs Editor, Associate Editor, The Conversation

This is the text from The Conversation UK’s World Affairs Briefing email. Sign up here to receive weekly analysis of the latest developments in international relations, direct to your inbox.

The five-day deadline to open the Strait of Hormuz handed to Iran by Donald Trump on Monday expires some time tomorrow and the Islamic Republic needs to “get serious before it is too late” – or so the US president has announced on his TruthSocial platform.

You’ll recall that this deadline replaced another deadline which was due to expire on Monday night, after which the US and Israel would obliterate Iran’s power plants and plunge the country into darkness. Happily Trump pulled back from this plan, reporting that talks were progressing very well, so he would extend the deadline until March 27.

For their part, Iranian officials denied that negotiations were even underway, while US officials said contacts were at a very early stage. This has prompted speculation that the US president was seizing even the most informal of contacts as an “off ramp” to save face over not following through with his threat.

Certainly Trump’s oft-repeated assurance that the war in Iran has been won and that Iran’s senior officials (whoever remains after Israel’s highly successful campaign of assassinations) are “begging” the US to make a deal looks a rather optimistic assessment from the US president.

Far from collapsing in a heap after the death of the former supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, the regime is showing its resilience. Its targeting of US installations in the region are hurting the Gulf states and there are signs that Israel’s Iron Dome is fracturing in parts under the volume of Iranian missile attacks (this reportedly also happened during the 12-day war last year). Conservative estimates are that the war is costing the US and Israel more than US$1 billion £740 million) a day.

But it has been Iran’s ability to shut down traffic through the Strait of Hormuz that has arguably turned this into a world war, despite the unwillingness of many of America’s allies, particularly in Europe, to get involved. An estimated 20% of the world’s gas and oil transit the strait each day along with other vital supplies. Or at least it did before the end of February. Now very little is getting through and the consequences are being felt globally.

It’s not as if the US and Israel couldn’t anticipate that Iran would react to their attacks by closing down the strait. Arshin Adib-Moghaddam, an expert in Iranian history at the SOAS, University of London, walks us through nearly five decades in which Iran responded to every crisis by threatening to close the strait. Is is, he argues, a key plan in Iran’s security policy.

Read more:
Iran has been threatening to close the Strait of Hormuz for years – it’s a key part of Tehran’s defence strategy

Meanwhile, it appears that the US is dusting off a 15-point peace plan it developed in May last year and which has already been rejected by Iran.

Critics say the chances of Iran acquiescing to the plan were negligible then and remain so now. It calls for Iran to give up all its uranium and agree to hand control of its civil nuclear programme to an outside panel. And, controversially, it seeks to control what Iran spends the money it gains if sanctions are relaxed.

This has prompted analysts to ask whether this plan was simply produced to give the US an explanation as to why it changed its mind over hitting Iran’s power plants. Bamo Nouri and Inderjeet Parmar, experts in international politics at City St George’s, University of London, think it the resurfacing of this plan is the strongest indication yet that Washington is beginning to fear that it has become embroiled in an unwinnable war.

Read more:
‘Girl math’ may not be smart financial advice, but it could help women feel more empowered with money

Certainly this conflict has not gone the way Trump and his Israeli counterpart Benjamin Netanyahu might have wanted. But – as with the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, this should have been predictable. Jason Reifler, a political scientist at the University of Southampton, asserts that the US in particular, has embarked on this conflict with no clear goals or thought-through strategy.

Failing to ask for authorisation via the United Nations (and for America, the the US congress) was a bad start, meaning the war had a legitimacy deficit from the word go. The reason for launching the conflict has veered from halting Iran’s nuclear programme to regime change and back again. And the strategy of assassinating Iran’s leadership has produced a rally-round-the-flag effect that few had anticipated.

Add to that the devastatingly effective use of drones by Iran (which the war planners in the US and Israel must surely have picked up on from the experience in Ukraine), means that the two countries are often forced to counter munitions worth US$20,000 with missiles worth millions of dollars. Meanwhile, the pain from Iran’s closure of the closing the strait will only get worse.

Read more:
Iran war lacks strategy, goals, legitimacy and support – in the US and around the world

Holy war?

The US defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, held a religious service at the Pentagon yesterday, at which he called on god to “grant this task force clear and righteous targets for violence”. Hegseth appears to see this as a holy war in which he has clearly cast himself as a crusader, even sporting a tattoo reading, “Daus vult” (god wills it) – reportedly the rallying cry for the attempt to “liberate the Holy Land” in the 11th century.

Toby Matthiesen, senior lecturer in global religious studies at the University of Bristol observes here the way in which all parties to this conflict have used religion to garner support. Of course, claiming the approval of one’s chosen deity is a time-honoured tactic that even Nazi Germany tried. But it feels a little incongruous in the 21st century.

You could be forgiven for thinking that the sight of Donald Trump in the middle of a prayer huddle in the Oval Office was an amusing oddity. But Benjamin Netanyahu’s reference to the Old Testament story of the Amalekites, whom god told the children of Israel to annihilate, “men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys” is frankly chilling. Parts of the Islamic world has flocked to Iran’s defence (although not with particular enthusiasm in the Sunni countries of the Gulf, which Iran is bombarding with ballistic missiles).

Read more:
God on their side: how the US, Israel and Iran are all using religion to garner support

Trang Chu and Tim Morris, meanwhile, believe that this conflict has been nearly five decades in the making. Just as Iran has always denied the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state, many people in the US and Israel have long been committed to the destruction of Iran as a theocracy. Accordingly the way the two sides talk about each other has hardened over the years. Language on each side no longer reflects a criticism of their adversary’s behaviours, it has become a verdict on their moral character.

So to Iranians, the US is the “Great Satan”, while Iran is described in America as part of an “axis of evil”. Our experts believe that, this language “not only describes the enemy, but actively participates in creating it”. The observe that once you start to think these sorts of things about your adversaries, the idea of engaging in negotiation tends to become secondary to the desire to simply defeat or destroy them. Which is terribly dangerous, as we’re seeing.

Read more:
How the words that Iran and America use about each other paved the way for conflict

Sign up to receive our weekly World Affairs Briefing newsletter from The Conversation UK. Every Thursday we’ll bring you expert analysis of the big stories in international relations.

– ref. Iran was always going to close the Strait of Hormuz – https://theconversation.com/iran-was-always-going-to-close-the-strait-of-hormuz-279371

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Adi Imsirovic, Lecturer in Energy Systems, University of Oxford

Despite reports of negotiations between the US and the Iranian regime, the Strait of Hormuz remains effectively closed to most oil tankers, with only a small number of vessels being allowed to pass. The result is a loss of roughly 11 million barrels per day (mbd) of oil and petroleum liquids to the global market. This represents just over 10% of global supply.

At first glance, a 10% disruption may not sound catastrophic. But in oil markets, even a 10% imbalance between supply and demand can have very large economic effects.

To understand the scale of the disruption, it is useful to compare it with the height of the COVID pandemic in 2020. During global lockdowns, empty roads, grounded aircraft and deserted bus and railway stations became normal as travel and economic activity collapsed. At that time, global oil demand fell by about 8mbd, the largest demand shock in history.

Today’s situation is the opposite. Instead of a collapse in demand, the world is experiencing a large supply shock. But the impact on everyday life could end up looking similar: reduced travel, higher transport costs, slower economic activity and pressure on household budgets.

The reason is that both oil supply and oil demand are very inflexible in the short term. People still need to drive to work, goods still need to be transported and aircraft still need fuel. When supply falls suddenly, prices must rise significantly to force demand down.

For now, the release of emergency oil stocks is helping to cushion the initial impact, particularly in developed economies. Members of the International Energy Agency (IEA) are required to hold emergency stocks equivalent to at least 90 days of oil consumption, and several countries also maintain strategic petroleum reserves.

Read more:
These are shaky times for oil markets. An expert explains what a prolonged war will mean for prices

Countries such as the US, China and Japan can therefore offset supply disruptions for a limited period. However, these reserves are not a long-term solution. If the conflict continues for months rather than weeks, stockpiles will be depleted.

The situation is much more serious for developing countries. Many countries in Asia, Africa and South America hold very limited commercial reserves and are much more vulnerable to supply disruptions and price spikes. For these economies, elevated oil prices quickly translate into higher food prices, inflation and economic instability.

The first shortages would probably appear not in petrol, but in diesel and jet fuel. Gulf oil producers are major exporters of middle distillates, and their crude oil grades produce large quantities of diesel and jet fuel when refined.

Diesel is particularly important because it fuels trucks, ships, construction equipment and agricultural machinery. So a diesel shortage affects food supply, construction, mining and global trade – not just transport. Petrol shortages would follow as crude oil supply tightens further, and eventually shortages would spread across all petroleum products.

Oil is not just used for transport fuel. It is also a key input into petrochemicals for the production of plastics, fertilisers, chemicals, synthetic materials and many industrial processes. This means the effects of a major oil supply disruption spread across the entire economy.

Shortages or price increases could affect everything from food production and packaging to electronics, construction materials and clothing. The economic effects of an oil shock are therefore much broader than simply higher petrol prices.

Protectionism could make everything worse

One of the biggest risks during a supply crisis is export restrictions and protectionism. Governments often try to protect domestic consumers by freezing prices and banning exports of fuel or crude oil, but this usually makes the global shortage worse.

Government price freezes only discourage production and supply, and encourage consumers to keep burning fuel. Protectionism is even worse. There are already signs of this happening – some countries (China, for example) are restricting exports of petroleum products such as diesel and jet fuel. When countries hoard fuel, global markets become tighter and prices rise even further.

The biggest risk would be if the US restricted oil exports in order to protect domestic consumers. The US is now the world’s largest oil producer, producing more than 20mbd of oil and petroleum liquids. But it is also one of the world’s largest consumers. However, it still exports significant volumes, particularly to Europe.

The US has banned oil exports before. In 1975, following the Arab oil embargo (when in 1973 Arab states refused to supply oil to countries, including the US, that had supported Israel in the Yom Kippur war), the US banned exports of crude oil. The ban was lifted only in 2015. If such a ban were introduced today, it would be likely to cause major supply shortages and price increases, especially in Europe.

If the Strait of Hormuz remains closed for a prolonged period, or if the conflict escalates further, global losses of exports from the Persian Gulf could approach the 20mbd of oil and petroleum products.

Under these circumstances, the economic and social effects could be severe. Transport could become more expensive and less frequent, air travel would be severely curtailed, inflation would rise and economic growth would slow significantly. In extreme scenarios, the disruption to daily economic life could resemble the COVID period (and probably worse). But this time it would be caused by a shortage of energy.

For now, markets are relying on emergency stock releases and hopes of a geopolitical de-escalation. But if not, the world economy could face an unprecedented energy shock, with far-reaching and unpredictable consequences.

Adi Imsirovic 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. Could this energy crisis be worse for the global economy than COVID? – https://theconversation.com/could-this-energy-crisis-be-worse-for-the-global-economy-than-covid-279284

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Caroline Flanagan, Head of School, Agriculture, Anglia Ruskin University

The conflict in Iran and the disruption to the strait of Hormuz are already starting to affect UK farmers. The closure of this vital shipping route threatens supplies of two essential agricultural necessities: fuel and fertiliser.

The immediate impact on farmers has been a sharp increase in the cost of red diesel – the rebated fuel widely used in agriculture – which has already risen by approximately 60%, far outpacing increases seen at retail fuel pumps for car owners.

Concerns for farmers include the cost of fertiliser, particularly nitrogen. As the key nutrient driving growth in two key crop groups grown extensively in the UK, cereals and oilseeds, nitrogen is essential for achieving high yields. A wheat crop may require over 200kg per hectare during the growing season, depending on soil conditions, weather, and yield expectations.

The UK imports around 60% of its nitrogen fertiliser. Although much of this supply does not originate directly from the Middle East, global market dynamics mean prices are highly sensitive to disruptions. Around one-third of the global fertiliser trade passes through the strait of Hormuz, contributing to price increases of approximately £50 per tonne, compared to early 2025, and is expected to rise more if the conflict continues.

UK fertiliser traders are finding prices are changing so fast that they can’t update their daily lists. The NFU president Tom Bradshaw has raised concerns about farmers not being given a confirmed price until stocks are delivered.

While most farmers buy fertiliser in bulk ahead of the growing season, the longer-term outlook is already a concern.

Much will depend on the duration of Middle Eastern tensions and whether the strait reopens in time for fertiliser purchasing decisions this autumn, ready for next year’s crops.

Unlike the 2022 fuel price shock following the invasion of Ukraine – which was partially offset by higher commodity prices – current market conditions offer little expectation of improved crop prices.

Difficult calculations

Farmers are, therefore, being forced into difficult calculations: weighing the cost of nitrogen against likely crop prices, reassessing how to balance the crop’s agrochemical inputs, including fertiliser, and awaiting clarity on the future of Environmental Land Management Schemes (Elms). Elms are government schemes in England aimed at supporting farmers to make environmentally beneficial changes to their land.

Read more:
How the Iran war could create a ‘fertiliser shock’ – an often ignored global risk to food prices and farming

Even before the current conflict started, industry bodies such as the National Farmers’ Union had raised concerns about the viability of arable farming under sustained cost pressures.

The government has also acknowledged these challenges, commissioning the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) to investigate supply issues affecting fertiliser and agricultural fuel. The CMA has said it will monitor price rises caused by the current international conditions. In response to the crisis, the UK government has just announced proposals to support more varied types of fertiliser.

All these factors raise broader concerns for the UK, where food self-sufficiency stands at around 62% – a potentially precarious position in an increasingly uncertain global landscape.

Farming landscape

UK crops are currently looking generally robust, after a strong autumn with ideal conditions for sowing winter crops and a favourable start to spring. Early signs point to a promising 2026 harvest.

But optimism is tempered by ongoing economic pressure. Farm gate prices (the price if a customer bought direct from a farmer) remain stubbornly low, as UK farmers compete with imports produced under lower environmental and regulatory standards

Simultaneously, the transition away from legacy EU support payments has left a significant income gap. Replacement schemes under the Environmental Land Management Schemes were paused in 2025 and are only expected to resume later this year, creating further uncertainty.

The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) latest figures forecast average arable farm income fell to £17,000 in the year to February 2026 – the lowest level since 2004–05. The drop reflects a mix of difficult seasonal conditions and global oversupply in key crops such as cereals and oilseeds. Dairy farm income was much higher at £224,000 for the same period.

The industry is rapidly embracing innovation and the government is backing farmers with measures to strengthen fertiliser supply resilience. Together with rising costs, these shifts have helped drive a 50% reduction in nitrogen use over the past four decades.

Precision agriculture (which uses technology to refine decisions) has boosted efficiency further, enabling farmers to tailor fertiliser use to the needs of specific fields.

There are other potential innovations that could help. Tesco for example, is working with farmers and manufacturers to develop lower-carbon fertilisers made from food waste, algae, poultry manure, and industrial by-products.

Global fertiliser markets may be volatile, but in the short term shoppers are unlikely to see that uncertainty reflected in everyday food prices. A 2022 Sustain report, found that farmers often receive less than 1% of the profit from supermarket sales, meaning their tiny share leaves little room for fertiliser costs to influence the final price on the shelf. For now, any rise or fall in the price of bread, flour, cakes or biscuits is far more likely to come from supermarket pricing tactics or broader supply‑chain pressures than from shifts in global fertiliser markets.

That’s not to say fertiliser costs never filter through – a prolonged conflict could still nudge prices up for shoppers. Crops respond dramatically to fertiliser levels, so even modest reductions in nitrogen use can produce disproportionately large declines in yield. All that could translate into thousands of tonnes of lost crops, which would make food more expensive in the future.

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.

– ref. How the war in Iran is already affecting UK farmers and food production – https://theconversation.com/how-the-war-in-iran-is-already-affecting-uk-farmers-and-food-production-279032

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Daniel Cook, Professor of English Literature, University of Dundee

Wolf Worm by T. Kingfisher begins innocently enough: Sonia Wilson, an anxious young scientific illustrator, has been hired to draw the vast insect collection of the reclusive entomologist (insect expert) Dr Halder at his North Carolina manor house.

Something’s not quite right from the off. No one meets her on her arrival and she wonders whether her new employer really expects her to walk ten miles from the train station to his house? Old Halder is not one for practical details, the tight-lipped locals warn her. Harmlessly eccentric or maddeningly distracted? Intrigue surrounds the doctor.

T. Kingfisher is known for slow-burn books that offer rich rewards, and Wolf Worm is no different. The ominous signs come early. Weeds lurk in the corners of the unkempt garden and swarms of insects appear in the oddest of places throughout the house – bugs get into everything, Mrs Kent the housekeeper reveals matter of factly.

Sonia feels as though she has fallen into the kind of fairy tale where a wicked fairy demands she spins her watercolour illustrations into gold. Really, she has fallen into a creepy-crawly horror novel. Her days and nights are filled with delirious bouts of sleep, imperfect drawings, and scientific discovery. All the while, the mysterious Dr Halder works largely off the page.

When he does appear, Halder’s speeches are eerie and unsettling. “Do you know why it is called a screw-worm?” he asks his guest. Sonia provides a logical explantion: that the spiral ridge merely resembles a screw. But this induces an unpleasant leer from the doctor, who goes on to describe in grim detail the action of the burrowing ridges that anchor themselves into living flesh and are nearly impossible to remove. Dr Halder then casually taps a jar filled with hundreds of dead parasitic screw-worms, letting us know the insect horrors surrounding Sonia are far from hypothetical.

As with any other astute protagonist in a gothic novel, Sonia is consistently aware that something about her situation is “off” (a word she frequently uses). Animals behave strangely throughout. People avoid answering questions. Like Dracula’s Jonathan Harker, a late-Victorian gothic counterpart whose words she inadvertently borrows, she can barely suppress her shudders.

In a neat turn on the overly curious protagonist trope, Sonia’s knowledge of entomology develops as she works on her illustrations for her employer. As that knowledge grows, so does her discomfort.

The house and its environs steadily grow equally uncomfortable and these settings overwhelm the lead character in wholly novel ways. She habitually rationalises her experiences. For instance, if you hear a horrible sound in the woods and you don’t know what it is, she reasons, then it is probably a fox. Something is certainly making a noise in the basement: is it a disturbed prisoner? No, it’s more likely a tortured creature of some kind, she convinces herself.

It becomes harder to spin explanations, however, when she finds human remains. Like the more ghoulish doctors of 19th-century literature, such as Dr K in Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Body Snatcher or the eponymous vivisectionist in HG Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau, or even the real-life pioneer of anatomy studies Robert Knox, the entomologist has extended his studies to include the flesh of living subjects. And the results are truly gruesome.

Wolf Worm represents the best kind of neo-Victorian gothic: disturbing in its scope but never gratuitous, intimate and personal but always refusing to let the reader settle. For those who love historical fiction with a focus on science and artistry, and set in big creepy houses, this book will leave your skin crawling till the very end.

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.

Daniel Cook 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. Wolf Worm by T. Kingfisher – a brilliantly creepy, skin-crawling work of southern gothic fiction – https://theconversation.com/wolf-worm-by-t-kingfisher-a-brilliantly-creepy-skin-crawling-work-of-southern-gothic-fiction-279165

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Jialin Wei, PhD Candidate in Biological Science, University of Bristol

The transition from water to land is a question that still intrigues scientists. Those ancient organisms would have needed to adapt to several new challenges to life out of water. So, how did they do it?

In a 2025 study, my colleagues and I tried to understand the genetic basis of adapting to life on land by comparing the genetic material of 150 living animals. We discovered that some adaptations to land are universal, while others are found only in a few lineages.

Animal life started in water over 600 million years ago. Around 500 million years ago animals began their journey from water to land. Known as the Cambrian period, this is one of the biggest evolutionary shifts in Earth’s history, that paved the way for all modern land-based ecosystems.

Although green plants transitioned to land just once around 500 million years ago, animals colonised land at multiple points in time independently. This makes animal life on land a striking example of “convergent evolution” – the process in which different lineages evolve solutions to the same problem. Each of these “jumps” onto land opened up new habitats and had a dramatic effect on the atmosphere and water cycle. This in turn created the modern ecosystems we live in.

In our Nature paper, my colleagues and I explored these habitat transitions from a genetic perspective. First, we compared the genomes of more than 150 species across the animal kingdom to identify which genes are shared by different lineages. Then, using the evolutionary tree of animals, we mapped which branches of the tree those genes emerged or were lost in.

We found that most transitions to land were accompanied by a large gene turnover, with many gene gains and reductions happening at the same time. The ability of genomes to gain and lose genes played a key role in animal adaptation to new habitats.

Making the leap

This discovery led us to ask what these genes do and wonder why some were retained while others disappeared. Using analytical techniques and powerful computer tools, we found that genes repeatedly gained across distantly related landbased lineages were involved in functions related to dehydration. They were also often related to stress response (such as temperature, UV radiation, contaminants found on land, and toxic compounds from plants). The genes that were lost or diminished were often linked to regeneration, diet and biological clocks such as day and night cycles.

Life’s move from water to land profoundly reshaped the planet itself. As life ventured onto land, it changed Earth’s cycles, removing CO₂ from and increasing the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere. Land-based life also weathered rocks, which made them release more minerals like calcium into the ecosystem.

These findings suggest that genetic changes drove shifts in biological functions, which in turn became key drivers of the transition from water to land.

Some animals still need humid surroundings to thrive. For example, earthworms live in moist soil. In contrast, insects and mammals can live entirely on dry land. Interestingly, we found that semi-terrestrial species (mostly tiny invertebrates) tend to share more adaptations. For example, functions related to blood circulation and nutrient absorption that help them survive in soil.

Fully land-based animals seemed to evolve a wider diversity of adaptation strategies. We discovered gene innovations specific to certain lineages, such as genes for shell formation and mucus secretion in land snails and innate immunity genes in land vertebrates. Land-based animals evolved more reinforced and specialised barrier defences for life on land. These distinct traits reveal the unique evolutionary histories shaped by ecology, physiology and chance.

Our study also sheds light on when these transitions happens. We identified three major waves of water to land transitions over the past 500 million years, during the Ordovician (485–443 million years ago), Devonian–Carboniferous (419–298 million years ago) and Cretaceous periods (145–66 million years ago). These waves began with early land arthropods, such as insects, and ended with land snails like those found in our gardens.

These periods were probably triggered by dramatic ecological and geological shifts. For example the rise of early land plants and the creation of seasonal habitats that created new environments and opportunities for land-based animals.

Previous research has mostly focused on specific land animal lineages. However, our study brings these transitions together, offering the first comprehensive view of how and when animals conquered the land.

This study offers a glimpse into what might happen if we could replay the tape of life: some genetic changes seem inevitable, appearing again and again, as life adapts to land, while others are rare. Our research shows how evolution continuously finds new solutions to the challenges of life on Earth.

Jialin Wei is supported by University of Bristol-China Scholarship Council joint-funded Scholarship.

– ref. Land animals evolved from ocean ancestors – new study unravels the genetics behind the transition – https://theconversation.com/land-animals-evolved-from-ocean-ancestors-new-study-unravels-the-genetics-behind-the-transition-278609

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Gemma Ware, Host, The Conversation Weekly Podcast, The Conversation

Final preparations are underway for NASA’s Artemis II mission, the first crewed mission around the Moon for more than 50 years. Four astronauts, three men and one woman, will spend 10 days aboard the Orion spacecraft, going further into space than any other humans as they orbit the Moon and return to Earth.

Issues caused by a fuel leak while testing the Space Launch System rocket used for the mission meant launch windows in February and March were missed. Now NASA is targeting early April for launch.

The mission is the next step of the Artemis programme, which plans to land astronauts back to the Moon by 2028. China has its own programme targeting a full crewed mission to the lunar surface by 2030.

In this episode of The Conversation Weekly podcast we speak to Scott Pace, director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University about why NASA is sending people back round the Moon. Pace worked in space policy for the George W. Bush Administration, followed by a stint at NASA before his appointment as the executive secretary of the National Space Council during the first Trump administration, where he worked on the launch of the Artemis programme.

No human has set foot on the Moon since Gene Cernan climbed back aboard Apollo 17 in 1972. Pace says that once the Americans had beaten the Russians to the Moon “the geopolitical reason for continuing those missions really wasn’t there”.

Today, Pace believes the “geopolitical purpose for being on the Moon is to be there a lot”. He compares the Moon to Antarctica, arguing that the US and its allies have influence over Antarctica in part because they put 3,000 people on the ice every summer. “Rules are made by people who show up,” he says. It matters to him if China beats the US back to the Moon, “if China drives all the standards and the operating norms”.

For Pace, this means it’s important to up the flight rate to the lunar surface by building capacity to send more than one crewed mission a year. He thinks Artemis’s partnerships with commercial space partners will be crucial to achieving this.

“What we’re seeing now with Artemis is NASA and industry learning how to fly to the Moon, and then making a decision about what will be a sustainable future for doing this,” says Pace. “That is a current debate that will shape what happens after Artemis II.”

Listen to the interview with Scott Pace on The Conversation Weekly podcast and read an article based on the interview here. This episode was written and produced by Katie Flood and Gemma Ware. Mixing by Eleanor Brezzi and theme music by Neeta Sarl.

Newsclips in this episode from WTKR News 3, ABC News, International Astronautical Federation, CBS News,Space Policy and Politics and NBC News and British Movietone/AP.

Listen to The Conversation Weekly via any of the apps listed above, download it directly via our RSS feed or find out how else to listen here. A transcript of this episode is available via the Apple Podcasts or Spotify apps.

Scott Pace is an advisor for Sierra Space and is a member of the Board of Trustees for the Planetary Science Institute, and the Board of Advisors for the National Security Space Association. He was a political appointee in the Administrations of George W. Bush (2002-2008) and Donald J. Trump (2017-2020). He is the Director of the Space Policy Institute at the Elliott School of International Affairs, at George Washington University, Washington, D.C.

– ref. Why is the US going back round the Moon with Artemis II? A space policy expert explains – https://theconversation.com/why-is-the-us-going-back-round-the-moon-with-artemis-ii-a-space-policy-expert-explains-279229