Category: The Conversation

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Edmund Kelly, PhD candidate, Department Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford

In many democracies today, trust in politics is either very low or in decline.

This is a noteworthy development in its own right, but it may be especially important because trust is associated with several other important outcomes, for example, whether we vote and whether we comply with the law. The latter became particularly apparent during the pandemic, when it turned out that people who trusted politicians more were more likely to comply with lockdown rules.

Political scientists often think about trust as a dynamic concept. When politicians perform poorly, our trust falls. And there is plenty of evidence for this. When the economy performs badly or when politicians are embroiled in scandals, trust tends to be lower.

This way of thinking about trust is obviously helpful, but one problem is that it is hard to explain why people’s levels of political trust tend to be stable. Once people reach a level of trust in early adulthood, they don’t tend to change it very much afterwards. And people don’t always have as strong a reaction to events like political scandals as we might think – so it’s not a given that current performance is the only cause of low trust.

One explanation for this apparent contradiction is that trust might also be affected by our formative experiences. Of course, this doesn’t mean that trust never changes later, it obviously does. But on this view, each person would have a stable, base level of trust informed by their early experiences with the political system.

How our parents talked about politics when we were growing up, or how governments performed when we started paying attention to politics, might affect our base level of trust. We know that these experiences affect other aspects of our relationship with politics, for example, our voting behaviour, and our political values.

However, these ideas are difficult to prove. Academics generally study political attitudes by surveying a random sample of the population. These surveys ask about our opinions, and about things that might be influencing them (for example, our household income). But they rarely ask about our formative experiences. That’s partly because people can’t be expected to accurately remember experiences from many years ago. It’s also difficult to know which experiences to ask about. We obviously can’t ask about everything (that would be expensive and tedious), but that means we might miss things.

One way around this problem is to look at twins and siblings, because we know they largely share their formative experiences and traits formed early in life. That way, we can study those factors without having to directly measure them.

By comparing non-identical twins and siblings (who share lots of traits and experiences) with identical twins (who share almost all traits and experiences) we can estimate how important these are for our political attitudes. That’s what I’ve been doing in my own work, which suggests that a substantial proportion of our trust is explained by our early experiences – perhaps as much as 40%.

Early life and political trust

One possible explanation for this is that important traits formed early in life, like our personalities, might affect our ability to trust the political system. Some people are naturally more agreeable, for example, and it seems likely that they would also be more trusting.

This is one line of argument I’ve discussed in some of my own work, but the evidence for this is less clear. Instead, it seems likely that people who share similar personality profiles are similarly trusting because they grew up in environments which predisposed them toward those personality traits and also toward having more or less trust in the system.

Another, perhaps more plausible scenario is that the environmental conditions we experience early in life might affect whether we go on to have more or less trust in politics. For example, experiencing economic hardship early in life is associated with our ability to trust the system in the long run, especially if we think the government is to blame for our hardship. We might also expect that our educational experiences affect trust, for example, by giving us the knowledge about the system that can help us make more reasoned judgements about its trustworthiness.

The relationship between trust and voting might, therefore, not be due to trust causing voting, but instead due to our formative experiences affecting both. My work with colleagues suggests that this is likely to be the case. We tested whether differences in political trust within twin pairs predicted differences in how often they voted. That way, we know we’ve accounted for all relevant formative experiences shared by the twins. When we did that, we found that the relationship between how much we trust and how often we vote is much weaker.

Another reason that trust being partly caused by our formative experiences matters is because long-run changes in trust might be generational in nature, and difficult to reverse. In the UK, for example, gen Z tends to be particularly distrusting of institutions, including political ones.

If political trust is socialised when we are young, this has the concerning implication that it might stay that way, even if performance improves. We might then expect younger voters who grow up in a low-trust environment to remain distrusting in the long run.

Edmund Kelly receives funding from the Economic and Social Research Council (grant number ES/P000649/1).

– ref. Could the experiences of twins help explain why we don’t trust politicians? – https://theconversation.com/could-the-experiences-of-twins-help-explain-why-we-dont-trust-politicians-274069

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Kevin Olsen, UKSA Mars Science Fellow, Department of Physics, University of Oxford

A new study of carbon-based molecules in a Martian rock offers new hints about the possibility that the red planet once hosted life.

The researchers considered a range of possible processes that could have produced the molecules they found. They argue that high concentrations of large organic (carbon-based) compounds found in the rock cannot be fully explained by the non-biological processes they examined.

The team members say it is therefore possible that the organics were produced by living organisms. It is also feasible that molecules made by hydrothermal processes – where water is heated to high temperatures underground – also contributed to the organics found in the rock.

The scientists also believe that some of the organic compounds came from fatty acids, which are found in the cell walls of living organisms.

The complexity of the newly detected molecules is strikingly distinct. They require more complex methods for production, which helps scientists narrow down their source.

The discovery of the molecules was made with Nasa’s Curiosity rover, which examined a Martian rock named Cumberland. This is a sedimentary rock, meaning it was probably built up in layers in the presence of water billions of years ago. Curiosity has been exploring a site called Gale Crater on Mars since 2012.

The molecules include long chain alkanes in the form of decane (C₁₀H₂₂), undecane (C₁₁H₂₄), and dodencane (C₁₂H₂₆), much larger molecules than previously identified on Mars.

These measurements come from a pyrolysis experiment – where samples are heated to release gases that can then be analysed. This experiment broke down even larger molecules, and the assumption, from well-known chemistry, is that these may have been derived from carboxylic acids, or fatty acids. These are the kinds of compounds we recognise from our food.

The molecules were reported in a separate paper from March 2025. This new study, in the journal Astrobiology, considers the various ways they could have been made, both biological and non-biological.

The discovery of organics on Mars is critical to our understanding of whether the planet could have supported life (and whether it could today). Organic matter refers to molecules containing a bond between carbon and hydrogen. These comprise the essential building blocks for life as we know it.

The critical line of reasoning in the new paper is that because these long chains will break down under the ionising radiation in the harsh Martian environment (a combination of ultraviolet radiation from the Sun, heavier charged particles that don’t make it through Earth’s magnetic field, and cosmic radiation), the actual quantity of the carboxylic acids that we are measuring now must have been hundreds of times higher in the past.

Today, these molecules are present at 30–50 parts-per-billion in the rock. But the authors estimate this could have been around 120–7,700 parts-per-million before ionising radiation exposure.

Read more:
Signs of ancient life may have been found in Martian rock – new study

The authors examined several possible, but non-biological, sources for these fatty acids, such as delivery by interplanetary dust and meteorites, organic hazes in the ancient Martian atmosphere, and the act of serpentinisation – a geological process known to have occurred on Mars involving high heat and abundant liquid water.

The authors point out potential limitations with some of these processes that may make them less likely as sources for the organic molecules. For example, these limitations may relate to what we know about the ratio of simple organics, like methane, to the amount of CO₂ in the early Martian atmosphere, or where reactions like serpentinisation need to take place (underground) and how this matter could be transported to the surface.

Therefore, the authors argue, it is plausible that these carboxylic or fatty acids have a biological origin and may be remnants of an ancient, early Martian biosphere. They concede in their closing paragraph extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, as the scientist and author Carl Sagan once said, and downplay any attempt to claim evidence of life without intense scrutiny. However, it sets an optimistic tone for future projects – and there will be a busy future on Mars.

In September 2025, Nasa made a similar announcement using results from the Perseverance rover. They reported organic carbon-bearing mudstones that appeared to have participated in low temperature chemical reactions after they were deposited.

The researchers behind this study also looked at a variety of ways that the reactions could have taken place and were unable to explain them using known non-biological processes. The results hinted at the possible presence of microbial activity on Mars billions of years ago.

However, it will be impossible to say for sure whether the red planet hosted life until Martian rocks are delivered to Earth for analysis in laboratories. The findings published in September 2025 were largely seen as a rallying cry for the Mars Sample Return mission. This will gather up samples collected by the Perseverance rover and send them to our planet for examination.

Unfortunately, Mars Sample Return was effectively cancelled last month after years of being under-funded. Despite this, there remain big things ahead. The European Space Agency will send its Rosalind Franklin rover to Mars in 2028, featuring a drill that will search for signs of life up to two metres underground.

In 2026, Japan will attempt to retrieve a piece of the Martian moon Phobos with its Martian Moons Exploration mission. At the same time frame, follow-up missions from China and India are taking shape, with China also attempting to retrieve a sample from the surface.

Kevin Olsen 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. Molecules found in Martian rock hint at ancient life – new study – https://theconversation.com/molecules-found-in-martian-rock-hint-at-ancient-life-new-study-276241

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Felia Allum, Professor of Comparative Organised Crime and Corruption, University of Bath

France has reached what has been called a “turning point” in its relationship with drugs cartels after Medhi Kessaci the innocent 20-year-old brother of anti-drug activist Amine Kessaci was shot dead in Marseille last November.

The murder was taken as a warning to Amine, who had lost another brother five years earlier. Brahim had been found burnt in a car, a casualty of internal drug rivalries and business. Amine has since been very outspoken about the need to understand what is happening in Marseille and in France.

But he continues to risk his life by being outspoken. He was recently evacuated from a meeting in Aix en Provence, after a threat was made on his life.

Between 2023 and 2024, 73 people were murdered in Marseille in crimes related to the drugs business. Many of them were young people freshly recruited on the internet to make easy money by selling drugs. Similar drug-related murders have taken place in Grenoble, Paris, Nimes, Montpellier, Nice and Lyon.

Experts and commentators have invented labels such as “narcobanditism”, “narcomurder”, “narcoterrorism”, “narcostate” and “narcocracy” to try to explain what is happening in France.

Marseille is emblematic of a state’s failure to understand how drug networks function, and their relationship with local communities and drug consumers. Although the current drug group dominating in France at the moment uses the term mafia in its name (Mafia DZ), it is still different from the mafia-type associations that have developed in Italy.

These waves of drug-related crime reflect the contemporary cosmopolitan and capitalist cities that our society, governments, value systems and economic systems have created. These are places where the welfare state, with its sense of belonging and collectivity, has been downgraded in favour of individualism, money, technology and bureaucracy.

Organised crime groups in their different forms, whether local drug lines, more sophisticated drug networks or traditional mafias, do not appear out of nowhere overnight. They do not become embedded in local communities against citizens’ will. They don’t develop links with local politicians and professionals for no apparent reason. These crime groups fill the gaps that the state and society should occupy because they offer jobs, support and votes.

We know that criminal organisations take hold through two different mechanisms.

In Italy, the US, Colombia, Albania and Russia, mafia and cartel structures have developed during major state transformations. These periods of upheaval create space and even vacuums, which can be filled by other non-state organisations and structures. The classic example of this is the US in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when there was significant economic upheaval, rapid urbanisation and industrialisation, developing political institutions and changing social makeup. Another is Naples and Sicily during the 1860s, when Italy went from being a peninsula of kingdoms to a unified state.

In other cases, as has happened in the 20th century, the state has established itself but its capitalist structural conditions create the conditions for organised crime to thrive. Social, racial, educational and economic inequalities drive crime.

Political economist Susan Strange explained how the state’s authority has evaporated and how the markets now dictate terms. Communities are left with no safety net in the wake of the state’s retreat. Gangs seize on this vulnerability and propose an alternative model for young people. They offer instant and easy money to local people and enjoy visible respect in neighbourhoods where despair has become the daily background music. They dictate the law to their drug dealing employees and seek social consensus from the local community, which feels abandoned and has little option but to live with the violence.

This is not a French-only phenomenon – it is taking place in many liberal democratic systems where the welfare state is becoming a privatised, bureaucratic and technological state based on individualism and profit.

The French government has proposed new solutions such as police and judicial tools to tackle these drug groups. The French state has made some inroads in the past, but these groups just reorganise, often controlling operations from Dubai.

France hopes to learn from the Italian anti-mafia legislation of the 1990s. It is bringing in a new anti-organised crime directorate (PNACO), which includes 16 prosecutors who will tackle drug networks across France and Europe.

In addition, it wants to introduce a new state witness protection programme for former criminals to collaborate with the state to go with their new harsh prison conditions for drug bosses and laws on confiscation of assets.

It also wants to target the consumers and increase fines for drug possession and even take away people’s driving licences or jobs if they get caught with drugs.

But when states implement reactive and punitive measures of this kind, they aren’t dealing with the roots of the problem. As Amine Kessaci recently wrote in his book, ending drug trafficking isn’t just about combating the networks in Marseille. It’s about resisting a societal model that makes these networks desirable. It’s about promoting other values and offering an alternative to escape or downfall. It’s about giving the foot soldiers of the drugs trade a positive horizon other than a cell or a grave.

Felia Allum 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. Drug murders in France: how organised crime moves in and ruins communities – https://theconversation.com/drug-murders-in-france-how-organised-crime-moves-in-and-ruins-communities-274054

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Chloe Casey, Lecturer in Nutrition and Behaviour, Bournemouth University

Anxiety affects an estimated one in five teenagers. The condition can seriously affect their social lives, school performance and overall wellbeing. And, worryingly, anxiety disorders that begin during adolescence often continue into adulthood.

Biological, genetic and environmental factors are all known to play a role in a person’s likelihood of developing anxiety. But a growing body of research suggests that diet may also influence mental health.

Some foods, such as fruits and vegetables and omega-3 fatty acids, have been linked to lower anxiety symptoms.

On the other hand, diets high in free sugar have been linked to poorer mental health in adolescents. Free sugars include sugar added to foods and drinks, as well as those normally present in honey, syrups and fruit and vegetable juices.

UK guidelines recommend that free sugars make up no more than 5% of our daily calorie intake. Adolescents typically consume the most free sugar of any age group, sometimes up to 20% of their daily total energy intake – much of it coming from sugary drinks.

Now, my colleagues and I have published new research showing that sugary drink consumption may be linked to higher levels of anxiety in adolescents.

This review combined data from several previous studies looking at the amount of sugary drink teenagers consume and how anxious they feel. Our research group pulled together findings from multiple studies published between 2000 and 2025. Of the nine studies included, seven found a clear link between sugary drink intake and anxiety.

The studies involved young people aged ten to 19. Sugary drink intake was usually measured through surveys. Sugary drinks included fizzy drinks, colas, sweetened fruit juices, sweetened milk drinks, energy drinks and sweetened tea or coffee.

The results of the study showed a significant positive association: teenagers who consumed high amounts of sugary drinks had 34% higher odds of being diagnosed with an anxiety disorder.

It’s important to remember that the included studies were observational. This means they can show patterns or associations, but they do not indicate that sugary drinks cause anxiety. It’s also possible that anxiety leads teenagers to consume more sugary drinks.

Other factors, such as education levels and family income, are known to influence both mental health and sugary drink intake.

The gut-brain axis, which is the network that links your brain to your gut, could also play a role in the connection between sugary drink consumption and anxiety. However, there are many things that affect gut health as well, including overall diet, stress levels and sleep – all of which have also been linked to anxiety.

Overall, our study suggests that reducing sugary drink consumption could be a helpful way to support adolescent mental health. While numerous studies have investigated the impact reducing sugary drink intake has on the physical health of adolescents, there is a need now to investigate whether this also has mental health benefits.

Reducing sugary drink intake

UK dietary guidelines recommend that adolescents and adults consume no more than 30 grams of sugar per day (approximately seven teaspoons). Given that a single can of fizzy drink can contain around 35 grams of sugar, cutting back on sugary drinks is an effective way to stay within this limit.

There are other practical ways of reducing intake of sugary drinks. This includes drinking sparkling or soda water with a slice of lemon, cucumber, berries or mint to get natural flavour without added sugar. Sugary drinks can be replaced with water, milk or sugar-free alternatives.

Another option is to switch to low-calorie, artificially-sweetened drinks (though these should only be consumed in moderation). Energy drinks can have a negative effect on sleep quality, academic performance and behaviour in adolescents so it’s a good idea to replace these with alternatives that contain less caffeine, such as tea or coffee.

With growing concerns about anxiety in teenagers, it’s becoming increasingly important to identify whether changing certain lifestyle factors can help reduce their risk of experiencing poor mental health. Although we still don’t fully understand how sugary drinks might influence anxiety, this study suggests they could play a role.

Chloe Casey 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. Anxiety in teenagers linked to sugary drinks – new research – https://theconversation.com/anxiety-in-teenagers-linked-to-sugary-drinks-new-research-275989

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Martin B. Richards, Research Professor in Archaeogenetics, Department of Physical and Life Sciences, University of Huddersfield

When ancient DNA studies began to gain attention, little more than a decade ago, the view took hold among geneticists that everything we thought we knew about the peopling of Europe by modern humans was wrong. The story was simpler than anyone was expecting: Europe was settled in just three massive migrations from the east.

First came the hunter-gatherers, more than 40,000 years ago. Then, after 9,000 years ago, there was an expansion of farming people from Anatolia during the Neolithic age.

Finally, from 5,000 years ago, the Corded Ware people expanded out of the Russian steppe to inaugurate the European bronze age. The Corded Ware were named after the cord-like impressions in their pottery and carried a distinctive genetic signature previously absent from most of Europe. Genetically, most present-day Europeans have some of each.

This was always an over-simplification, however. Our new paper, produced with colleagues from the US and across Europe, has highlighted some of the more complex interactions between ancient populations that took place in north-west Europe.

Our research untangles the origins of prehistoric populations across Belgium and the Netherlands, as well as identifying the source population for a migration into Britain during the late Neolithic that seems to have led to a 90% replacement of Britain’s Neolithic farmers.

Ancient DNA research already suggested a much more nuanced picture. For example, when early Neolithic farmers first moved into Europe, they interacted little with the local hunter-gatherer people. As a result, although they now lived far from their homeland, their genomes still resembled those of their ancestors from Anatolia.

But by 1,000–2,000 years later, they had absorbed significant local ancestry. Their hunter-gatherer ancestry swelled from only 10% to 30–40% in some regions. Clearly the hunter-gatherers had not vanished as the farmers expanded.

Northern wetlands

The new research takes us even further from the simple picture. Almost a decade ago, our research group at the University of Huddersfield began a collaboration with palaeoecologist Professor John Stewart from Bournemouth University and archaeologists at the Université de Liège, Belgium. We analysed the genomes of Neolithic human remains excavated along the River Meuse in Belgium, dating to around 5,000 years ago.

This work became part of a larger project, led by Professor David Reich and Dr Iñigo Olalde at Harvard University, involving geneticists and archaeologists from across western Europe. This widened the focus to further sites around the Lower Rhine–Meuse area – wetlands and coastal areas as well as rivers – spanning the late hunter-gatherer cultures to the bronze age.

The fertile soils south of the Rhine-Meuse wetlands had attracted pioneer Neolithic farmer-colonists as early as 5,500BC. However, the rich resources of the northern wetlands were more suited to the lifestyle practised by hunter-gatherers. Even so, the results, generated by our research student, Alessandro Fichera, in collaboration with Harvard, came as a big surprise.

The genomes of people from later Neolithic times in Belgium carried at least 50% local hunter-gatherer ancestry, alongside the expected Anatolian farmer ancestry. Discussing these results with our collaborators led to a “eureka” moment: the same pattern appeared at other sites situated in similarly water-rich environments across the region.

Notably, many of the earlier Neolithic Dutch samples from further north – such as the Swifterbant culture, well-known for maintaining a hunter-gatherer economy alongside some adoption of agriculture – carried close to 100% hunter-gatherer ancestry.

Women’s role in the spread of farming

We then compared the Y-chromosome and mitochondrial DNA, which track the male and female lines of descent, respectively. The Y chromosomes in the Belgian remains were all characteristic of hunter-gatherers, but three-quarters of the mitochondrial DNA lineages had come from Neolithic farmers living further south. The implication was clear: farming know-how had been imported into the “waterworld” hunter-gatherer communities by women.

Our findings support a version of the “frontier mobility” or “availability” model for the spread of the Neolithic, proposed by archaeologists Marek Zvelebil and Peter Rowley-Conwy in the 1980s. They envisioned a contact zone between pioneer farming groups arriving by “leapfrog colonisation” and hunter-gatherer areas.

In the model, the “availability” phase entailed contact and small-scale movements across the frontier, with trading relationships and marriage alliances, for example, forming gradually. This would be followed by a “substitution” phase where farming develops alongside foraging in the hunter-gatherer area, and eventually a “consolidation” phase, when farming predominates.

Our results suggest that the frontier was much more permeable to women than it was to men, and that it may have been marriage of Neolithic women into the forager communities that eventually helped the hunter-gatherers to adopt farming full time. After all, because of the predominance of farming across Europe, the likely alternative long-term was extinction.

Perhaps this kind of model might also apply to other parts of Europe where we lack evidence for how the increased hunter-gatherer ancestry in the later Neolithic came about. In any case, the fact that, here, the “more advanced” farming women married into hunter-gatherer groups, contrary to many archaeologists’ expectations that hunter-gatherer women would “marry up”, suggests that perceptions need to change.

Beakers, bronze age and Britain

Around 4,600 years ago, though, people were on the move again. A new wave of settlers – pastoralist-farmers hailing ultimately from the Russian steppe – began to infiltrate the Rhine area in the form of the Corded Ware culture. As growing numbers moved in from the east, they were transformed – we still don’t understand exactly how – into what is known as the Bell Beaker culture.

Within a few centuries, the genetic landscape of the Rhine-Meuse region, including the wetlands, was completely reshaped. Our colleagues found that, 4,400 years ago, less than 20% of the ancestry of the people living there traced back to the earlier farmers and hunter-gatherers. At least 80% of their ancestry was now from the steppe.

The Bell Beaker people rapidly expanded and rippled out further in all directions, creating the bronze age of central Europe. And not only central Europe – they also spread across the English Channel and throughout Britain, extending as far north as Orkney.

It looks as if the British farmers who had been building Stonehenge over the preceding centuries all but disappeared – again, for reasons which remain unclear.

But did they actually vanish? Perhaps this rather blunt picture might become more nuanced too, as we learn more fine-grained details of what happened from archaeology and ancient DNA.

Martin B. Richards has received funding from The Leverhulme Trust’s Doctoral Scholarship scheme.

Maria Pala has received funding from The Leverhulme Trust’s Doctoral Scholarship scheme.

– ref. DNA study uncovers continental origins of Britain’s bronze age population – https://theconversation.com/dna-study-uncovers-continental-origins-of-britains-bronze-age-population-276540

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Samuel Finnerty, Senior Research Associate, Social Psychology, Lancaster University

From marches and demonstrations to civil disobedience, scientists are increasingly turning to climate protest. As a social psychologist, I’ve been investigating why researchers – who are trained to value scientific norms of objectivity and restraint – choose to engage in such public and sometimes disruptive action.

My study, just published in the journal PLOS Climate addresses this question by exploring scientists’ own experiences and decision-making. I spent two years observing, participating with, and interviewing scientists engaged in climate activism to understand their motivations.

Science and activism are very different. Scientific training emphasises restraint, uncertainty, narrow expertise, and objectivity. Activism demands urgency, moral clarity, and visibility. This tension often fuels the critique that scientists who protest have abandoned scientific norms in favour of ideology. Yet, a significant number of scientists engage in advocacy and activism. This marks a culture change in how scientists communicate.

So, how do scientists advocate without betraying what it means to be a scientist?

Most activism does not begin with actions that risk arrest such as blocking a road. Scientists typically become involved through roles aligned closely with their professional identity: public communication, giving talks, producing evidence summaries for social movements or acting as visible “scientist” figures within protest spaces. This reflects wider research showing that continuing to “feel like being a scientist” rather than stepping outside that role altogether, is critical for scientists’ engagement in activism.

The white lab coat is one tool scientists use to manage this tension. In protest spaces, it serves as visible signal of expertise, collective identity and legitimacy. Lab-coated scientists can challenge expectations of what an activist looks like, while also helping participants feel united and reassured that they are still acting as scientists. This helps reconcile identities that might otherwise appear in conflict.

However, for some social scientists who do not wear lab coats in their everyday research, this approach risks reinforcing narrow ideas about what counts as “real science”, both in public perception and within activist spaces, discouraging some from participating.

Acting alongside other scientists helps normalise and legitimise activism, reduce anxiety and build confidence. Being part of a collective also mitigates concerns about reputation damage. Participants nevertheless described activism as emotionally demanding. Continued involvement therefore depended on feeling supported by others.

Escalating actions

Some scientists choose to take part in civil disobedience, a form of peaceful protest that involves deliberately breaking the law to draw attention to an issue, such as sitting in roads or attaching themselves to buildings.

Many scientists told me this move was driven by frustration with the limits of conventional science communication. Many had spent years publishing research, advising policymakers and engaging with the media, yet saw little meaningful political response. For some, civil disobedience felt like a last resort. They framed it not as abandoning science, but as acting on it, when producing and communicating evidence no longer felt sufficient.

As one scientist, arrested during a protest at the London headquarters of the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, said: “As scientists, we have tried to warn the world as reasonably and as rationally as possible, […] But what is the point of doing it if it just gets ignored?”

The challenges of advocating as a scientist

Once scientists appear in activist spaces, their identity is not always taken at face value. Wearing a lab coat or invoking scientific credentials can open conversations and signal trust. But it may also invite scepticism, heightened scrutiny, or unrealistic expectations that one person can speak for all of science. Participants described being questioned by members of the public, journalists and sometimes other scientists about whether they were “real scientists”, whether their research field counted, or whether they were qualified to speak at all.

Many scientists therefore found themselves balancing the need to speak with authority while remaining honest about the limits of their expertise. Research on scientist advocacy shows mixed effects on public trust, sometimes positive, sometimes negative, and often context-dependent.

Scientists in my study were acutely aware of this. They sought to manage how their activism was perceived by clarifying their expertise, acting alongside other scientists, and choosing forms of participation consistent with their professional values.

Looking at the wider picture, as political inaction, hostility towards climate activism, politicisation of science and misinformation grow, scientists face growing pressure not only to produce knowledge, but to decide how to visibly stand for it. The rise of scientist activism reflects this shifting terrain, and the difficult choices it brings.

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Samuel Finnerty 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. How climate scientists balance the tension between research and public protest – new study – https://theconversation.com/how-climate-scientists-balance-the-tension-between-research-and-public-protest-new-study-274916