Category: The Conversation

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Panagiota Tragantzopoulou, Visiting Lecturer, University of Westminster

As daylight shortens and routines slow down, many people experience a
dip in mood and motivation. The run-up to Christmas is marketed as joyful, but for a large number of households it brings family strain and a surprising amount of loneliness. Against this backdrop, it’s no wonder the idea of welcoming a dog into the home feels appealing.

One of the most consistent findings in human–animal studies is that dogs often act as emotional stabilisers. In my 2025 study, pet owners described a sense of companionship that feels different from human relationships. They talked about dogs as warm presences that offer routine, purpose and a steady emotional tone at home.

Many participants said that when a dog is present, expressing emotions becomes easier – whether that is joy, frustration or sadness. Simply having another living being nearby, responding without judgment, can make difficult moments feel more manageable.

These needs often intensify during winter. For many people, this period makes them think about who isn’t present as much as who is. Although a dog cannot replace human relationships, a companion animal can make emotional fluctuations less dramatic. For someone dealing with a difficult December, a dog can provide steadiness during what can otherwise be an emotionally uneven month.

This helps explain the growing popularity of initiatives such as animal-assisted therapy programmes and puppy yoga sessions, where participants interact with dogs that are not their own. Research suggests that even brief contact with unfamiliar or therapy dogs can reduce stress and improve mood, indicating that the psychological benefits of canine interaction do not depend on ownership.

Some studies also suggest that dogs may be particularly effective in buffering stress compared with other companion animals, possibly because of their responsiveness to human social cues. Although these experiences are not a substitute for long-term companionship, they may offer moments of calm, connection and routine.

For people unable or unwilling to commit to dog ownership, lighter forms of contact, such as fostering for a local shelter, walking a friend’s dog or volunteering with rescue organisations, may still provide psychological benefits.

Dogs and social support

During the COVID lockdowns, people who felt strongly bonded to their dogs often reported higher levels of perceived social support. While the dog wasn’t solving practical problems, this relationship appeared to soften feelings of isolation at a time when normal social life was disrupted.

Although the circumstances were very specific, this finding has wider relevance. Many people spend long stretches at home over the Christmas period, sometimes largely alone or without regular social contact. In such situations, having a dog nearby can offer a sense of companionship during what might otherwise be extended periods indoors.

Research shows that dog owners often experience short social encounters while out walking: brief greetings from neighbours, light conversation with other dog owners, or acknowledgement from passersby. These interactions are usually quick, but they can help maintain a sense of belonging during winter, when daylight is short and social activity naturally slows.

Not every owner will have the same experience, and caring for a dog requires time, energy and resources. Even so, for some households, the presence of a dog can make the winter months feel less isolating than they might otherwise be.

Everyday connection

The emotional benefits of companion animals may be particularly relevant for older
adults, many of whom live alone. Loneliness in later life is associated with higher risks of depression, cognitive decline and cardiovascular disease. Here, companion animals can play a modest but important role. Everyday routines such as feeding, grooming and going outdoors with a dog provide structure to the day and encourage gentle physical activity.

Even short outings can increase light exposure and offer low-pressure
opportunities for social contact – two elements known to support wellbeing in later life. Exposure to natural daylight plays a key role in regulating circadian rhythms, which influence sleep, mood and energy levels.

Outdoor light is more intense than typical indoor lighting, even on overcast days, and is more effective at signalling to the brain when to be alert and when to rest. In adults, reduced daylight exposure is associated with sleep disruption and lower mood, particularly during winter months when days are shorter.

Being greeted at the door or having a dog settle beside the armchair does not replace human company, but it can provide a daily sense of being noticed and needed. Some studies suggest that interacting with a familiar dog can help regulate stress and promote feelings of calm. While these effects should not be overstated, they help explain why many older adults describe their animals as central to their emotional wellbeing.

But research also indicates there is an important caveat: emotional benefits are most likely to grow out of stable, long-term relationships. When dogs are adopted impulsively, that foundation may never develop.

Puppies require training, patience – and early-morning wake-ups. Adult dogs may come with behavioural histories that take time to understand. And all dogs bring financial responsibilities, from vet bills to insurance and food, that continue long after decorations are packed away. These realities are often overlooked in the excitement of December.

But for those prepared to take on the responsibility, a dog can offer far more than a fleeting festive moment. It can provide years of connection and companionship long after the Christmas lights fade.

Panagiota Tragantzopoulou 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. Why you should spend more time with a dog this Christmas – https://theconversation.com/why-you-should-spend-more-time-with-a-dog-this-christmas-272090

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Robin Bailey, Assistant professor, University of Cambridge

Christmas can be hard. For some people, it increases loneliness, grief, hopelessness and family tension, and the festive season has a way of turning ordinary concerns into urgent ones. Not because something terrible is guaranteed to happen, but because more is often at stake: money, time, family dynamics, travel and expectations.

A large study found a small but consistent dip in people’s wellbeing in the run-up to Christmas. One psychological process that often shows up under this pressure is worry.

It helps to separate worry from anxiety, because although they feel similar, they are not the same. Worry is mostly a thought process, often taking the form of “what if” questions such as “what if I don’t make everyone happy?” or “what if the cooking goes wrong?”. It tends to be negative and focused on the future.

Anxiety, by contrast, is the body’s threat system revving up. People may experience it as tension, dread, a racing heart or a churning stomach. But there is another part of worry that is particularly important. The issue is rarely the first “what if” thought. It is what happens next.

A psychological approach called metacognitive therapy focuses on the beliefs people hold about worrying itself. These beliefs can quietly determine whether worry passes quickly or turns into a long spiral.

Some beliefs sound reassuring or even helpful. Research has identified positive beliefs such as “worrying helps me prepare”, “worrying stops bad things from happening”, or “worrying shows I care”.

Read more:
Christmas can be stressful for many people – here’s what can help you get through the festive season

Others are more openly distressing. Negative beliefs include thoughts such as “my worrying is uncontrollable” or “my worrying is dangerous”.

Together, these beliefs can keep worry going by making it feel urgent, important and impossible to step away from.

When worry feels urgent and uncontrollable, people often try to manage it in ways that backfire: answering one “what if” with another, seeking repeated reassurance, misusing alcohol, or trying to block thoughts altogether.

Interrupting the worry pattern

One way to interrupt this pattern is to catch worry early and picture it as a text message.

A worry thought arrives like a message on your phone: What if the dinner goes wrong? What if they spoil things? What if they are disappointed with the gift?

You did not choose for the message to arrive. Thoughts often appear automatically. But the message contains a link and invites you to click on it. Clicking the link leads to prolonged worrying, rising anxiety and attempts to solve unsolvable problems at 2am.

The key point is this: you may not control which messages arrive, but you can learn not to click every link. That is the most controllable part of worry.

A technique designed to do this is called “worry postponement”, and it is more evidence based than it sounds. Studies and reviews show that postponing worry, or confining it to a specific time window, can reduce overall worry levels.

The idea is simple. You are postponing engagement with worry, not pretending it is not there. Pick a daily “worry slot” that is not just before bed. Five to ten minutes is enough.

When a worry message arrives outside that window, do something small but deliberate: notice it, name it as worry, and postpone it. For example: “That’s a worry message. I’ll deal with it at 7.30pm.” If it returns later, do the same again: notice, name, postpone.

When 7.30pm arrives, you can engage with the worry if you choose, but only for the agreed time.

Many people forget to use the slot at all, or find that after a day of postponing worry they feel less motivated to start worrying. Evidence suggests that learning to control your response to worry reduces its power.

Another helpful step is questioning beliefs about the usefulness of worry.

Worry often masquerades as protection. It can feel like it prevents disappointment, shows how much you care, or keeps bad things from happening.

One study found that over 90% of people’s worries, as logged day to day, did not come true.

Even when the issue is real, such as money or a difficult family situation, worry is not the same as dealing with the problem. Studies suggest that getting stuck in worry can make people less clear, less confident and more anxious than approaching the issue in a practical, step-by-step way:

1. If the task is preparation, planning works better than worrying.

2. If the task is avoiding conflict, setting a boundary is more effective than worrying.

3. If the task is showing care, actions matter more than worry.

Reframing these beliefs as another kind of scam message can make worry feel less convincing and less worth clicking on.

Christmas can be a difficult time, with heightened pressures and expectations. Learning not to click every worry link can make it more manageable. It is a skill for life, not just for Christmas.

Robin Bailey 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 to deal with worry this Christmas – https://theconversation.com/how-to-deal-with-worry-this-christmas-272146

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Flynn Ames, PhD candidate, Meteorology, University of Reading

A small, icy moon of Saturn called Enceladus is one of the prime targets in the search for life elsewhere in the solar system. A new study strengthens the case for Enceladus being a habitable world.

The data for those new research findings comes from the Cassini spacecraft, which orbited Saturn from 2004-2017. In 2005, Cassini discovered geyser-like plumes of water vapour and ice grains erupting continuously out of cracks in Enceladus’ icy shell.

In the latest study, Nozair Khawaja, from the Free University of Berlin, and his team set out to re-analyse a Cassini sample of material from Enceladus’ south pole.

Most analyses of solid particles from Enceladus’ plumes had been done on Saturn’s E-ring. The E-ring is an outer diffuse ring in the majestic ring system that surrounds the planet. It is continuously replenished with material from Enceladus’ plumes. But this material is not fresh – and exposure to radiation in space can alter its characteristics.

The younger material analysed by Khawaja and colleagues was sampled by Cassini during a particularly fast flyby over Enceladus’ south pole. The use of freshly ejected plume material guaranteed the removal of any possible interference from radiation.

So what do these and other analyses of plume samples tell us about Enceladus? Early Cassini samples were found to contain sodium salts, suggesting the plumes are fed by an underground liquid water ocean in contact with a rocky bottom. Later observations of Enceladus’ “wobble” (slight shifts in its rotation) relative to Saturn demonstrated that its icy exterior shell is probably completely detached from the rocky core below.

This means that Enceladus’ underground ocean (sandwiched between the ice and rock) is global, extending across the entire moon. The ocean is likely sustained by tidal flexing, where the varying gravitational tug of Saturn on Enceladus stretches and squeezes it, causing Enceladus to heat up and preventing the ocean from freezing and preventing the ocean from freezing.

The ability to (albeit, indirectly) sample the ocean has permitted a more comprehensive investigation of Enceladus’ habitability – that is, whether Enceladus contains the necessary ingredients for life as we know it (namely a suitable energy source and mix of chemical elements).

Sampling the plumes

Analysis of Cassini’s plume samples was made possible by a technique called “mass spectrometry”. The process began with the high velocity impact between Cassini (flying at speeds of kilometres per second) and the solid plume material it collected.

This broke up the material smaller, charged fragments. After impact, an instrument exposed the fragments to an electric field which moved them towards a detector.

The timing of impact of the chemical fragments with the detector was then used to determine their mass and charge. Scientists could then “piece the jigsaw” back together to figure out the identity of the molecules that the fragments once formed.

When attempting to determine habitability, there are certain molecules to look out for in the data. Organics are simply molecules that contain carbon. Because life on Earth is fundamentally carbon-based, detecting carbon-bearing molecules of any form is a good start.

Organics have been detected with confidence in plume material, including “amines”, which can be precursors to amino acids (which in turn, can be precursors to proteins). Much larger “macromolecules” have also been seen. But their exact identity is currently uncertain owing to the limitations of the Cassini instrumentation.

Carbon is one of the “CHNOPS” elements (carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, and sulphur) which form the majority of atoms within living organisms on Earth. Apart from sulphur, these have all been detected with confidence in plume material.

Mass spectrometry can also indicate the types of energy sources available within an ocean. Photosynthesis, the primary energy source for life on Earth, is unlikely to be viable within Enceladus because its ocean is buried under kilometres of ice. Photosynthesis requires light and the ocean is almost certainly dark.

Luckily, there are other ways that life can extract energy from its environment. In the late 1970s, vast ecosystems were discovered at Earth’s ocean depths, around hydrothermal vents – fissures on the ocean floor from which hot water rich in minerals emerges.

The microbes surviving around hydrothermal vents are forms of “chemosynthetic” life. They use the various substances found in hydrothermal waters to perform chemical reactions to get the energy they need.

It appears that ingredients for some chemosynthetic pathways such as carbon dioxide and hydrogen are available in sufficient quantities within Enceladus’ ocean to theoretically make it a viable energy source.

In fact, the amount of hydrogen in plume material is so large that it would require a present-day source in Enceladus’ ocean to explain it, most likely hydrothermal vents.

Recent study

Of course, we need to be careful in using plume material to infer what is inside the ocean. Processes during the formation of the plume (as it travels through the ice into space), may either dilute or concentrate certain substances. The harsh radiation could also cause chemicals within the plumes to react, leaving the material unrepresentative of the ocean it came from.

By analysing the freshly ejected plume material, the latest study removes that problem. Owing to the higher speed, samples obtained during this flyby should have fragmented in a way that would allow more types of molecules to become visible in the data.

And the samples collected did include new substances, as well as some that were already known, confirming that they came from within Enceladus, not from radiative alteration. Some of the newly detected substances further hint at a hydrothermal origin.

With knowledge of Enceladus’ potential habitability, the European Space Agency is planning a mission, launching in the 2040s, that will perform flybys of Enceladus, and possibly even orbit and land on its surface.

With an upgraded suite of instruments, the mission will aim to look for evidence of life within plume material. If life resides around hydrothermal systems at Enceladus’ depths, its journey to the ocean top and out into space may be long and arduous.

Yet recent work by Fabian Klenner from the University of Washington and colleagues, showed that even a single bacterial cell within an ice grain could be detectable via mass spectrometry. Thus the hope remains that if life resides within Enceladus, the evidence of it may be floating in space waiting for us to come and see it.

Flynn Ames has previously received funding from STFC

– ref. Saturn’s icy moon Enceladus is an attractive target in the search for life – new research – https://theconversation.com/saturns-icy-moon-enceladus-is-an-attractive-target-in-the-search-for-life-new-research-270694

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Tamsin McLaren, Senior Lecturer in Marketing, University of Bath

The world-famous Liberty department store in London celebrated its 150th anniversary this year. Describing itself as “an extraordinary laboratory of creativity, generating inventions, innovations, and original expressions of form and thought”, 2025 has seen a year-long programme of exhibitions, installations and special collections.

An exhibition entitled I am. We are. Liberty., located in the east gallery on the fourth floor of the London store, was a rare view into the Liberty archive. Showcasing 330 different print designs from the late 1800s right up until the Liberty Retold fabric collection for Spring/Summer 25.

The exhibition was curated by Ester Coen and co-curated by Silvia Spagnol, with all the designs originating from the company archives. Designed as a travelling exhibition, I am. We are. Liberty. was transported to the UK pavilion at the World Expo in Osaka, Japan,, in August, in honour of the brand’s early influences.

At the same time, a giant installation, an enormous patchwork house by The Patchwork Collective represented the brand’s living history via a community project that invited artisans, makers and designers from around the world to help create a collaborative artwork.

This physical manifestation of craft and creativity was made from more than 1,000 patchwork squares and occupied the store’s central atrium. Contributors could trace their own patch via a map which details the exact location of all 1,000 patches, paying tribute to its customers and collaborators as co-creators of the Liberty brand.

Extravagant, exotic, unusual

Founded by Arthur Liberty in 1875, the original store on Regent Street established itself as a destination at the forefront of the aesthetic movement, specialising in imported goods and fabrics. Within the same year as opening, the founder printed the first Liberty fabrics.

This late-19th century movement championed pure beauty and “art for art’s sake” (an expression coined by the 19th-century French philosopher Victor Cousin), pushing back against the moralistic materialism of Victorian England, after the Great Exhibition of 1851. With connections to influential artists and designers such as Dante Gabriel Rossetti and James Whistler, the ideals of aestheticism were commercialised by Liberty.

Liberty introduced its customers to a vast array of extravagant objects and textiles imported from the Middle East and Japan, recognising the appetite for unusual and exotic textile prints registered “Art Fabrics” as a trademark. In 1887 the iconic Liberty design Hera was created, featuring stylised peacock feathers, and by the 1890s Liberty Fabrics was a byword for the very best in avant-garde textile design.

Archiving has been part of the Liberty design practice since the 1880s. Today the archive, which is not open to the public, is home to original print designs, pattern books, paintings, drawings and artefacts. It’s an ever-growing resource. Archivist Anna Buruma has said that “Liberty has always used their archive, so prints kept being reworked – making the counting game very difficult”.

Other British heritage brands which also make good use of their archives include Clarks Shoes (The Alfred Gillett Trust), Marks and Spencer and John Lewis & Partners. These rich resources provide inspiration for designers and celebrate the role these well-loved brands have played in customers’ lives across centuries. And when they open to the public they can become important experiential and cultural destinations, such at the Shoemakers Museum, which opened in September in Somerset.

The reason for the enduring appeal of Liberty prints is their “DNA”, which the company has described as “Design, Nature and Art”. The exhibition curators invite us to consider how this continuous cycle of self-renewal works:

Liberty continually regenerates itself, remaining true to its DNA through a cyclical journey that returns to its origins and archetypes. This process allows itself to stay relevant weaving past, present and future into a single living thread in perpetual motion.

Liberty has always represented the zeitgeist, the general intellectual, moral and cultural climate of an era. Its prints worn by the Beatles, Twiggy and David Bowie. It was a fabric supplier to fashion brands Yves Saint Laurent and Cacharel. More recently, Liberty has collaborated with Hermes, Gucci, Acne Studios and Uniqlo, positioning the brand at the forefront of craft and culture.

The choice of the founder to call the store his own name was symbolic. Department stores were new businesses at the time which provided alternative means of employment for women, enabling a newfound freedom. They were the innovative emporiums mirroring societal change where women were powerful actors and agents of change as consumers, designers, workers, managers and eventually owners.

This year’s programme of events at Liberty has leveraged storytelling and sensory marketing to create immersive experiences in retail. These interactive and shareable environments help increase customer dwell times and enhance advocacy of the brand.

This rich crossover point, where retail and leisure merge, offering sensory experiences that go beyond transactions, fostering community, culture and meaning.

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Tamsin McLaren 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. Celebrating 150 years of Liberty’s DNA – fusing design, nature and art – https://theconversation.com/celebrating-150-years-of-libertys-dna-fusing-design-nature-and-art-271002