Humans seem to have been adapted to the last ice age in similar ways to wolves and bears, according to our recent study, challenging longstanding theories about how and where our ancestors lived during this glacial period.
Previous studies have supported the view of most archaeologists that modern humans retreated into southern Europe during the height of the last ice age and expanded during the later increase in global temperatures. But our study is the first to use genetic data to show that at least some humans stayed in central Europe, unlike many other animals and despite our species having evolved in the much warmer climate of Africa.
Scientists have known since the 19th century that the distributions of animals and plants across the world may fluctuate with the climate. But the climate crisis has made it more important than ever to understand these fluctuations.
Populations of the same species that live in different places often have different genetics to each other. More recently scientists have studied how climate change has altered the distribution of these genetically distinct populations of species.
Most of the studies in this field focus on individual species of animal or plant. They have shown that many species, including humans, expanded their geographical ranges since the height of the last ice age, approximately 20,000 years ago.
At this time, European ice sheets reached Denmark and south Wales. Europe was cold but mostly unglaciated, probably much like Alaska or Siberia today.
Our team’s new study, led by Oxala García-Rodríguez at Bournemouth University, took a different approach and reviewed the genetic history of 23 common mammals in Europe. In addition to humans, these included rodents such as bank voles and red squirrels, insectivores like shrews and hedgehogs, ungulates like red deer and wild boar, and carnivores like brown bears and weasels.
An important metric in our study was where the greatest diversity is today across Europe. This is because areas of high genetic variation are likely to be the areas of longest occupation by species.
These areas, known as refugia, are locations where species retreated to survive during periods when environmental conditions were unfavourable elsewhere. For the mammals we studied, these refugia would have been occupied since the height of the last glaciation, at least. These refugia were probably the warmest areas or places where it was easiest for the animals to find food.
The genetic patterns we found include cases where some mammals (such as red foxes and roe deer) were restricted to glacial refugia in southern areas such as Iberia and Italy, and that they expanded from these areas as global temperatures warmed following the ice age. Other mammals (such as beavers and lynx) expanded from glacial refugia to the east of Europe only to spread west.
Species such as pygmy shrew and common vole had been restricted to sheltered areas such as deep valleys in northern Europe, small enclaves in otherwise inhospitable glacial landscapes. These patterns have previously been documented by other scientists.
But we found a fourth pattern. Our study indicated some species (such as brown bears and wolves) were already widely distributed across Europe during the height of the last glaciation with either no discernible refugia or with refugia both to the north and south.
Humans seem to have followed the same distribution pattern as brown bears in the last ice age. Volodymyr Burdiak/Shutterstock
This pattern includes Homo sapiens too. Neanderthals had already been extinct for around 20,000 years by this point.
It’s not clear why ancient humans and other animals in this group lived in this seemingly harsh climate rather than explore more hospitable places. But they seemed able to tolerate the ice age conditions while other animals withdrew to refugia.
Perhaps most important of all is that among the species that seem to conform to this pattern, where little or no geographical contraction in population took place at the height of the last ice age, are modern humans. It is particularly surprising that humans are in this group as our ancestors originated in Africa and it may seem unlikely that they were resilient to cold climates.
It is unclear whether these humans relied on ecological adaptation, for example the fact that they were omnivorous meant they could eat many different things, or whether they survived due to technology. For instance, it is well established that humans had clothing, built dwellings and controlled fire during the cold conditions of the last ice age.
This new pattern, and the inclusion of humans within it, could cause rethink of climate change and biogeography among scientists, especially for those studying human distribution changes. It could mean that some areas may be habitable for longer than expected as the climate changes.
Professor Andy Phippen writes for The Conversation about children’s use of smartphones and technology, and why giving them ‘dumb’ phones with minimal features might not help…
Should you give your child a ‘dumb’ phone? They aren’t the answer to fears over kids’ social media use
Parents concerned about the possible dangers smartphone use might have for their children are turning to “dumb phones”. These are the brick-shaped or flip phones today’s parents might have had themselves as teenagers, only capable of making calls or sending text messages and lacking access to social media apps.
Phones available include a remake of noughties classic the Nokia 3210, or new designs such as the recently released Barbie flip phone.
But handing children a “dumb phone” seems to be as much an exercise in nostalgia as proactive practice. Ultimately, young people will end up using smartphones in their social and working lives. They have many useful features. It makes sense for them to learn to use them with the support of adults around them in a nurturing environment.
Unhappiness among children and teenagers is often seen as being related to smartphone or social media use. Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s 2024 book The Anxious Generation suggests that there is a link between the rise in the use of smartphones by young people and an increase in youth mental health issues.
However, is very difficult to demonstrate a causal link between a specific aspect of modern life and a specific public health concern, as responses to Haidt’s book point out.
Yes, young people use smartphones more than previous generations. But they are also growing up in a world experiencing a global pandemic, visible climate change and international conflict. They’re being told they will never have a job because AI will be doing it instead, and that they’ll never own a house because of price inflation.
It is very difficult in these social contexts to isolate one factor and claim this is what is causing a rise in mental health issues among young people.
Large and rigorous peer reviewed studies have been conducted to explore the correlations between digital technology and children’s mental health. They rarely return a clear link. Some show positive correlations – use of digital tech leading to outcomes such as happiness, being treated with respect and positive learning experiences.
This doesn’t mean that we can say that smartphones are definitely a bad thing, or – conversely – that they have no negative impact on children. It just means that claims of causation are difficult to prove and irresponsible to make.
I have spent 20 years talking to young people about their use of digital technology. There are certainly risks and concerns. However, there are also many positive uses of this technology which, with the right guard rails, can enhance a child’s life.
While young people talk about concerns around popularity and “fear of missing out”, they also see value in accessible communication with friends and family, which is especially important for those who might live in isolated locations or have physical restrictions. And many say the main reason they would not raise concerns is for fear that adults around them might “freak out” and take their device from them.
Checks and balances
Hearing that seven-year-olds own and use smartphones sounds worrisome. But there’s a difference between, for example, a child using their phone to keep in touch with their grandparents who live in another part of the country with the supervision of their parents, and an unsupervised child interacting with strangers on social media. These are two very different scenarios.
Giving a child a smartphone does not mean allowing them ultimate freedom to use it however and how often they like.
It is perfectly within a parent’s power to restrict the types of apps that are installed, monitor screen time and install software to make sure a young person’s interactions are healthy – as well as talking to their child about social media use. Or, perhaps more simply, implement house rules that a child can only use their smartphone for a certain amount of supervised time.
As their child gets older, parents can relax the restrictions and afford them greater privacy and responsibility in its use. Parents can still make sure their child knows that if something upsetting does occur, they can ask for help.
I have a friend and colleague who is fond of analogising technology use with teaching a child to ride a bike.
Do we give a child a bike on their seventh birthday, put them at the top of a hill, and tell them to figure it out for themselves? No, we help them learn, with safeguards in place, until they develop competencies while also understanding the risks. The approach should be the same with digital technology.
In this Insights long-form article for The Conversation, Dr Ellie Smith and Professor Melanie Klinkner write about their work documenting mass graves across the world and the difficulties in locating and investigating such sites…
How the world’s first open-source digital map of mass graves could help bring justice to victims in Ukraine and other war zones
These newly reported discoveries [of mass graves] confirm our darkest fears. The people of Ukraine and the world deserve to know how exactly those buried in the forest near Izium have died. Amnesty International
Mass graves were reported in Ukraine soon after Russia’s full-scale invasion in early 2022, and were promptly probed by investigators and forensic experts as likely crime scenes.
Soon after the war began, we started to collate information on potential mass grave sites, hoping to get a better understanding of the practicalities of documenting the location of mass graves in real time using open-source information, and to stress test tools that we had developed to support mapping.
It was exacting work: the internet was flooded with reports from many different sources, from potential victims and witnesses to journalists and analysts. The volume of material available to us was enormous, and within it, we needed to work out which reports were reliable, where there might be inaccuracies – innocent or deliberate – and how we should record the location of a verified mass grave.
We were working within an ongoing and rapidly changing situation: in a short space of time, a site would go from being located, reported to the police, formally investigated, excavated and the bodies located in it identified.
Our mapping therefore had to be done at pace to fully verify the open-source reports that we relied on before the situation changed.
The intensity of the work in Ukraine was also a strong reminder to us of the need to protect ourselves and our team from the constant exposure to graphic reports and imagery. As Diego Nunez, a data researcher for the Mass Grave Protection, Investigation and Engagement (MaGPIE) project that we run, told us:
Even if you might be familiar with graphic or explicit content, it is hard not to feel small and powerless in front of the evidence of human rights violations of any kind. From pictures of the mass graves with fresh or skeletonised remains to the testimonies of survivors, each grave seems to tell a story of horror which might be difficult to forget.
It was noticeable how little information was coming out of eastern Ukraine and Russian-controlled regions. For us, this meant an increased risk of an incomplete or skewed map with the potential for it to feed into a political narrative of denial. It was only when Russian troops left certain territories that more information emerged.
But while the inaccessibility or unreliability of information about mass grave sites during an armed conflict presents challenges for us as researchers, it is a source of excruciating anguish for those looking for their loved ones.
That is why we have made it our mission to produce the world’s first global open-source mass graves map. Such a map is important because physical memorialisation of mass grave sites may be difficult where political and ethnic tensions continue to run high or perpetrators remain in positions of power. The digital recording of sites – especially in an open-source format – may serve as a form of memorialisation, providing some form of justice for victims’ families, ensuring that the death of their loved one is recorded and remembered, and helping to counter revisionism and state denial.
Our co-editors commission long-form journalism, working with academics from many different backgrounds who are engaged in projects aimed at tackling societal and scientific challenges.
In addition to our ongoing work with the map, we have extensively researched mass grave materials and victim accounts from across the world and have produced a protocol of international standards on how mass grave protection and investigation should be approached.
Millions missing
Mass graves are sites of unimaginable human loss and suffering, and they exist on a shocking scale. According to a report by the UN Special Rapporteur in 2020), “there is not one region in the world, not one historical period, that has not seen mass graves”.
They are present on every inhabited continent and the number of victims they are believed to contain is staggering. In Iraq alone, up to 1 million people are missing and are potentially in mass graves following decades of conflict and human rights violations, from the pre-Saddam Hussein era to the Yazidis killed at the hands of the Islamic State.
In Bosnia and Herzegovina, 7,600 people are still missing following the conflict there. They include over 1,000 victims of the Srebrenica genocide.
The ethnographer Adam Rosenblatt has called mass graves, “an underground map of atrocity that stretches across the planet’s surface”.
And for every body hidden in a mass grave, there is a family that is in anguish. The need to know where their loved one is, what happened to them, and to have their remains returned so that they can be mourned with dignity can be overwhelming and enduring.
Crime scene investigation
But mass graves are more than sites of human despair and suffering – they are also crime scenes, containing evidence that is essential for building a case against perpetrators so that families can achieve some element of justice. Despite this, however, until relatively recently there have been no common, international standards to guide practitioners on the best ways to protect and investigate such sites.
We were fortunate enough to be joined by a group of world-leading experts who worked on mass graves in many different capacities, including representatives from the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP), the International Committee for the Red Cross and the International Criminal Court. Between them, our collaborators had worked as lawyers, judges, investigators and forensic practitioners in every major mass grave context imaginable, and on every continent.
The protocol follows the chronological stages of mass grave investigation, from the initial discovery of a site to the achievement of justice and commemoration. It is now being used by the ICMP and is available in 15 languages, most recently Ukrainian.
Zahra and Wadad’s quest for answers
To highlight the impact that this trauma can have, we searched for and
compiled the real-life experiences of families of the missing from all over the world for our animated film Resolution.
Our hope for the animation is that any family who finds themselves in the same horrific situation anywhere in the world would be able to recognise their own experiences in it. The six-minute film is told from the perspective of those who are left behind, and focuses on three key characters.
The first two are Zahra and Wadad – they are not real, but their experiences are. They are composite characters, grounded in research that includes published victim narratives and testimony from many different countries that have seen atrocities, including Bosnia, Iraq, Lebanon, Rwanda, Syria and Guatemala. Our research also involved direct engagement with victims’ organisations and expert practitioners with experience of working with the families of the missing.
Our decision to use composite characters for the film was based on our need to ensure the anonymity and safety of survivors, particularly in situations where the perpetrators of atrocities were still in positions of power. It also allowed us to represent the experiences of as many people and contexts as possible.
Zahra’s son was found in a mass grave ten years after he was taken by armed forces from their rural home. Together with hundreds of others who were targeted because of their ethnicity, he was transported to a holding site, tortured and executed.
His body was found in a mass grave that contained the remains of over 200 others. He was identified initially by his distinctive clothing – a hat that Zahra had knitted for him – and later by DNA evidence
Zahra’s search for him had been a long and arduous one. Like many others who were also searching for missing family members, she reported him missing, provided a description and a DNA reference sample. She asked neighbours, survivors and witnesses if they had any idea what had happened to him and where he might be.
She plastered his image on any available public space – and she waited. And despite the almost daily discovery by international investigators of mass graves in the surrounding area, knowing in her heart of hearts that he must almost certainly be dead, the absence of a body meant that there was always the tiniest shred of hope that somewhere he might be alive and come back to her.
She lived in this agonising state of limbo for more than a decade, unable to mourn her son and to move on with her own life until he had been found. The return of his body to her was devastating, but it also meant that she was able to bury him with the care and dignity that had been denied him in his final days and in his death.
Sadly, Zahra’s experiences are not unique.
Wadad was at home with her husband and two small children, celebrating her husband’s birthday, when the soldiers arrived at their door.
They beat her husband before taking him away and raped Wadad while her terrified children cowered outside her bedroom door.
Wadad never saw her husband alive again. Like Zahra, Wadad’s quest to find out what had happened to him was a long one. Her children grew into adults as their struggle continued. As political oppression in her country mounted, so did the number of disappearances, and families of the missing swelled the ranks of protesters who were calling for answers.
In the end, the answer did not come from the government but from a survivor who had been imprisoned with Wadad’s husband. He had been executed. Wadad still doesn’t know where his body is.
The experiences of Zahra and Wadad are shared by families all around the world who are searching for their loved ones. The majority of victims in mass graves are men and boys, meaning that many of those who are looking for the bodies of their dead are women. In the immediate aftermath of the Rwandan genocide, for example, 70% of the country’s population was female. In Bosnia, too, the vast majority of the missing are men (86.98%), most of whom were aged between 21 and 60 at the time they disappeared (70.58%).
Like Wadad, women were often victims of human rights violations, including rape and other forms of sexual violence. This means they have to deal with their own trauma and at the same time navigate the ordeal of investigating what happened to their loved one.
In Rwanda alone, between 250,000 and 500,000 women were raped during the genocide. Many of them suffer social isolation and rejection as a result, struggle with ongoing illness including HIV infection, and must try to make a living as a sole breadwinner for their families, including for any children born as a result of rape.
In our film, the body of Zahra’s son is found and returned to her so that she can bury and mourn him. The same cannot be said, however, for Wadad, reflecting the sad truth of mass grave investigation: for most people who are looking for their loved ones, their remains will never be found. Mass grave sites – even when known – will never be excavated, and in other cases remains have been destroyed.
‘They made him disappear completely’
Armando Amaro Cóndor, for example, was a student at Peru’s Universidad Nacional de Educación Enrique Guzmán y Valle who went missing in July 1992.
He was among nine students and one professor who were disappeared and later extrajudicially executed by Peruvian military forces. His sister, Carmen Rosa Amaro-Cóndor summed up her feelings in her evidence to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights when she said:
They made him disappear completely; they burned his body with lime, with gasolene, that shows their complete inhumanity.
Mass grave exhumation is time consuming and expensive, and for countries that lack sufficient resources or expertise, may simply never happen.
In Iraq, for instance, it is estimated, based on the current rate of progress, that to exhume and investigate all currently known mass graves would take 800 years.
But efforts to search for, exhume and identify the dead and prosecute those responsible also requires political will, which is likely to be lacking where those responsible remain in positions of power.
In Guatemala, there is still no specialist public body with a mandate to search for the reported 45,000 people who have been missing since the 36-year conflict ended in 1996. Instead, families have faced official denial and obstruction, aided by an attorney general who remains loyal to former military leaders and political figures directly implicated in the many massacres that took place there. Families must rely instead on civil society organisations to conduct exhumation and identification efforts.
Where the existence of mass graves runs counter to political or nationalistic goals, sites become inconvenient reminders of a truth and a history that leaders are seeking to either rewrite or erase.
For example, nationalism and ethnic tensions are running dangerously high in Bosnia’s Republika Srpska where President Milorad Dodik – a genocide denier – has promised his supporters secession from Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Authorities within the Republika Srpska are actively engaged in revisionism efforts, and since 2016, at the behest of the minister of education and culture, children attending schools in the Republika Srpska have not been taught about the Siege of Sarajevo or the Srebrenica genocide.
Memorialisation has become a highly partisan issue, as murals in the city of Foča have appeared celebrating Ratko Mladić and Milorad Pelemiš, the commander of the 10th Sabotage Detachment of the Bosnian Serb Army – the unit responsible for the killing of over 1,000 Bosniaks at Branjevo Farm in July 1995.
By contrast, of the 42 largest mass graves discovered in the country to date, just 12 of the excavated sites bear any kind of memorial plaque or are otherwise marked. Instead, many have been built over or used as rubbish dumps.
Within this highly tense and partisan context, witnesses to crimes are fearful of reporting mass grave locations. Amor Mašović, chairman of the board of directors of the Missing Persons Institute in Bosnia, said that information about hidden graves is still being stored in people’s heads, but witnesses who were involved in crimes aren’t willing to share their knowledge, partly because of the political climate, adding:
Messages from political leaders go against that, saying those who offer information will become traitors to their people, while those who should be criminally prosecuted for taking people away and forcibly making them disappear are heroes to these politicians.
Wissam is the third character in our film (they are gender-neutral so that the widest possible spread of survivors can recognise themselves in the film).
They are a student in a city in sub-Saharan Africa, where they blog about the political situation. Wissam is chatting with their partner online when they witness armed men break into their partner’s flat and begin to beat him, before dragging him away, out of sight of the screen.
Wissam uses their online presence to raise awareness of the disappearance, launching a campaign that attracts others from their own country and beyond. There are riots as protests against government oppression grow, but Wissam never learns their partner’s fate or whereabouts. They remain in limbo.
For those who continue to search – and for whom there will never be a body or a trial – we need to find other ways to alleviate their anguish, to restore dignity in death and to bring families some peace, and perhaps some form of justice.
Digital mapping and concealed evidence
Online documentation and mapping is used in other human rights contexts as a way of recording fact, preserving evidence and raising awareness of human rights violations. It is an area that we have been exploring in our work to see how it might be applied to mass graves.
The digital recording and mapping of mass grave sites could also provide protection of the site and preserve its location in the event that the political situation changes and investigation becomes a possibility at some point in the future.
In Guatemala, for example, after decades of impunity and an absence of any will on the part of the state to search for and identify the missing, a new president has been elected on an anti-corruption platform, and the country is currently pursuing the criminal prosecution of a former army general, Lucas Garcia, who held office during one of the most violent and bloodiest periods of the conflict.
It offers families a glimmer of hope that justice will finally be done and loved ones found – but time is running out. Garcia is 91 and his co-accused, Callejas y Callejas, has been declared unfit for trial. Witnesses and perpetrators are dying and memories are fading, along with hopes of locating mass graves and their victims.
But the issue of open-source mapping of mass graves is not a straightforward one.
Mass grave sites are vulnerable to disturbance because perpetrators will often try to cover up their crimes. So publicly revealing the location of a site may actually alert them to the fact that their cover ups have failed. The destruction of or interference with mass graves can then result in the loss or contamination of evidence.
It can also result in damage to the bodies that are buried there, including the separation and commingling of body parts. For those hoping for the identification and return of a family member, this can be both traumatic and catastrophic.
As the conflict in Bosnia was in its final throws, for example, several months after the Srebrenica genocide took place, the US secretary of state issued a statement indicating that US forces had identified the location of a number of mass graves from satellite imagery.
As Bosnian-Serb forces sensed defeat, a concerted and organised effort was made to conceal the evidence of mass graves: they were dug up using heavy machinery and bodies were moved in their hundreds to secondary, smaller sites. The process was brutal and indiscriminate. It meant that body parts became separated and mixed with others, with remains of single individuals being found in multiple different grave pits.
Public disclosure of the location of a mass grave site could also put witnesses and victims’ families at risk of harm, especially where the possibility of criminal investigation exists within a country or those responsible still hold positions of power.
The first global map
While there is currently no system of global record keeping, mapping or monitoring of the number and location of mass graves or of the numbers of victims believed to be in them, there are a few mass grave mapping projects that have been conducted at a country level, including in both Bosnia and Cambodia, providing us with an insight into some of the challenges involved.
Our initial aim was to produce guidance – a number of practical tools – that would enable anyone involved in mapping mass graves to make decisions that were ethical and safe – including when open-source publication should be avoided and how risks could be mitigated.
And our team of specialist researchers has now begun the long process of producing the first world-wide open-source map of mass graves, a process that we envisage will take another 2.5 years to complete.
We continue to encounter many challenges along the way, including how we verify the credibility of online reports and sources, as well as the availability and accessibility of reports themselves.
Cross-referencing materials to validate our sources is hugely time consuming – we are trying to compare the non-comparable. Where sites are unmarked or are situated in remote areas they are harder to identify, bringing with it the risk of under-representation in areas and the possibility that fewer recordings of graves might feed into a revisionist narrative, or deny families the justice and closure they are looking for.
The work is methodical and long. Nonetheless, as a snapshot of our current progress hopefully shows, we are working to ensure that overlooked and under-reported mass graves are captured.
The image above shows the different types of mass graves recorded in Kosovo. The barchart outlines the large numbers of sites recorded by the project so far.
What next?
The way that we search for, exhume and investigate mass graves has come a long way since the formation of forensic teams in south and Latin America in the wake of the military junta regimes of the 1970s and early 1980s. Since then a number of forensic teams have been founded in Guatemala, Peru and elsewhere to facilitate the exhumation and identification of the disappeared.
The international tribunals that were set up by the UN Security Council after the conflicts in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia went a step further, introducing multidisciplinary teams that operated on a large scale. The search for the missing has benefited from the application of technology such as satellite imagery and ground penetrating radar, while the development of DNA evidence has been instrumental in the reliable identification of victims.
These developments all inform today’s efforts to find answers for victims’ families in what feels like an increasingly volatile world.
And despite the ubiquity of mass graves across the globe and their significance for families and societies that are seeking to come to terms with their violent pasts, the full scale and nature of the mass grave phenomena is still not well understood. While many countries may legislate to search for the missing, punish those responsible and provide families with the answers they so desperately need, the extent to which those legal commitments are manifested in practice is variable.
Sometimes states may simply lack the capacity and expertise required to conduct credible forensic exhumations that have the potential to meet the needs of families who are often left without the answers they need while perpetrators go unpunished. In order to rectify this, we need a fuller understanding of how legal commitments are being interpreted and applied in practice.
In the meantime, for the families of the missing, the need to find their loved ones and to understand what happened to them does not fade with time, and neither does their commitment to pursue the truth.
Resolution was written and animated by Lina Ghaibeh and Georges Khoury and is dedicated to all those who continue to search. The name is intended to speak, not only to their need for an answer but also to their steadfast resolve – often over decades – to bring their loved ones home. We are grateful to the victims’ organisations that supported us in the development of the film. The survivor quotes used in this article come from materials produced by those organisations, and helped to form its narrative.
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Professor Sine McDougall co-authors this article for The Conversation about whether beauty matters in housing policy and what makes a beautiful building…
Is there such a thing as an objectively beautiful building? Here’s the science
Some people assume that there’s a type of beauty that everyone can agree on. But did early humans really admire slender bodies the way we do today? After all, fashions come and go – there’s been plenty of fads throughout history that we find hard to understand today.
The UK’s deputy prime minister, Angela Rayner, recently suggested “beautiful” needs to be removed from the government’s housing policy on the grounds it is too subjective. She said in an interview that “beautiful means nothing really, it means one thing to one person and another thing to another”.
She isn’t alone. Many people support the notion, first stated by the Irish novellist Margeret Wolfe Hungerford, that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder”.
But is this true? The current state of our knowledge on aesthetics, and specifically what we consider beautiful, is a mosaic of empirical discoveries. For over 150 years, psychologists have run carefully controlled experiments to determine whether an attribute, such as a particular colour, shape or melody is beautiful.
Some rules have emerged, but none are universal: for instance, the golden rectangle ratio in geometry, which denotes a rectangle with the height to width being 1:1.6. Although considered beautiful by some in objects such as buildings or windows, these dimensions are an uncommon choice for bathroom tiles or books.
Research has shown that our experiences of finding things visually appealing are an integral, and often unconscious, part of the way we perceive objects in the world around us. It takes approximately 50 milliseconds, the blink of an eye, to reliably decide whether or not we think an object is beautiful.
Familiarity is an important factor. When something is seen or heard often, it is easier for our nervous system (our vision and hearing) to process it. And this ease can be misattributed as beauty. This also explains how trends in beauty emerge – if we keep seeing and celebrating a certain type of face, it becomes familiar.
Beauty comes about in different ways, and whether something is considered beautiful can depend on attributes of the person doing the looking, such as their prior experiences, expertise and attitudes; whether it hangs in a museum or along a hospital corridor; as well as attributes of the object itself, such as its shape, colour, proportions or size.
Beauty can therefore arise from good design. When people deal with an easy-to-use object or interface, they like it more than hard-to-use counterparts. Easy-to-use objects often have visual characteristics such as clear balance, clarity and good contrast.
Does beauty matter in housing policy?
Discussions about beauty are a healthy state of affairs, until they start coming into discussions about housing policy.
A beautiful building can bring joy and contentment in everyday life. Beautiful, well-designed homes can significantly enhance the mental health of the inhabitants.
Attractive, well-built surroundings can reduce stress, increase feelings of happiness, and contribute to a sense of peace and contentment.
This may be why there’s increasing evidence that taking small doses of psychedelics in a controlled environment such as a clinic, which produce intense experiences of beauty, can help treat depression.
A beautiful building means that someone cared to do that little bit extra. This may be meaningful to the kid growing up in social housing, offering a sense of pride and belonging. Aesthetic appeal in housing and neighbourhoods may lead to civic pride, where residents take collective responsibility for maintaining and improving their environment.
Pride may lead to stronger, more vibrant communities, and idea that came to life in modern times by the “city beautiful movement” in the US (1890–1920). “Mean streets make mean people,” wrote the movement’s leading theorist, Charles Mulford Robinson.
Amsterdam Het Schip. Beautiful? harry_nl/Flickr, CC BY-SA
Beauty in housing is not just about aesthetics; it often coincides with functionality. Good design considers the usability and comfort of spaces, ensuring that they are both beautiful and practical. This balance can improve the quality of life for residents by making spaces more efficient and pleasant to live in.
Beauty can also boost perseverance. When searching for information on a website, perseverance – the amount of time users keep searching for difficult to find information – increases when the website is independently rated as aesthetically pleasing.
Similarly, when dealing with an electronic device, people try for longer to make it work if they find it aesthetically pleasing.
Beauty also demands copies of itself. Historically, in art and design, thought-to-be beautiful landscapes, faces, or vases have been copied in different forms. The act of drawing, sculpting, writing about, composing about a beautiful object is to make a copy of it.
Don’t dis-invest from beauty
The subjectivity of beauty does not necessitate disinvestment from it. Beauty does mean something, even if it isn’t totally objective. Attempting to bring beauty into our everyday lives, no matter that we each have a unique perspective, as in the case of housing, would mean investing in the human experience for all.
So while beauty is to some extent subjective, artful design can play a crucial role in various aspects of our lives, from psychological well-being to social cohesion and even economic value. Industry giants such as Ikea and Apple have been reaping the benefits of applying this knowledge to their business model for decades.
Why build beautiful homes in the first place? Having the human experience in mind when building houses and neighbourhoods, remembering the immense impact that something well designed and decorated can have is a worthwhile investment in humanity.
If removing the term beautiful from housing policy helps build more homes, then that’s great. But, when it comes to actually building them – whether the term “beautiful” occurs in policy or not – it is certainly worth to consider investing in beauty.
Barcelona residents marched against tourists in July after similar protests in Venice earlier in 2024. Recently, residents of Santorini in Greece were in uproar after a Facebook post reportedly asked them to stay home and make room for the thousands of tourists expected to arrive during the peak holiday season.
These are symptoms of overtourism: a situation where visits exceed a destination’s capacity, making residents angry and tourists miserable. Local governments have proposed tourism levies or entry fees to make visits more expensive and thereby limit how many people show up. Some tourism researchers have encouraged people to holiday in rural areas or poorer countries instead, to give a boost to their economies.
However, overtourism exists in the developing world too. Here’s what it looks like.
Travel on a tourist-swamped island
Bali is a major tourist destination in the Indonesian archipelago that accounts for nearly half of international arrivals in the country. Air travel is the most reliable way to get there, although a big source of carbon emissions, which inflame a climate crisis that is expected to disproportionately harm poorer countries like Indonesia. Roughly 15 million visitors arrived in 2023 – close to their level in 2019, before the pandemic.
Bali’s tourism-dependent economy (providing 61% of regional GDP in 2019) was more or less frozen by COVID-19. Yet, for tourists who spent lockdown in cities, the pandemic also left Bali, and particularly the island’s rural parts, with a renewed lustre. Penglipuran, a traditional Balinese village in the central highlands, was attracting thousands of visitors every day in July.
Encouraging people to visit poorer areas can disadvantage residents, but in a different way to how people in Venice or Barcelona experience it. After all, roads and public transport in richer European cities are better maintained.
For all its problems, vehicle rental offers a roaring trade in Bali. Swuerfel/Shutterstock
In rural Bali, the hilly terrain, tropical weather and poorer public transport mean residents must rely on cars and motorbikes. The resulting noise and pollution degrades the rural experience. Converting these vehicles to run on electricity would not solve the problem entirely if most power in Bali remains fossil-sourced. Nor would it cut road congestion.
Tourists want to visit lots of places in rural Bali with a reliable source of transport. The limited options have prompted many to rent cars or motorbikes, but weak traffic enforcement has allowed misbehaviour: tourists driving without shirts or helmets – or even licenses. The regional government temporarily banned motorbike rentals for foreigners in March 2023.
Despite chaotic traffic on the island, residents have found work transporting tourists informally for decades. That’s why efforts to ease congestion and travel chaos, by designing public transport for tour groups or free shuttle bus services, have met with local protests and the ire of vehicle rental businesses.
To travel or not to travel
Unbridled development squanders the mutual benefits that tourism can have for residents and visitors. Likewise, neither residents nor tourists should be prohibited from travelling, but should instead travel responsibly.
A railway transport plan that promises to connect Bali’s airport with Seminyak and Nusa Dua, the most popular areas in urban Bali, could help ease road traffic around the city centre. Local vehicle rental businesses could continue to operate in rural areas, but restrict their riders to less busy roads.
Poor destinations should be cautious about depending on tourism in the long term. The Balinese government is exploring its options in other sectors at least, such as agriculture and the digital economy.
Poorer destinations such as Bali are less well equipped than richer countries to manage the socioeconomic and environmental costs of overtourism. And ultimately, a swollen tourism sector contains the seeds of its own demise: declining environmental quality, unhappy residents and eventually, fewer tourists.
Don’t have time to read about climate change as much as you’d like?
The multiverse, the idea of different universes that exist at the same time, has been a plot device on screen and in comic books for years. The success of the recently released Deadpool & Wolverine, which has already earned US$1 billion (£778,180,000) at the box office, and the excitement around Iron Man actor Robert Downey Jr’s imminent return to the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) – this time as villainous Doctor Doom – show the phenomenon is unlikely to go away anytime soon.
You could track it back to Sliding Doors (1998), which cut back and forth between two different realities, showing the ways a woman’s life diverged due to happenstance. Or you could go further still, with It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) which showed a different, darker, reality if James Stewart’s character, George, had died in childhood. Or even Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, where the Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come shows Scrooge an alternate, bleaker reality where he doesn’t change his ways.
On TV, an episode of The Twilight Zone first dealt with parallel worlds in 1963 – while, in a 1967 episode of Star Trek, Leonard Nimoy played an evil version of Spock from an alternate reality, signified mainly by his facial hair.
The moment Robert Downey Jr. was revealed as Doctor Doom.
As Marvel fans know, Downey Jr’s familiarity as Tony Stark/Iron Man means it’s overwhelmingly likely that his new role as Doctor Doom will mean the two worlds (or multiverses) colliding in some way. But we don’t know yet how the return of Downey Jr to the MCU will lead to him playing a villain.
Perhaps in this alternate universe, Tony Stark became evil because of different choices taken in his life. Or perhaps he will be playing an entirely different character – Doctor Doom masquerading as Iron Man to shock or beguile the characters that trust him.
Doom is traditionally a Fantastic Four villain, so may first appear in that forthcoming movie. As Mark Hibbert, the author of Data and Doctor Doom (2024) suggests, it wouldn’t be out of character for Doom to “swap bodies with the original Tony Stark” and “travel backwards in time to before he died fighting Thanos”.
Doom often surrounds himself with robot doppelgangers (as seen on stage at San Diego Comic-Com, when Downey’s casting was announced), so it’s not a complete surprise that this character would look like another character.
Multiverse narratives and dark storylines
Multiverses hold the potential for infinite narrative freedom. This means gaining access to all possibilities, and alternatives to the mistakes of history – but multiverse stories seldom seem to work out that way.
The trope is found in various genres and media, from British comics such as Bryan Talbot’s Luther Arkwright saga (1978-2022), to novels including Adrian Tchaikovsky’s The Doors to Eden (2020) and Michael Moorcock’s Eternal Champion series (1962-2012), which coined the term.
Stepping into the multiverse is generally discomfiting and unnerving at best, and downright dangerous and homicidal at worst, as in Sarah Pinsker’s 2017 novella And Then There Were (N-One).
Travelling the multiverse leads to colonisation in Stephen Baxter and Terry Pratchett’s The Long Earth series (2012). It enables corporate greed and eco-violence on an unprecedented scale in M.R. Carey’s Infinity Gate (2023). As Carey’s protagonist Essien Nkanika discovers, in the multiverse, strangeness and familiarity are twisted together, producing a feeling of sickening pressure and emotional dread.
Those who visit parallel worlds usually come back traumatised and changed – sometimes even becoming the monsters they once hunted, or tried to escape.
Often the alternate world is conveyed as an uncanny experience – Sigmund Freud’s term for the familiar made strange, an effect which “arouses dread and creeping horror”. How could it not? There is the danger of meeting another version of yourself – the ultimate doppelganger.
This notion signals the collapse of the idea of a single self, when the multiverse traveller finds themselves suffering a profound sense of otherness and displacement. These parallel worlds connect to ours in discomfiting ways, showing us our own world replaced and dislocated, where familiar landscapes hide unfamiliar threats. This theme is explored in Brian Crouch’s 2016 novel Dark Matter and the 2022 TV adaptation, where a parallel world doppelganger can steal your life.
It’s unsurprising that superheroes lend themselves so well to this scenario. These characters are already divided selves, with superhero identity frequently opposing the alter ego – think powerful Superman versus weak Clark Kent, brash Spiderman versus timid Peter Parker, obsessive and proactive Batman versus idle Bruce Wayne.
Chris Evans plays two Marvel characters in Deadpool and Wolverine.
Deadpool & Wolverine also comments on the phenomenon of the same actor playing different characters in the same multiverse. In the movie, Chris Evans plays two characters. This is first used for surprise, then humour, and finally to inflammatory effect.
This isn’t a new phenomenon. DC Comics got there first in 1961, when The Flash met a doppelganger from an alternative reality. On TV, Brandon Routh played both The Atom and Superman in a 2019 episode of Batwoman, that also featured multiple Clark Kents.
The cartoon series Rick and Morty (2013-present) often returns to the plot of the characters facing evil versions of themselves from other dimensions, while their domestic life features two versions of Morty’s mother now living in the same house.
The multiverse brings new twists and turns to comic book sagas on screen and in print, and allows reboots to be folded into the same narrative (as seen in Spider-Man: No Way Home, 2021) which helps a film studio, reuse, revive and advertise their back catalogue.
Since cinema-goers are currently voting with their feet for this narrative style, we should expect to see many more multiverses to come. But don’t be surprised when the consequences of visiting these parallel worlds turns increasingly dark.
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Just being near blue spaces (the sea, rivers and lakes) can make us feel more relaxed because water triggers our parasympathetic nervous system, helping our body rest and digest. This calming effect, which slows our heart rate and lowers blood pressure, explains why so many people find joy and solace in water-related activities.
But enjoying the water also has serious risks that can’t be ignored. In the UK, drowning is a leading cause of accidental deaths, surpassing even home fires and cycling accidents. Each year, around 400 people drown accidentally in the UK’s coastal and inland waters.
Notably, 40% of these incidents occur when people aren’t even planning to be in the water, such as when they’re caught off guard by a rising tide while walking along the coast or jumping in to rescue a dog. This is a glaring reminder that it isn’t just traditional water users who get into danger.
According to the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents, there are over 100,000 water rescues each year. These rescues are tragedies which leave lasting impact, with survivors (and their families) often suffering from severe injuries or post-traumatic stress disorder.
Incident report data tells us that globally, men are 80% more likely to drown than women, especially middle-aged men and teenage boys. This higher risk is attributed to men spending more time in the water and engaging in riskier behaviours like swimming alone, at night, drinking alcohol, and neglecting life jackets. Social pressures and a tendency to underestimate risks (by assuming the water looks safe when it isn’t) contribute to the higher drowning rates among men too.
My team of neuroscience and communication academics at Bournemouth University are working with the Royal National Lifeboat Institution to research how to improve water safety communications using virtual reality simulations to record brain activities when immersed in water.
By using emotional sensors in smart glasses, we’re discovering how emotional loads, like fear, are experienced during virtual reality scenarios, when falling into water unexpectedly from a boat or cliff. We’ll be demonstrating the technology at an exhibition at Bournemouth University during August 2024 to highlight the risks of being near water and to collect more data.
Virtual reality could be used to help people learn about water safety. Bournemouth University, CC BY-ND
So far, our research has highlighted the challenges and complexities of human emotions in making safer decisions in the water and the role that instinct plays in decision making in respect to gender. Men seem to exhibit a different perception of risk and a tendency towards impulsive decision-making, whereas women tend to be more precautionary and a greater inclination towards safety and risk avoidance.
Activities also affect the risk in the water. People tend to prepare for activities like paddleboarding and kayaking with the right gear and skills. This means they are usually safer than in-water play on inflatable toys such as lilos which are often used without preparation and are also easily swept out in a strong current.
Unexpected water entry, such as being caught by tides while walking along the shore, or taking a selfie at the edge of a clifftop is even more dangerous due to the element of surprise and lack of preparation when falling into the water. This unpreparedness significantly increases the risk of drowning as well as the fact that some people who unexpectedly fall into water are usually fully clothed and may also have a fear of water too.
Drowning fatalities often occur on inland waterways because these canals, streams, lochs and lakes are much colder than the sea, deceptively calm and hide numerous dangers. For instance, the water could be unexpectedly deep, there could be hidden currents or rubbish such as broken glass or an old bicycle. The water may be polluted and be a serious threat to health or it could just be difficult to get out of because of steep and slippery banks.
RNLI is promoting ‘float to live’ as its latest water safety campaign. RNLI 2024, CC BY-ND
Float to live
Instincts play a crucial role in how we respond to water. We could be relaxed and swimming one minute, then water conditions quickly change and a rip current can catch you off guard. Our instincts are often to swim hard against the rip current, but the best thing to do is swim parallel to the shore to escape the rip. People who aren’t experienced and educated around rip currents probably won’t know how to spot a rip current, let alone know how to get out of one safely.
On sudden entry into cold water, our bodies react automatically to heighten our alertness and adrenaline levels due to cold water shock. That makes us gasp, hold our breath and try to swim hard until the point of exhaustion. Overriding that instinct could save your life.
Swimming, sailing, even just building a sandcastle – the ocean benefits our physical and mental wellbeing. Curious about how a strong coastal connection helps drive marine conservation, scientists are diving in to investigate the power of blue health.
This article is part of a series, Vitamin Sea, exploring how the ocean can be enhanced by our interaction with it.
Whether you’re planning a refreshing dip, a leisurely stroll along the coastline or a run along a canal, it’s crucial to know how to stay safe. This knowledge can be the difference between a safe outing and a tragic accident. Research shows that following these five simple steps are highly effective. They are easy to remember and can be done by anyone, regardless of swimming ability or whether you are in freshwater or saltwater.
First, keep your head back with your ears submerged to keep your airways open. Resist the urge to panic, try to relax and breath normally. Gently move your hands paddling them as this will aid in keeping afloat. Don’t fret if your legs sink, everyone’s buoyancy is different. Finally, spread your arms and legs as this really helps maintain your stability in the water.
And if you spot someone in distress, don’t jump in to rescue them: instead, shout out the “float to live” steps and immediately call 999 to ask for the coastguard.
On the face of it, competitive distance running appears not to have changed much since the Olympic Games were revived in 1896. However, even the relative simplicity of racing from gun to tape has radically altered in recent years due to the rise of advanced running footwear known colloquially as “supershoes”.
A few years ago, the Nike Vaporfly shoe kicked off a storm of controversy in athletics. It became a focus for claims about whether it provided some athletes with an unfair advantage over those not equipped with the shoes.
In 2019, Kenyan distance runner Eliud Kipchoge wore prototype Vaporfly shoes when he became the first athlete to run the marathon distance in under two hours as part of the Ineos 1:59 challenge in Vienna. Ultimately, the shoes avoided a ban just in time for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.
Several years on, what more do we understand about these shoes and how they work? My recent paper attempts to review and answer ten key questions about supershoes as the Paris Olympics now loom on the horizon.
First, we need to understand what supershoes are and how they differ from
traditional running footwear. Initially, supershoes used a sole that saw a combination of material called a polyamide block elastomer (known by its tradename Pebax) coupled with the use of a carbon fibre plate.
At the height of the controversy, much was made of this plate, leading to claims that they were essentially springs propelling runners along. However, scientists now understand that, generally speaking, it’s the combination of all of the soles’ components working together harmoniously that’s behind the shoes’ success.
This broad effect has helped topple a raft of world records in the marathon and half-marathon distances. The shoes have improved times by roughly 1.4-2.8% or 0.6-2.2% in the men’s and women’s marathon events respectively over the last seven to eight years.
Today, other brands such as Adidas and Saucony have their own designs and
use different components in different ways. But the harmonious principle in the sole design is inherently the same.
Teeter-totter effect
Beyond the observation that all components are working in unison, a more detailed explanation of how the shoes work remains elusive because so many different influences can contribute to athletic performance. Among factors credited with the shoes’ enhanced performance are the thickness of the midsole and what’s been termed the “teeter-totter” effect, an upwards reaction force that passively enhances the propulsive stance of the runner. There’s also evidence against both of these ideas.
However, there is now strong evidence that supershoes reduce a runners’ oxygen consumption when compared to traditional running shoes. However, the scientific community isn’t in agreement as to how that is achieved.
Most studies focus on well-trained runners so it’s plausible that a recreational runner or those of a different age could see wildly different levels of performance enhancement than the elite runners we’ll see in Paris this summer. It’s also conceivable that the placebo effect could mean that simply knowing that you are wearing an advanced shoe makes you perform better in a race, regardless of whether the shoe helps or not.
As to the shoes’ acceptability, that is ultimately decided by the sport’s stakeholders and you, the spectator. Whether they are fair or not, new technology can either prompt people to use it or provide cost barriers that reduce peoples’ participation.
Furthermore, consumers can now purchase supershoe technology themselves. Whether they really want to or are happy to do so for something that may only be effective for a few hundred miles of running before the sole materials could begin to lose their potent mechanical properties remains equally contentious.
The use of supershoes has not been unchecked or challenged. In 2020, World Athletics, the international governing body for the sport, moved to limit this technology by implementing regulations that countered what it felt was contributing to the magnitude and frequency of records being broken.
In this case, the governing body’s rules centred on limiting the sole thickness, the number and complexity of any internal rigid structures (such as the carbon fibre plates) and the prevention of shoes that were one-offs and would therefore not be accessible for the consumer to buy.
Most leading running shoe brands have now released their own supershoes. The technology will undoubtedly evolve, so perpetual vigilance will be required by the World Athletics. Ultimately, supershoes have sometimes courted controversy, but they don’t seem to be going away and will remain an important part of distance running for the foreseeable future.
We weren’t the first to lay eyes on the engraving since it was carved into the hillside any number of centuries or millennia ago, not by a long shot. The Venezuelan archaeologist José Maria Cruxent even recorded it in his diaries in the 1940s – and there were certainly visitors before him.
The site of Cerro Pintado (Painted Hill), in the Venezuelan state of Amazonas, is a local landmark and a well-known fixture on the itinerary of those travelling on the Middle Orinoco River.
Yet viewing the gigantic snake, carved high up on the hillside, immediately ignited both our sense of wonder and our scientific curiosity. Why a snake? Why did its creators climb a towering granite hill to place it there, just so? What about all the other engravings orbiting it – what do they mean?
All these questions and more swirled around our little group as we stood, sticky and mosquito-bitten, in the savanna at the foot of the hill. Its singular status made it all the more intriguing.
While there are other examples of giant prehistoric rock art in other parts of the world, these appear to be the largest. While, as mentioned, some were already known to archaeologists, our team documented others, including over the border in Colombia.
The results reveal a high concentration of these monumental engravings in the region. The subjects of these symbolic works include snakes, humans and centipedes. The animals probably played an important role in the mythologies of the people who made them. The results have been published in the journal Antiquity.
New sites to survey
On our visit to Cerro Pintado in 2015, we supposed that the enormous 42-metre-long snake engraving (probably representing a boa or anaconda, native to the region) stood in splendid isolation. Prior scholars observed that many rock shelters in the surrounding savanna hosted prehistoric paintings, and we had already seen plenty of engravings near our dig sites.
Although often numerous or quite large, none of these sites shared the truly monumental scale of the Cerro Pintado engravings. Its apparent uniqueness led us to dutifully return with a drone to secure better images of the highly inaccessible panel. Already during the first stint in the field, however, we suspected that there was more to be uncovered about the rock art of the region.
Our guide, Juan Carlos García, a local educator and photographer, was well travelled around the area, and had plenty of insights to share. While surveying the islands that separate the calm middle course of the Orinoco River from its turbulent upper reaches, he pointed to the Colombian bank and forthrightly informed us: “Do you see that hill? Over there, behind it, is another snake, as big as Pintado.”
The possibility of another snake was beyond tantalising to us. Did it also have a set of accompanying motifs? Was it truly as big and as visible from far away? For lack of scientific permits in Colombia, or the time to search for a new site even if we had permits, these questions were left unanswered. After four campaigns in Venezuela, our fieldwork funding ended in 2017 and Cerro Pintado remained, as far as archaeology was concerned, a one-and-only location.
Luckily, the project’s principal investigator, José Oliver, at the UCL Institute of Archaeology, secured the means to return to survey the Colombian side in 2018. The results of careful systematic surveys were shared between the team in a flurry of excited text messages and emails, confirming that there was not just one more snake, but several. They were also comparable in size to Pintado and clearly related, yet each with their own twist.
The project’s doctoral candidate, Natalia Lozada Mendieta, from the Universidad de Los Andes, Colombia, now an assistant professor, also returned in 2021 and 2022 to find more snakes. Finally, the entire original team reunited in the field in 2023. Collectively, and with help from local guides, we amassed a database of 13 vast rock art sites with upwards of 150 individual engravings between them.
Striking motifs
To us, the snakes were the most striking motifs, although giant centipedes, humans dancing or playing instruments, and mysterious geometric shapes of unknown intent did not fail to impress. Although not unique, as previously thought, Cerro Pintado is now accompanied by a constellation of related sites – a genuine monumental rock art tradition.
Very large prehistoric petroglyphs, the scientific term for rock engravings, are not unknown. Whales and elk are depicted in the Stone Age art of Norway, and virtually life-size giraffes and camels are known from Niger and Saudi Arabia, respectively.
Highly visible or salient rock art such as this is often presumed to communicate ideas or concepts of importance. While their exact meaning is lost, their impact can be felt through their physicality, meaning their size and placement.
In our cases, we are fortunate to note repeating themes across the indigenous cosmologies of northern South America that allude to gigantic snakes as the creators and protectors of rivers – including the great “river” in the sky, the Milky Way. Yet they are also menacing, predatory and lethal.
This information enriches our understanding of the archaeological record. The snakes were intended to be seen from some distance, reflecting a shared understanding of the world and its inhabitants. What marks the Middle Orinoco out as a unique hotspot, we argue, is the sheer concentration of these enormous works of pre-Columbian art.
They appear to be the largest in the world, and speak to a contested, yet openly communicative cultural landscape during the pre-Columbian period that we are only just beginning to understand.
More importantly, as regional tourism expands year on year, the sites are
increasingly in need of protection, an activity in which indigenous people should have a leading voice. Undoubtedly, there are dozens more sites in this unique monumental tradition to encounter, record and, hopefully, preserve.
This Town, Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight’s latest drama for the BBC, brings to life a defining – if short-lived – era in the history of British youth culture and popular music. Set in the West Midlands against the backdrop of industrial decline and social unrest in the early 1980s, the drama unfolds to the syncopated sounds of 2-Tone.
A furious mix of punk and Jamaican ska, 2-Tone became a genuinely national phenomenon, bursting out of a bedsit in Coventry and into the charts and the popular consciousness.
We know a lot about the urban multiracial landscapes of its Midlands origins, out of which its twin ideals of racial unity and musical hybridity sprang. But we know much less about how it resonated with the experience of young people beyond the big towns and cities.
Such considerations are timely. It is now 45 years since the founding of 2-Tone Records by Jerry Dammers, organist and songwriter for ska’s most famous band The Specials, and mastermind of the whole movement.
To understand how they did so is important not only for historical reasons. A deeper sense of how anti-racist and multicultural ideas have shaped less culturally diverse regions may enrich contemporary debates over racism, particularly rural racism, which have become increasingly polarised.
My own ongoing oral history project with people from the Dorset region registers the powerful effect 2-Tone had in less racially mixed areas. Interviewees speak vividly of the energy, excitement and unruliness of attending gigs, as well as the sense of shared community, belonging and togetherness.
Nobody is special
As The Specials’ first single, Gangster, hit the airwaves in the summer of 1979 and the first 2-Tone tour opened in the autumn (with support from fellow labelmates The Selecter and Madness), a growing legion of youth clad in slim-fit mohair “tonic suits”, pork-pie hats, and black-and-white checkerboard greeted the bands as they made their way across the country. By the time all three bands appeared together on Top of the Pops that November, 2-Tone had swept the nation.
The Specials, in particular, built an ethos on the idea that “nobody is special”, refusing the division between band and audience (symbolically represented in the audience joining the band on the stage for the final numbers).
The inaugural tour covered the length and breadth of the country, reaching musical outposts like Aberdeen, Ayr, Blackburn, Bournemouth, Plymouth and Swindon. A seaside tour followed in 1980, winding its way through several English coastal towns, from Blackpool to Worthing.
One interviewee described how 2-Tone bands made a big deal of moving out into the remote areas and bringing the music to the people. That made them more accessible, setting them apart from other bands of the period.
For one fan from Weymouth, travelling up to that first Bournemouth gig was a powerful unifying experience:
You just didn’t realise that you were part of a bigger thing…When you get in there and everyone’s got the same attitude, the same outlook, the same sense of purpose and sense of place – it was really quite an amazing feeling.
Playing venues in far-flung places was part of the 2-Tone mission. For Dammers and others, the anti-racist message was aimed directly and primarily at white youth. These 2-Tone bands sought to reach audiences with a visual and aural display of unity. The symbolism had a profound impact. As another interviewee recalled:
Groups were either all white or all black…2-Tone was the first thing where you actually saw white and black musicians on stage together…That was a massive difference.
But not everyone suddenly became a staunch anti-racist. Some simply went for the music, the dancing and the good times. But for others the unity of politics, style and music cut across divisions among fractious youth cults and against far-right influences. Embracing the spirit of 2-Tone gave rural and small-town youth a way of expressing anti-racist politics in a more local idiom.
Race and racism today
Despite the contribution of 2-Tone – and before it, Rock against Racism – to anti-racist struggles, issues of racism have never gone away. The fight against far-right nationalism and police brutality continues, but increasingly the spotlight has shifted towards the more subtle and unseen ways in which racism is perpetuated. This ranges from everyday microaggressions to the lingering shadow of Britain’s imperial legacy, attracting a strong backlash in some quarters.
Recent evidence of rural racism, for example, has been met with swift dismissals. The former home secretary Suella Braverman was quick to deny others’ experience of racism, stating that the claim the countryside is racist is one of the most ridiculous examples of left-wing identity politics – just because there are more white people than non-white people somewhere does not make it racist.
Recalling the example of 2-Tone and The Specials may encourage a longing for a simpler time, when racists were easy to spot; things are more complicated today. Still, it can help us to understand how racial solidarities are forged, particularly in and through social and geographical differences. For my interviewees, 2-Tone’s ska revival was not a passing fad; it allowed them to reinterpret their own experience of class, race and locality.
If only for a moment, 2-Tone mania ruled Britain, in the words of the music critic Simon Reynolds. But as This Town shows, its rich and complex legacies can still be brought powerfully to life in the present.
BU Professor Zulfiqar A Khan has been invited to the 12th International Conference KOD 2024, Machine and Industrial Design in Mechanical Engineering to deliver a plenary talk to disseminate and discuss, the latest work on numerical simulation and modelling in interacting machines and systems conducted in NanoCorr, Energy and Modelling (NCEM) Research Group led by Professor Khan. This talk is also aimed to provide an overview of Professor Khan’s work in terms of Nanoengineering & Energy Systems (NES®).
The overall relation of interacting systems, durability and reliability will be discussed by Professor Khan in the following invited lecture, entitled “an overview of research: numerical modelling and simulation for predictive condition monitoring,” invited by Professor Aleksandar Marinković, Head of Machine Design Department, Faculty of Mechanical Engineering University of Belgrade, and Prof. DR Vladimir Popović, Dean of Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, University of Belgrade, the Republic of Serbia. Professor Popović has extended this invitation to include Professor Khan’s meetings with Faculty Management and Chairs of Laboratories for exploring to pursue mutual interests’ initiatives and common goals in Nanoengineering & Energy Systems (NES®).
Professor Khan will then deliver an invited lecture in Mathematical Institute of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, National Institute of the Republic of Serbia to discuss the latest developed mathematical models, Khan-Nazir I, Khan-Nazir II and Khan-Nazir III, these are BU’s ground breaking and globally leading contributions to knowledge in terms of developing impactful design solutions to aid safety, cost savings, energy efficiency and reliability applied in complex interacting and energy systems. These novel models are linked to recently awarded GB, US, PR China, Singapore, Hong Kong (notice of allowance) and EU/EPO (pending) patents in mechanistic, nanofluidics and energy systems developed at BU by NCEM team led by Professor Khan. This lecture is invited by DR Ivana Atanasovska, seminar leader and Stepa Paunović, secretary of the seminar. This lecture will be live streamed on Tuesday, 28 May 2024, you are invited to join.
This will be followed by invited meetings with key researchers and academics in the Institute of General and Physical Chemistry, Studentski try 12/V, Belgrade to explore collaborative initiatives in Clean Energy Systems.
If you are interested in any of the above topics, events and would like to know more then please get in touch through this link.
Most grant awarding bodies expect a well thought through communications and dissemination plan. As Research Culture Champion in the Faculty of Health & Social Sciences (FHSS) I thought it might be useful to outline some of the kind of dissemination processes we have employed in the past. Sometimes funding agencies’ requests for a communications and dissemination plan are framed in terms of knowledge transfer and engagement with end users. In a typical research communication plans, apart from excellent scientific publications, we outline our experience of publishing research finding in practitioners journals, online sites, and pressure groups. Depending on the research topic, population and country we may include the production of a short research summary in lay language [see picture Research Brief Migration & Health Jan 2019] and/or organising a dissemination meeting to national stakeholders. In addition we may highlight our experience in writing press releases and some of the subsequent media interest/coverage we have generated.
When writing articles for practitioners’ journals remember: First, do not to publish in practitioners’ journals before your scientific papers in academic journals, as some high-quality journals will not accept papers with findings that have been published/publicized elsewhere. Secondly, aim your paper at the target professional audience and stress the practical implications of your work. For example, BU Visiting Faculty Dr. Emma Pitchforth and I wrote an article from our NIHR-funded study on the role and place of community hospitals in the NHS in HRJ, a professional journal for health service managers [1], this had a very different slant than papers our team in the Centre for Midwifery & Women’s Health (CMWH) we has written for, for example, practical midwifery journals [2-8]. Of course, articles in practitioners’ journals don’t have to be published in English [9-11].
Apart from practitioners’ journals there is growing array of online sites interesting in publishing research findings to a wider audience. The first one that comes to mind is The Conversation; for example, some CMWH contributions on aspects of midwifery and maternity care [12-13], the latter article on Nepal was duplicated in several Indian online newspapers [14-16]. There are plenty of other online outlets available, such as research institutions’ websites [17-19], as well as websites of pressure groups. When writing press releases it is useful to put the actual press release online, for example one on NIHR-funded drowning prevention project in Bangladesh, or write a blog about the press event, for example one in Nepal, all this adds to your overall dissemination plan (and profile).
Way, S, Hundley, V., van Teijlingen, E, et al. (2016) Dr Know. Midwives19: 66-7.
Ireland, J., van Teijlingen, E. (2013) Normal birth: social-medical model, The Practising Midwife16(11): 17-20.
van Teijlingen E., Ireland, J.C. (2014) Community midwives on the go. Midwives 1: 54-55.
Hundley, V., Duff, E., Dewberry, J., Luce, A., van Teijlingen, E. (2014) Fear in childbirth: are the media responsible? MIDIRS Midwifery Digest24(4): 444-447.
van Teijlingen E., Pitchforth, E (2011) One-stop shop, Midwives (The official magazine of the Royal College of Midwives) issue 1: 30-32.
Pitchforth, E, van Teijlingen E, Ireland, J. (2007) Focusing the group, RCM MidwivesJournal 10(2): 78-80.
Eboh, W., Pitchforth, E., van Teijlingen E (2007) Lost words: research via translation, RCM MidwivesJournal 10(8): 374-377.
van Teijlingen, E., De Vries, R., Luce, A., Hundley, V. (2017) Meer bemoeien met media (In Dutch: more engagement with media). Tijdschrift voor Verloskundigen (in Dutch: J. for Midwives), 41 (6):28-29.
Grylka-Baeschlin, S., van Teijlingen, E., Gross, M.M. (2017) Postpartale Lebensqualität beurteilen (in German: Assessing postnatal well-being), ch (April): 20-23.
Nieuwenhuijze, M., van Teijlingen, E., Mackenzie-Bryers, H. (2019) In risiko’s denken is niet zonder risiko (In Dutch: Thinking in terms of risk, it not with its risk). Tijdschrift voor Verloskundigen (in Dutch: Journal for Midwives), 43 (4): 6-9.
van Teijlingen, E. (1992) ‘The Organisation of Maternity Care in the Netherlands’, The Association for Community-based Maternity Care Newsletter, No.5:2-4.
The Conversation is a news analysis and opinion website with content written by academics working with professional journalists. Since we first partnered with The Conversation, articles by BU authors have had over 10 million reads and been republished by news outlets across the world.
In this interactive session, you’ll find out more about communicating your research to the public, what The Conversation is looking for, and have the chance to discuss your research with a Conversation editor and pitch potential story ideas.
It is open to all BU researchers and PhD candidates who are interested in finding out more about working with The Conversation.
Ahead of the London Marathon this weekend, Dr Ben Powis co-authors this article for The Conversation which explains the variety of techniques used by visually impaired runners, as well as the societal barriers that stop visually impaired people from getting involved in the sport.
London Marathon: how visually impaired people run
GB parasport athlete Charlotte Ellis (left) finishing the 2019 London Marathon with her guide runner. Dave Smith/Shutterstock
In this weekend’s London Marathon, nearly 50,000 runners will hit the capital’s streets in one of the world’s most iconic races. For the visually impaired (VI) runners on the start line, their approach to this famous route will differ from their sighted counterparts. Just as there are misconceptions about blindness itself, many people are confused about how VI people run.
Some assume that all VI runners are blind with no usable vision, have superhuman compensatory skills and are passively guided around running routes by sighted guides. The reality is that, like all runners, VI runners have diverse experiences, preferences and needs.
In our research, we’ve conducted in-depth interviews with eight blind and partially sighted runners about their running practices. Some navigate routes independently, while others run with a guide – using a tether, holding their elbow or running in close proximity.
VI running can be a rich and creative experience, engaging all the senses. But, as one of our participants stated, this process is not innate: “People say, ‘Oh your smell becomes better, your hearing becomes better’. I don’t think it does, I just think you tune into it a little bit more… it just becomes more of a natural thing.”
As research on the runner-guide partnership shows, it can take practice and trying different strategies for runners to make sense of their surroundings and figure out what works for them.
Through touch, hearing, smell and usable vision, VI runners actively develop unique relationships with the routes they run. Our participants described how they identify landmarks, such as the sound of a river or the feel of changing terrain, to construct maps inside their heads. As one runner explains: “I could subconsciously tell you where every crack on the pavement is.”
Barriers to running
With VI people being one of the most inactive minority groups, running can be inclusive, empowering and provide a range of social and physical benefits.
But there are a number of societal barriers to VI people getting and staying involved in running. Ableist assumptions about who can and cannot run, are frequently internalised by VI people themselves.
One of our participants, who is blind from birth, explained: “I’d never even considered running before really… I just thought I couldn’t do it.” Having acquired sight loss in adulthood, another participant said: “I thought I’d never be able to run again, which was a massive blow when I first started losing my sight.”
To combat these assumptions and spread awareness about opportunities, runners like Kelly Barton and her guides share running content online. A recent video of her 250th parkrun, which she completed without being tethered to a guide, attracted national media coverage.
Our participants reported struggling to find guide runners, who can support VI people to run safely by guiding them along a route using verbal instructions, tethers or physical contact.
One VI runner who owns a guide dog contacted a local running event for a guide and was told they “haven’t found a guide yet, but we’ve got a dog sitter”. While there are local groups connecting VI runners and guides in some areas, such as VI Runners Bristol, this is not consistent across the UK.
For VI runners who prefer running indoors, the treadmills used in many gyms are inaccessible. The charity Thomas Pocklington Trust and UK Coaching are working to address this through the inclusive facilities toolkit.
How you can get involved
For many VI runners, including our participants, parkrun has become a popular place to get started. The event’s inclusive ethos and specific efforts to encourage VI runners have created a welcoming and accessible environment.
If you are in search of a guide, British Blind Sport and England Athletics operate a database to connect VI runners with guides licensed by England Athletics. And if you are a sighted runner thinking about becoming a guide, you can complete a sight loss awareness and guide running workshop to get listed on the database.
Prospective runners and guides can also connect informally through parkruns, running clubs, local VI organisations or running organisations like Achilles International.
Are you an academic, researcher or PhD candidate who would like to build a media profile and take your research to a global public audience by writing for The Conversation?
The Conversation is a news analysis and opinion website with content written by academics working with professional journalists. It is an open access, independent media charity funded by more than 80 UK and European universities.
In this interactive session we’ll take you through what The Conversation is – our origins and aims; what we do and why.
We’ll look at why you should communicate your research to the public and take you through The Conversation’s unique, collaborative editorial process.
We’ll give you tips on style, tone and structure (with examples), look at how to pitch (with examples) and look at different approaches and article types.
You will have the opportunity to discuss your research with a Conversation editor and pitch potential story ideas.
*Note the session takes place on Zoom and we expect you to turn your camera on.
Benefits of attending
Find out how to join a community of academic authors taking their expertise outside the institution
Understand what makes a good story and the types of articles your expertise could generate
Learn the skills of journalistic writing and how to make your writing accessible and engaging to a diverse general audience
Meet one of The Conversation’s editors and learn how we commission articles
To get the most out of your time with the editor, come prepared:
Read some articles on The Conversation to get a sense of what we publish
Think about the sort of pieces you might potentially write, what aspects of your research might interest people, and come armed with ideas.
There are a limited number of places for this session. If you sign up and then are no longer able to attend, please cancel your registration so that your place can be re-allocated to a colleague on the waiting list.
Total numbers have a direct relation to several factors including but not limited to overseas students, and both financial and planning challenges faced by international students. Various geographical regions for example South and Southeast Asia are conventionally more leaning towards traditional degrees for example engineering and medicine. Particular interest in these degrees is stemmed by primary and secondary education systems, national skill gaps and more widely societal impacts. Despite, a brief decline in the numbers of international students a pattern in terms of various disciplines varies according to available data. In order to attract and sustain international student numbers core engineering and medical/ medicine degrees will remain significant centripetal force.
HEIs are also facing a challenge in terms of financial sustainability as reported, the sector is struggling to recruit the higher-paying foreign students it relies on to subsidise lossmaking domestic places [FT 07 April 24]. A two-pronged approach would be needed to address these challenges. Firstly, repositioning in terms of facilities and resources to introduce, apply and integrate more state-of-the-art modelling and simulation techniques for practice, practical and experimental elements of teaching in engineering and technology degrees and initiating a phased transition from dependency on conventional hardware tools e.g. expensive machines to realise releasing economies of scale. Secondly, more robust, simpler and well understood parallels and transitioning pathways between HEIs and primary to higher secondary education are needed.
Keywords: APC, Open access, REF, Repositories, Journals, Outputs.
APC and subscription-based models have their specific yet intersecting merits. Here in the UK, several aspects of publications have been repositioned during the last REF2021 census period. Lord Stern review led to several key changes, especially in terms of reporting research. Although the costs of APCs are high, HEIs have ringfenced QR funding to support outputs in quartile two and above through an internal review process. Similarly, publishers have institutional partnerships where partial or full waivers are offered. Several reputable publishers have introduced incentives to waive or partially waive APCs, for example, by contributing to the review process, participating as editors, and recommending high-quality manuscripts in terms of originality, significance, and academic depth.
APC route, for example, Creative Commons CC BY, offers many benefits to researchers, academics, and especially early career researchers in terms of flexibility of literature use as compared to traditional publication processes, such as the complexity and costs associated with permission to use or reuse infographics, including authors’ own results and images where copyright transfer has occurred. On the other hand, APCs provide an opportunity for wider availability of research to be read, used, and applied within research contexts where funding for subscription-based models is not generous or sometimes limited. Making preprint peer-reviewed and accepted author version manuscripts available on institutional repositories is a better alternative to APCs.
Traditional and legacy practices could benefit from dialogue and consideration; publishers’ subscription models could be diversified for greater inclusivity by offering variations in subscription fees based on certain metrics such as a country’s GDP or RPI. Revenues generated from both subscription and APCs should be more transparent, with figures available to public and open to stakeholders feedback. Profits should be reinvested in discounted subscription fees for HEIs, funding research through RC UK initiatives and similar programmes, and supporting early and mid-career researchers.
Another aspect which is not usually discussed is that traditionally, journals editorial teams, especially editors and chief editors, serve in their roles for prolonged periods. Although unintended, this inadvertently limits opportunities for diversity, inclusion, and equal opportunities for a diverse community of researchers worldwide. New thinking is needed to change the structure of publishers’ journal editorial teams to meet twenty-first-century needs. Some initial measures could include: (i) open calls for expressions of interest in editorial team roles, including editors and chief editors, (ii) transparent recruitment based on person specifications, and (iii) a maximum two-year tenure in the role. Subscription fees and APC revenue, combined with alternative grants from research councils and charities, could be used to incentivise engagement with the publishing process, from editorial board participation to contributing to the review process.
A practical session covering tips and techniques for speaking with broadcast media (TV and radio) followed by the chance to put it into practice through mock interviews.
This session is open to all academic staff with an interest in engaging with the media. No previous experience is necessary.
By the end of the session, attendees will:
Have a better understanding of communicating their work with the media
Understand the difference between TV and radio interviews and what is required
Feel confident in undertaking media interviews and dealing with difficult questions
Facilitated by: Emma Matthews – Research Communications Adviser & Stephen Bates – Senior Press Officer
Wednesday 24 April, 2-4pm
Talbot Campus
Book your place here under ‘Impress the Press: How to talk to Journalists – 16/04/2024’ in the drop-down menu
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