As the Ukraine war approaches its four-and-a-half year milestone, the sustainability of the coalition of support for Kyiv has once again become a key question on the minds of Europeans.

YouGov data from February 2026 shows considerable variation among Europeans in support for maintaining the war effort. Support for a negotiated peace has overtaken that for holding out for Russian withdrawal in France, Germany and Spain. Ukraine has also become a key political issue in Italy ahead of elections in 2027.

Larger parties, such as Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy and the centre-left Democratic party, have maintained their support for Ukraine. But smaller parties both on the left and right, including the Five Star Movement and Lega Nord, are showing little appetite for continuing military aid.

How can we assess how much strain the coalition of western democracies supporting Ukraine is really under? After all, we have seemingly been here several times before. We believe the key is understanding the sources of “war fatigue” and the willingness and ability of parties to capitalise on it.

War fatigue

One the many unfair aspects of the war is the contrast between the autocratic Russian regime, which is able to mobilise societal resources rapidly and impose its will on its own citizens, and the coalition supporting Ukraine.

Maintaining this disparate coalition requires constant maintenance of the relationship with other coalition partners and with domestic electorates to ensure continued support is forthcoming and to prevent the defection of partners.

However, citizen support is not something that can be taken for granted. As conflicts become drawn out, this support can increasingly come to waver.

War fatigue isn’t just a question of the longevity of a conflict. It is also a question of the costs imposed upon citizens and their cumulative impact over time. Fighting wars implies trade-offs between public and military spending, which citizens may not be willing to tolerate over the long term.

Vladimir Putin’s weaponisation of the energy supply to Europe, by periodically tightening the flow of natural gas, reflects a keen awareness on the Russian president’s part of this dynamic. His bet seems to be that Russian resolve can outlast that of the Europeans.

War fatigue also depends on the perception of success. Citizens will be far more willing to support the cause if they think there is a high likelihood of victory. They will be less willing to back initiatives where there will be no return.

The first wobbles in the coalition, in late 2023, reflected these dynamics. They coincided with rising energy prices across Europe and the faltering of Ukraine’s strategic position as promised funds were tied up in the US Senate.

Translating citizens’ dissent into a direct challenge to the war effort depends on the supply of political opposition. And whether owing to deals and agreements between political leaders, ideological predisposition or a sense of responsibility, almost all mainstream parties in Europe continue to support the coalition.

Data from a December 2025 EU-VALUES survey, which asked experts to rate observations of fatigue for Ukraine support on a scale from 1 (not at all) to 5 (very frequently), highlights a significant divide between perceptions of elite and public fatigue across Europe.

Citizens seem to have become sceptical of supporting Ukraine. But this view does not appear to be shared by European political elites, who largely continue to support the policy.

Perceived war fatigue in EU member states

So far, political opposition to supporting Ukraine has tended to come from radical parties on the far right and far left, such as the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) in Germany and Podemos in Spain.

But the overall picture among radical right parties on supporting Ukraine is mixed. There is similar equivocation among radical left parties. Parties such as Die Linke on the left in Germany and the National Rally on the right in France are deeply divided on the issue.

The efficacy of the challenge these parties present is also unclear. On the one hand, spoilers such as former Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán and current Slovakian prime minister Robert Fico have proved highly disruptive. They have been accused of holding EU sanctions packages on Russia hostage.

On the other hand, radical right parties have often remained out of government and where they have come close to power – as with Geert Wilders in the Netherlands – would-be coalition partners have extracted clear commitments not to pull support from Kyiv.

The election of Donald Trump as US president in November 2024 complicated this picture. Trump’s arrival and subsequent freezing of aid raised the costs of supporting Ukraine for European governments, made Ukrainian victory appear less likely and gave succour to the radical right.

But his attacks on European trade and security interests placed radical right parties in an awkward position and made a pro-Trump worldview more difficult to sell at home.

Shifting battlefield momentum

Recent evidence has suggested the battlefield momentum is shifting in Ukraine’s favour. Ukrainian strikes on the Russian energy grid and logistics centres, for example, have been well publicised.

In a meeting with Trump on July 28, Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, also seemingly convinced his US counterpart of his ability to win the war. The meeting took place shortly before the Senate voted to approve new sanctions on countries purchasing Russian oil.

Such momentum may help to quell dissent among citizens and galvanise western support insofar as it suggests a speedier end to the conflict on terms that would vindicate the actions of coalition members.

It is too early to tell how these events will play out. But any reversal of Kyiv’s fortunes bodes well for the ability of western and European leaders to keep their citizens on board with the task of defending Ukraine.

Benjamin Martill has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement no. 962533. He is affiliated with Chatham House and the Independent Commission on UK-EU Relations.

Adam Holesch is the project manager of the EU-VALUES network. The EU-VALUES expert survey, the results of which are presented in this article, was conducted within the framework of the EU Research and Education Network on Foreign Policy Issues: Values and Democracy (EU-VALUES), co-funded by the European Union under Grant Agreement No. 101127854.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/08/14/european-war-fatigue-may-be-growing-but-ukraines-recent-momentum-could-buy-time/

Across Europe, running a home – whether you need to keep it cool in the summer or heat it during winter – usually means burning imported gas. That wastes energy and creates carbon emissions, contributing to climate change. The European Commission’s new electrification action plan aims to end that era, mapping out a drive to double electricity’s energy share from 23% to 46% by 2040.

“I have always looked forward to the day that our energy system is based on electrons, not molecules,” said Vangelis Tzimas, who heads an energy policy unit at the European Commission’s science service, in response to this news.

Electrons, not molecules. It sounds abstract, but for homes, it is the difference between a house that burns something and a house that doesn’t.

Buildings consume 40% of all the energy Europe uses, most of it for heating with gas boilers, so this is where this shift will succeed or fail. I measure energy performance as part of my work, through sensors in Irish social housing, and the data points to four reasons why electricity is superior to gas.

The most persuasive one is efficiency. A gas boiler burns fuel and gives you, at best, one unit of heat per unit of gas. A heat pump delivers three to four units of heat per unit of electricity.

A heat pump, essentially a fridge running in reverse, gathers warmth from the outside air and keeps working even in freezing weather. Run it the other way and it cools your home too, which matters more with every record summer.

So why doesn’t every house already have a heat pump? It’s expensive to buy one, and even to run it. Before government grants, installing a heat pump costs around £10,000 in the UK and close to €30,000 (£26,000) in Germany. In contrast, a new gas boiler will only set you back roughly £2,500.

This massive price gap isn’t about the technology. Steep labour costs, high VAT, and a shortage of installers mean the same machine costs twice as much across borders.

These upfront costs are being tackled through subsidies and low-interest loans. In the UK, the government introduced a clean heat market mechanism to try and increase competition and drive down prices of heat pumps by 2027. To fund the transition in the EU, the European Investment Bank is spending €75 billion on grids, storage and heat pump manufacturing.

Upfront bills form half a heat pump’s lifetime expense, but running costs are the real hurdle. Because EU electricity costs three times more than gas, a heat pump’s impressive efficiency is entirely cancelled out at the meter. In the UK, where electricity is 4.3 times more expensive, this greener technology actually costs more to run.

This difference between electricity and gas prices, called the “spark gap”, is partly because taxes are significantly higher for electricity than gas. The European Commission is finally imposing a legal obligation on EU governments to tackle this pricing accident. They are being asked to shrink the gap by 2030 to no more than 2.5 for households, by reducing the tax for electricity; allowing VAT cuts on heat pumps, electric cars and home batteries; and phasing out fossil fuel subsidies after 2030.

Britain has started to close the price gap too. The 2025 autumn budget shifted most green levies off electricity bills and into general taxation, which trimmed the ratio to around 4.3 from 4.7 in April 2026.

These strategies are the right way forward, because countries where the gap is smallest already sell around three times as many heat pumps as those where it is widest.

If the spark gap falls to 2.5, to match a 90% efficient gas boiler, a heat pump needs to generate 2.25kW of heat per kilowatt of power. UK data shows every unit tested beat that benchmark, meaning owners should save money in the long run. Once the spark gap is reduced, the heat pump will become a cheaper way to cool or warm a house.

The European Commission electrification plan puts emphasis on heat pump installations that allow heat-recovery ventilation. These can capture up to 90% of the warmth from outgoing stale air and transfer it to incoming fresh air — meaning heat you already paid for gets reused. The aim is to nearly double heat pump installations that allow heat recovery from 2.4 million a year in 2025 to 4 million by 2030.

The second reason why electricity wins is your home’s carbon footprint. Every time you burn gas, CO₂ exits the flue. An electric home burns nothing. Its emissions depend on how the electricity was made, which is improving every year: around 70% of Europe’s electricity already comes from home-grown clean sources.

That phrase “home-grown” is the third reason, and the one that finally motivated European politicians to commit to change. Molecules must come from somewhere, and for Europe that mostly means abroad; anyone who watched their bills after the 2022-23 gas crisis knows how much that dependence costs.

Electrons can be made at home, from our own wind, sun and water. The European Commission estimates that its plan could cut gas imports by more than 70% and shave up to €260 billion a year off Europe’s fossil fuel import bill by 2040. After which, the prices can be set by the EU’s own investment decisions, not by wars on the other side of the world.

Everything must work together

The final reason is the benefits from energy-efficient homes. It is now four years that I have been monitoring Irish social housing – a mix of new apartments and older dwellings that had a deep energy retrofit (a comprehensive, whole-building upgrade to radically improve energy efficiency).

My sensors record their electricity consumption, indoor temperature, humidity and air quality around the clock. The data shows that homes are more energy-efficient when different measures complement each other: insulation and the fixing of drafty air leaks, correctly sized heat pumps that suit the space, ventilation that keeps air fresh without throwing warmth away.

But even the best kit only goes so far. How we set the thermostat, use appliances, and time our energy use during lower cost off-peak windows matters just as much as hardware efficiency. Occupant behaviour alone can cause heating energy use to vary threefold. This means that our daily choices can result in savings that almost match major technical upgrades (albeit delaying dinner and bath times isn’t a reality for families with young children).

Smart meters make those choices visible. Home energy monitoring apps make it easier for households to shift power-hungry chores to off-peak hours. Add rooftop solar into the mix, and buildings transform from passive energy consumers into localised mini power stations. According to European Commission scientists, rooftop solar on Europe’s 271 million buildings could meet 40% of the continent’s long-term electricity needs.

That is the quiet promise inside “electrons, not molecules”. It’s a system that’s immune to gas shocks that can continue cooling you through heatwaves. Europe has simply decided to make it everyone’s normal.

Lala Rukh receives funding from Research Ireland for the ERBE Centre for Doctoral Training under grant agreement No 18/EPSRC-CDT/3586. She is affiliated with the University of Galway, Ireland and MaREI, the Research Ireland Centre for Energy, Climate and Marine research and innovation.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/08/14/four-reasons-why-fully-electric-homes-can-be-affordable-and-efficient/

Embroidery is a way to embellish textiles by stitching patterns and images onto them with thread. It has a long history with the earliest examples dating to ancient times. Since then, it has developed into myriad forms around the world.

Many embroidery techniques are steeped in history. In early medieval Europe, embroidery was predominantly a female occupation and was considered a feminine virtue. However, in the same period in the ancient Greek city of Byzantium there were both male and female embroiderers.

From the 12th century, guilds known as livery companies in cities such as London began to control who could train and work as an embroiderer within city limits. As a result, men began to play a more dominant role in this industry, which served the wealthy and the church. As embroidery evolved into a domestic craft during the 17th and 18th centuries, it again became a female art even though men continued to stitch.

Hobbies can bring joy, wellbeing and focus to our busy lives, but so many of us don’t have one. If you’re ready to replace scrolling with stitching, or hustle with horticulture, The Hobby Starter Kit (a new series from Quarter Life) will help you get going.

In other parts of the world the division between who embroiders varied. Across Africa, for example, men traditionally stitched and it is only in recent times that women joined them.

How to get started

Today there are many embroidery techniques, which means knowing where to start might seem a little confusing for a beginner. It’s worth trying different techniques, because you will probably find that you like and excel at some more than others.

Here are four techniques I think are good for beginners. They are traditional forms, but can be given modern twists, as many publications and online videos demonstrate.

1. Canvas work

Canvas work is stitched on a stiff-ish open weave fabric. There are many stitches, most of which are counted. This means you bring the thread to the front of the canvas, count a set number of holes and take the yarn to the back of the canvas in set sequences.

These steps create not only different embroidery stitches but also textures. You can use a variety of threads including stranded cottons, wool and metallic yarns. Canvas work can be created in everything from monochromes through to bright colour ranges and can be flat or 3D.

You can also embroider traditional patterns using this technique such as Berlin wool work, which uses coloured wool threads sewn onto an open-weave canvas in tent stitch. The pattern can be copied from a colour image printed on to a paper grid or it can be drawn out onto the canvas, and you simply fill in the shapes.

2. Crewel work

Crewel work was originally popular in the 17th century. Its popularity has waxed and waned since then.

It was originally used for bedding and soft furnishings and now tends to decorate cushions, bags or be made as a picture. It is free work, which means the stitches are not counted.

A variety of stitches are used, creating patterns and fillings within motifs. They include satin stitch, stem stitch and laid and couched, the first form of which is found on the Bayeux tapestry. Crewel work is worked on a linen twill fabric in wool threads called crewel yarn.

3. Blackwork

Blackwork is first cited in Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Miller’s Tale (circa 1380s–1390s). However, it became popular in England when Catherine of Aragon brought it with her from Spain, when she married Henry VIII.

It is a counted technique worked on an evenweave linen in black thread. Blackwork patterns range from simple to complex. Traditionally they were worked in a uniform thickness of yarn but modern blackwork incorporates varying thicknesses of thread that are “blended” together within a stitch to create shading. As a result, very complex lifelike images can be created. Today blackwork is sometimes worked in coloured threads as well.

4. Silk shading

Silk shading, sometimes called “painting with a needle”, originated in China between the 10th and 13th centuries.

Traditionally, silk threads were stitched on silk fabric but today stranded cottons are also used. Only two stitches are used, stem stitch to set the design’s outline, which is then sewn over with long and short stitch. The long and short stitch creates staggered rows of colour so when new stitches are worked into them, a blended or shaded effect is created, forming a life-like image. If you like making realistic artwork, this could be the embroidery technique for you.

There are numerous other embroidery techniques besides these. Whitework, for instance, uses white thread on white fabric and can incorporate areas where the threads of the ground fabric are pulled or cut away. Coronation gold is a complicated form of three dimensional gold embroidery used primarily to embellish the coronation robes of monarchs. Among the many techniques from other parts of the world is Aari, which originates from India, and is formed of rows of continuous chain stitch created with a special hooked needle.

But if you start with the four techniques I’ve suggested, there are various ways you can get started with any of these techniques. If you prefer to learn from a book, the RSN essential stitch guides by Search Press are a good place to start. These have been written by specialists in each embroidery technique and include guides to materials and equipment and step-by-step instructions.

If you prefer a video, you can search for specific starter guides on YouTube; just make sure the tutor has been trained and is qualified. You can also buy kits. If you decide to use a kit, please make sure you purchase one from a legitimate designer or retailer. There is a growing number of counterfeiters selling cheap kits with stolen ideas and poor-quality materials and instructions, who should be avoided.

You can also attend beginners’ classes. Some are taught by independent tutors while others are run by institutions, and they often have face-to-face and online courses. An internet search should bring up options in your local area.

Whichever way you decide to start your embroidery adventure, I wish you many happy hours of stitching.

Alexandra Makin 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.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/08/14/a-brief-history-of-embroidery-and-how-to-get-started-yourself/

For some, abstaining from alcohol can subsequently increase compulsive drinking. Our research team found that, in abstaining mice, this urge to drink is preceded by changes in the activity of a particular brain region, pointing to potential new screening opportunities to identify and help those most vulnerable to relapse.

Although alcohol abstinence is associated with improved health outcomes, addiction researchers have theorized that brain changes that occur during abstinence may increase a person’s risk of relapse.

To explore this theory, we studied how mice behaved after giving them long-term voluntary access to alcohol followed by a forced abstinence period. We found that a subset of the mice developed aversion-resistant alcohol intake – that is, they now drank alcohol despite the quinine we added to make it increasingly bitter. Moreover, compared to those who did not experience forced abstinence, these mice drank even larger quantities of the very bitter alcohol. These results suggest there are potential bodily challenges associated with abstinence that contribute to relapses in alcohol use disorder.

Next, we monitored the activity of a particular collection of cells in a portion of the brain known as the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis, or BNST. Researchers have previously found this small structure to be heavily implicated in alcohol use disorder symptoms such as anxiety and depression.

We found that allowing abstinent mice to reenter the setting where alcohol was previously available would lead them to attempt to drink even though the spout contained only water. These attempts were associated with activity in the BNST. Abstinent mice who had developed the taste for very bitter alcohol had more than double the activity in this brain area compared to mice that did not experience forced abstinence.

Importantly, we saw activity in the BNST even before we gave abstinent mice access to the bitter alcohol. This finding suggests it might be possible to identify people who are at risk of relapsing by screening for BNST activity when someone is given access to alcohol.

Why it matters

Alcohol misuse is one of the top public health challenges in the United States. Although this condition is linked to a wide variety of negative health effects, the public chronically underestimates its seriousness.

Deaths associated with alcohol use in 2024 were 4.5 times higher than deaths attributed to opioids. While harm reduction – a major component of opioid use disorder treatment – is being explored in alcohol use disorder, abstinence remains a mainstay of most approaches to this addiction.

Over 80% of Americans age 12 and older consume alcohol at some point in their lives, and around 10% go on to experience alcohol use disorder. This 10% amounts to almost 30 million people in need of treatment.

Unfortunately, clinicians are ill-equipped to predict who will need help. Although there are treatments approved by the Food and Drug Administration for alcohol use disorder, the number of people diagnosed with this condition remains very high. In fact, those numbers have effectively doubled in the U.S. since 1999.

Developing better strategies for identifying those at risk of developing alcohol use disorder and helping them navigate treatment strategies may improve treatment.

What still isn’t known

It’s not clear the exact role that the BNST area of the brain plays in behavior related to alcohol use disorder. It’s also not clear what drives the increase in activity, or which specific populations of brain cells within the BNST encode this activity. Obtaining these answers could lead to new treatment targets.

What’s next

New tools in neuroscience have allowed researchers to manipulate the activity of specific neurons in mice brains. Using these strategies, our team is working on understanding the role BNST plays in drinking alcohol despite the harmful consequences.

Our colleague Jennifer Blackford is also investigating BNST activity in the brains of people with alcohol use disorder who are in early abstinence. If her team observes similar findings in people, a next step would be to further test using the BNST as a screening method in clinical trials.

The Research Brief is a short take about interesting academic work.

Danny G. Winder receives funding from the National Institutes of Health.

Marie Doyle receives funding from the National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/08/14/quitting-alcohol-changes-the-brain-and-can-increase-the-risk-of-compulsive-drinking-new-research-in-mice/

You may have heard the phrase “we are made of star-stuff.” This statement by the astronomer Carl Sagan refers to the fact that elements heavier than hydrogen and helium were forged in the centers of the first stars. But how does this star-stuff evolve into the chemistry of rocks, plants and people?

As an astrochemist and radio astronomer, I study the places in the universe where stars are born as interstellar laboratories. I’m interested in how simple ingredients come together to form bigger and bigger molecules, including those that are building blocks of life. One way I do this is by mapping molecules in space and finding patterns between how abundant they are and the conditions around them.

Astronomers have mapped the distribution of molecules in interstellar space for several decades. From these maps, astronomers typically describe molecules’ abundances, temperatures and how fast they’re moving in each region.

Technology and techniques have improved over time, and now scientists are able to map these metrics at even more precise scales. My research team and I recently compared the findings from these newer methods against previous maps to make sure the earlier maps are consistent with our new maps.

A lab you can’t visit

Stars form in molecular clouds: clumps of gas and dust that act as cosmic nurseries. These nurseries start out at extremely cold temperatures of about minus 442 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 263 degrees Celsius). The material in them is also really spread out, with densities of about 100 molecules per cubic centimeter. By comparison, the air you are breathing right now has about 1019 — or 10 quintillion — molecules per cubic centimeter.

As infant stars form, temperatures rise to between minus 279 F and minus 100 F (between minus 173 C and minus 73 C), and the density increases to 10 million molecules or more per cubic centimeter.

In those conditions, the most fundamental chemical reactions in the universe take place. Unfortunately, these are interstellar laboratories too far away for scientists to visit.

I study the chemistry of high-mass, star-forming regions – nebulae that will give birth to stars much larger than the Sun. Nebulae are the visible clouds of dust and gas that star in many pretty pictures of space, but I am interested in the invisible aspects of nebulae: the molecules they produce as stars form.

The closest such region – and my interstellar laboratory of choice – is the Orion Kleinmann-Low nebula, or Orion KL. Orion KL is a smaller part of the Great Orion Nebula, which can be seen, even without a telescope, as a reddish blob below the belt of the Orion constellation.

Even though it is the closest high-mass, star-forming region to Earth, Orion KL is still about 1,300 light-years from the solar system. Unless I could hitch a ride on Star Trek’s USS Enterprise and travel to Orion KL at Warp 9 – or 729 times the speed of light – in which case it would take me about two years to get there, there is no way I could visit the nebula myself and collect samples to study the chemistry.

Even if I could travel at warp speed, I couldn’t watch what happens to Orion KL’s chemistry in real time. Stars – and the molecules that come with them – form over hundreds of thousands or even millions of years.

Instead, I observe Orion KL’s chemistry from Earth with radio telescopes.

Using radio telescopes

Astronomers can use radio telescopes to match the distribution of molecules to astrophysical characteristics such as temperature and density. This process provides a snapshot of the conditions during a specific time in the universe’s history and allows astrochemists to study the chemical processes that take place in the far reaches of the universe.

Molecular clouds emit radio waves, which allow astronomers to observe the signatures of the cold chemistry of interstellar space. Radio waves have wavelengths much longer than what human eyes can see. Fortunately, radio telescopes, many of which look like giant satellite dishes, are equipped to capture radio light so that astronomers can observe interstellar laboratories.

The photons, or light particles, that a molecule releases as it rotates and tumbles in space have frequencies unique to that molecule. In that way, a collection of radio signals at different frequencies – called a spectrum – serves as a sort of molecule fingerprint. The relative sizes of the different signals depend on how much of that molecule is in the nebula as well as its temperature. This means that molecules’ radio signals can be compared to calculate those quantities.

When mapping molecular clouds, bigger radio telescopes yield higher spatial resolution. Single-dish telescopes are as large as 1,640 feet (500 meters) across. While impressive, single-dish telescope observations of Orion KL can see structures down to about 2,600 astronomical units across, at best. An astronomical unit, or 1 au, is the average distance from the center of Earth to the center of the Sun. When trying to tease out chemical patterns on, say, solar system scales of about 200 au across, scientists need much bigger telescopes.

Radio interferometers are arrays of individual dishes that work together as a team, like one large telescope with lots of holes in it. This type of array allows astronomers to capture even smaller-scale phenomena that are invisible to a single-dish telescope. The radio interferometer I use is the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, or ALMA, located at an altitude of about 16,000 feet (4,877 meters) in northern Chile.

ALMA is made up of 66 antennas, 50 of which can be moved across the desert to make a telescope as wide as 10 miles (16 kilometers) across. In its most extended configuration, ALMA could zoom into structures only a few au across in Orion KL.

I am interested in Orion KL’s chemistry on fairly small scales of less than 300 au. At the frequencies where I can see my target molecules, ALMA needs to be in a configuration only about 1.6 miles (2.5 kilometers) across.

Mapping interstellar molecules

In my work, I map the abundance and temperature of different molecules to learn about phenomena astronomers can’t observe directly. I’ve used data from radio telescopes to suggest whether different parts of Orion KL are heated internally, as by a young, still-forming star, or externally, as by shock waves emanating from more evolved stars. I did this by using molecules as a sort of remote thermometer.

In other work, I’ve mapped different types of methanol – a molecule critical to interstellar chemical evolution – to investigate why some parts of the nebula have more of a certain type of methanol than what I expected based on their temperature. The methanol anomaly suggested that there could be a hidden baby star somewhere in the nebula, shrouded from view.

Quality assurance

A team of undergraduates and I revisited the methanol study and attempted to replicate past results using a new dataset from ALMA observations. I wanted to make sure that maps of methanol in Orion KL were consistent, even when generated from different datasets.

We were excited to see that the new maps agreed with the previously published maps. There were slight differences in the maps due to improvements in the code since the earlier works, but the conclusions remained the same. Because of this study, we are more confident in the mapping method as we continue investigating the composition and chemical processes in these regions.

While replication studies like this one may not seem quite as exciting as studies that yield groundbreaking new results, they’re an important part of the scientific process. As technologies such as radio telescopes improve, astrochemists will be able to make new discoveries, double-check existing observations and study these faraway regions in more detail than ever before.

Olivia Harper Wilkins receives funding from NASA and the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO).

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/08/14/radio-telescopes-help-scientists-map-molecules-in-space-and-uncover-where-and-how-stars-form/

Five years on from seizing power in Kabul on August 15 2021 and consolidating its hold through the whole of Afghanistan, the Taliban claims to have ended the country’s decades-long war and achieved security.

International troops have withdrawn and the former Islamic Republic of Afghanistan has collapsed. Daily security incidents, such as suicide attacks and roadside bombs that were mostly carried out by the Taliban in their two-decades-long insurgency, have since decreased. Conflict indicators such as those gathered by the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP) – a widely used metric for assessing whether a country is at war based on conflict-related civilian casualties – suggest that Afghanistan has been at peace since 2022.

Officials of the Islamic Emirate (IE) of Afghanistan, the name chosen by the Taliban for the cuntry’s government, regularly refer to improvements in security conditions as part of their image projection. A June 2025 statement on the webpage of the Arg – the presidential palace – by IE spokesperson, Zabihullah Mujahid, rejected a UN report on ongoing security risks from Afghanistan and claimed that the country is at peace for the first time in decades.

But it is difficult to verify the security conditions under the IE’s rule under the regime’s tight control on information. Legitimate doubts can also be raised about the regime’s interpretation of security.

War-related casualties have indeed dropped. But the generalised intimidation and fear that afflicts Afghanistan seriously undermines the IE claims regarding security achievements.

The severe repression particularly affects the mental and physical security of Afghan women and girls, who make up more than half of the population. Around 2.2 million girls are currently excluded from secondary school. Women have also been progressively pushed out of public life.

The IE has issued more than 100 decrees that violate the fundamental rights of women and girls. The UN has assessed that a state of gender apartheid now exists.

Based on a report by the UN’s rapporteur on human rights in Afghanistan, Richard Bennet, successive decrees have intensified and expanded discrimination against women and girls. The report highlights the wide-ranging restrictions on civic space and violations against ethnic and religious groups. It also reports an alarming increase of corporal punishment under the IE’s rule.

In one of its first acts after seizing power in August 2021, the IE reestablished the Ministry of the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice. The ministry was notorious for its violent and arbitrary methods in prosecuting what it considered un-Islamic behaviour during the Taliban regime of the mid-1990s. It has issued a series of draconian laws which have re-established a climate of fear among Afghans in recent years, according to the UN.

Independent reports have also documented systematic persecution of former government officials, despite the regime’s granting of a general amnesty.

Meanwhile, recent border clashes between the IE and neighbouring Pakistan belie the IE’s claim of having restored total security. The IE is accused by Pakistan of hosting members of the Pakistani extremist group Tehrek-I Taliban (TTP) that has increased its attacks in Pakistan in recent years.

Pakistani attacks on targets in Afghanistan, including aerial bombardments, have led to many casualties. A Pakistani attack on what it said was “military and terrorist infrastructure”, but what was actually a rehab centre in Kabul, killed 269 people.

In a sign that Iran might also be growing impatient with the IE, the Islamic Republic invited opposition figure, Ahmad Massoud, leader of the National Resistance Front of Afghanistan (NRF), to attend the funeral of Iran’s former supreme leader Ali Khamenei, who was killed in a US-Israeli bombardment on February 28.

While the NRF operates primarily as a small-scale armed opposition, Massoud remains a prominent political figure for some key Afghan constituencies. By hosting Massoud alongside an official Taliban delegation, Iran reiterated regional preferences for a negotiated political settlement involving a cross-section of Afghan interests rather than recognising the Taliban’s territorial dominance as a full and consolidated peace.

The relative security in today’s Afghanistan is due to the main perpetrator, the Taliban, ceasing its violence after gaining political power – hardly a notable success.

Coercive order

The regime’s officials have also highlighted achievements in other areas, such as revenue collection. Recent reporting by the World Bank shows a 6% year-on-year increase in revenue collection in 2026. However, the level of domestic revenues in Afghanistan remains generally low.

And even if it were possible to cast revenue collection in a positive light, the regime’s fiscal policy remains opaque because it does not report how it allocates the revenues it collects. Merely collecting money from ordinary people under coercion does not constitute proper governance.

Afghanistan’s people continue to rely on foreign aid to receive basic public services such as healthcare. Drastic reductions in assistance pose a serious challenge to efforts to address the intensifying humanitarian disaster affecting ordinary Afghans under the IE’s rule.

The stability of Afghanistan’s currency, the Afghani, has also been hailed by the regime as a success story. It was feared that the Afghani’s exchange rate would undergo sharp devaluation due to exposure to domestic and external shocks after the collapse of the former republic and the freezing of Afghanistan’s reserves. But this didn’t happen. Much of the currency’s stability can be attributed to the continued inflow of billions in aid, which has been instrumental in supporting the Afghani’s exchange rate.

Dependence on foreign aid has been the single most important economic story in Afghanistan over the past five years.

The Taliban’s record should therefore neither be dismissed nor accepted at face value. Its achievements show that it has become remarkably capable of imposing coercive order. Five years on, the harder question is what kind of order it has created, who gets to participate in it, and what Afghanistan is being asked to sacrifice to sustain it.

Kaweh Kerami receives funding from UKRI-ESRC (Grant Ref: UKRI2528) for his postdoctoral research hosted at Durham University. For full project details, visit: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=UKRI2528

Kambaiz Rafi 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.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/08/14/taliban-claims-five-years-of-peace-in-afghanistan-but-women-and-girls-face-oppression/

In Colorado, a full-time worker must earn US$36.44 an hour to afford a modest two-bedroom apartment without spending more than 30% of their income on rent, according to a recent report from the National Low Income Housing Coalition.

The state’s minimum wage is $15.16. Someone earning that would have to work 96 hours a week, more than two full-time jobs, to cover rent.

The report ranks Colorado as the 12th-least-affordable state in the country for renters.

In July 2026, Congress offered state and local leaders a new set of tools to expand housing supply when it passed the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, the most significant federal housing legislation in decades. It authorizes relatively little new spending. Instead it offers competitive grants and technical assistance to state and local governments that ease the local rules that slow housing construction and raise its cost, and it loosens federal restrictions on how existing housing dollars can be spent.

I direct the Center for Housing Research and Innovative Solutions at the University of Denver, where we study how Colorado and states across the Mountain West can expand housing supply and lower housing costs. Before that, I led the Office of Policy Development and Research at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, which evaluates proposed housing legislation, during the years when many of the ideas behind this new law were being developed and debated.

Housing costs are now central to Colorado politics. In a statewide poll in spring 2026, voters were more likely to call the cost of housing “a very big problem” than any other cost they were asked about. Whoever wins the governor’s race in November will inherit that problem along with a new federal law that could help address it. They will also take office just as federal agencies begin writing the rules that determine how much the law actually delivers and what states get out of it.

What the new law offers Colorado

Much of the federal act rewards changes that Colorado has already spent several years making. One provision authorizes competitive grants for local governments that revise parking mandates and minimum lot sizes or streamline permitting and environmental review for new construction. A 2024 Colorado state law eliminated parking requirements near transit, and Denver has since dropped them entirely.

Colorado also legalized accessory dwelling units statewide in 2024, letting homeowners build small backyard or garage apartments without needing a special hearing or approval. What that law could not supply was money. The federal act now lets Federal Housing Administration home improvement loans finance these units, pairing permission the state already granted with financing that has been hard to find.

The same pattern appears in construction rules. Colorado is one of four states that have legalized single-stair apartment buildings, a design that allows small apartment buildings to be served by one stairwell rather than the two that American building codes have long required, freeing up floor space and making it possible to build apartments on narrow lots. The new law directs federal officials to issue guidance for these buildings and authorizes grants to test their safety and cost.

Financing rules are shifting too. Banks are the main investors in the federal low-income housing tax credit, the largest subsidy for building affordable apartments. Developers sell those tax credits to banks in exchange for cash to build with. But federal regulators cap how much of a bank’s capital can go into such investments. The act raises that ceiling from 15% to 20%. Banks can now buy more credits, putting more equity into each deal, just as state housing subsidies shrink. The Colorado Housing and Finance Authority, the state agency that awards those credits to developers, lobbied Congress for the change.

What Colorado learned that other states can use

Colorado’s most useful contribution to other states may not be any single law but rather the machinery the state built to make those laws function.

Housing subsidy in the United States is fragmented, and assembling it consumes time and money that could otherwise go into buildings. The ROAD Act does not eliminate that fragmentation, but it trims some federal requirements that make stacking subsidies expensive, and it gives states a reason to make their own programs easier for developers to combine.

Colorado has been chipping away at this problem. In 2025 the state, its housing finance authority and the city of Denver launched Housing Hub Colorado, a single portal that aligns their application timelines and requirements. A shared application accepted by all three is expected later this year.

The portal came out of the Colorado Housing Consortium, a coalition launched in 2025 that brings together more than 120 people from state and local government, developers, lenders, philanthropies and nonprofits. Its members surveyed the field, ranked the barriers driving up construction costs, and picked three to work on first: a shared funding application, a revolving loan fund, and pooling demand for modular construction.

The lesson for other states is practical. A project stalls if any one of these fails: land it can be built on, permits that arrive on time, financing that closes, and a builder who can deliver at a price that works. Fixing one at a time leaves the others to block the project, which is why states that coordinate across agencies can act quickly when federal money and guidance arrive.

Colorado’s experience is also a caution. Passing a reform and implementing it are different things. In 2025, six of Colorado’s 105 home-rule cities, which under the state constitution control their own zoning, sued the state over the 2024 laws and over Gov. Jared Polis’ move to withhold state grant money from cities that don’t comply. Bills to limit how large a lot cities can require for a single home, and to allow lot splitting, died in the state Senate in 2026 after local governments objected to the state overriding their zoning decisions.

This is where research and measurement matter. Colorado has been at this since 2022, when voters passed Proposition 123, dedicating a share of state income tax revenue to affordable housing. Its reforms are now far enough along to evaluate, and knowing which produced housing and which produced only paperwork can inform other states considering similar measures. This knowledge will also help federal officials assemble the model zoning and land-use practices the law directs them to publish for states and cities to adopt voluntarily. The HUD research office I used to lead is responsible for developing these guidelines.

What the law will not do

The new federal law is designed to make new housing cheaper and faster to build, not to help people pay for homes that already exist. Focusing on new production has limits. It does little for households whose incomes are too low to pay for housing at any price. Three in four eligible low-income renter households nationally receive no federal rental assistance because the programs are underfunded.

Colorado is testing that limit. To close a $1.5 billion budget shortfall this year, lawmakers moved $130 million out of Proposition 123, with most of the cut falling on programs that build rental housing for low-income families. Regulatory reform costs little and can do a great deal, but it does not replace subsidies. The likely result is less subsidized housing built in Colorado over the next few years, at the same time the new federal law is making it easier to build housing generally.

Some of the state’s own barriers also remain. Colorado law gives condominium owners up to eight years after a building is finished to sue over construction defects, and the insurance costs that follow have long pushed developers toward building apartments instead. Condominiums are one of the few paths to entry-level homeownership. State lawmakers did act: A 2025 law offers builders more protection from lawsuits if they agree to third-party inspections and warranties. But homebuilders expect it to take six to eight years to affect premiums. The federal law does not touch the issue.

Why the next year matters

Federal agencies must still write regulations, conduct studies and launch programs as part of the new federal law, work that could take years at HUD, whose staff has been sharply reduced. Despite that, analysts at the Pew Charitable Trusts argue that jurisdictions that update their zoning, building codes and permitting policies now will be best positioned to win the new grant funding.

Colorado already knows how to do this work. What it has not yet demonstrated – and what the next governor and the state’s mayors now have a chance to show – is whether reform on paper becomes homes people can afford.

Read more of our stories about Colorado.

Solomon Greene is affiliated with the National Housing Law Project (Vice President of Board of Directors).

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/08/14/congress-just-passed-a-housing-law-that-rewards-states-for-reform-heres-why-colorado-has-a-head-start/

What does a child need to prepare themselves for kindergarten? I’m not talking about a new water bottle and a backpack, though certainly those come in handy.

I mean what it takes to try to make new friends, be brave, resilient, inventive and hopeful – no small tasks for anyone.

I am a children’s book writer and have been a professor of children’s literature and creative writing for more than 40 years. So you can guess that my answer to this question about school readiness involves books.

Reading lets children test out challenging, or frightening, situations in their imaginations.

It offers a path out of anxiety and into joy and adventure.

C. S. Lewis, author of the 1950 children’s book “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe,” reminds people that a reader “does not despise real woods because he has read of enchanted woods: the reading makes all real woods a little enchanted.”

Kindergarten is often an enchanted place, one which many children vividly remember all their lives. But it can seem scary to some children, simply because it is so new.

Here are a few important ideas that can fortify children who are entering this unknown land – as told through five engaging books that may help new students prepare for their journey ahead.

1. Hope and persistence pay off

Some of the happiest children are those who maintain a sense of hopefulness and possibility.

Children see these traits at play in Ruth Krauss’ 1945 classic picture book, “The Carrot Seed.” In it, an unnamed little boy plants, weeds, waters and then patiently watches over his carrot seed for a very, very long time. Doubters surround him.

His mother said,
‘I’m afraid it won’t come up.’

And his big brother says,
‘It won’t come up.’

What happens in the end will astonish and delight all readers – though it doesn’t faze the boy who always believed.

2. A new adventure is exciting

If you don’t think heading off to school for the first time is a wild adventure, you’re forgetting something.

The vivid 1963 children’s book “Where the Wild Things Are,” written by Maurice Sendak, brings readers into an unruly night where young Max puts on his wolf suit “and makes mischief of one kind and another” until his exhausted mother orders him to bed without his dinner.

Max imagines a world of tangled forests, a choppy sea and a “private boat for Max.” He sails off through “days and weeks and in and out of years” before he reaches a tropical island where the wild things live.

There, Max discovers his own power to command the wild things, and a “wild rumpus,” or a party with his new friends, begins. The book offers the tempting possibility that children have wonderful, exciting things in store for them in unknown experiences.

The wild things – fictional monsters Sendak has said were based on his own family members – roll their terrible eyes, gnash their teeth and show their terrible claws. But Max stands his ground and becomes king of them all. At the story’s end, Max makes it home just in time to discover that his dinner is still warm, and waiting for him in his room.

The book also offers comfort both for young children and parents who might be anxious about those first few morning drop-offs. At the end of the school day, our children do return, happy to be where someone loves them “best of all.”

3. School might be tough, but so are you

After raising a son and a daughter 14 years apart, I realized that every child is uniquely themselves. I raised one “wild thing” who play-acted and roared his way through obstacles. And one “Brave Irene,” who quietly and calmly got the job done.

Author and illustrator William Steig’s 1986 book brings us into the humble cottage of Irene and her seamstress mother, who has finally finished a hand-sewn ballgown for a duchess to wear at an upcoming ball. But Irene’s mom suddenly becomes sick and can’t deliver the dress herself.

Irene doesn’t let a raging snowstorm stop her from bringing the duchess her new gown.

She trudges sideways, backward, into deep snowdrifts and a howling wind that rips the box open.

The ball gown flounced out and went waltzing through the powdered air with tissue-paper attendants.

Brave Irene wrestles the dress and rides the box downhill like a sled in order to reach the duchess, who is anxiously waiting for her gown.

Irene can do the hard things and get through whatever tribulations get thrown her way. She also offers young readers a reminder that true bravery is trying your best to help people you love when they need it.

4. Try to listen; have empathy for others

All children deal with anger. A favorite toy breaks – or worse yet, gets broken by somebody else. And since those moments are inevitable, most people learn how to cope as they grow.

In Cori Doerrfeld’s 2018 children’s book “The Rabbit Listened,” a bird knocks down the building-block masterpiece that the young protagonist Taylor created.

Taylor is furious and sad.

Well-meaning friends stop by and try to help. A bear suggests that Taylor get angry and shout about the destroyed blocks. An ostrich recommends that Taylor hide and pretend nothing happened.

Finally, a rabbit comes along, sits and simply listens. It’s just what Taylor needs – to be heard. And children, no matter how small, are not too young to be good listeners and good friends.

5. You can’t go wrong with being yourself

Abby Hanlon’s “Dory Fantasmagory” series, the first book published in 2014, brings readers into the otherworldly imagination of young Dory.

Dory, who is often called Rascal by her family and friends, is a new-age “Ramona the Pest,” the classic chapter-book kindergarten heroine. The Dory series is about surviving the ups and downs of childhood, on steroids. Dory, who is the baby of her three-kid family, invents friends, villains and a bearded fairy godmother for company.

Hanlon’s whimsical illustrations are drawn as a brilliant child might create them. Many of Hanlon’s best jokes are visual, providing hilarious reading for lap-sitters and early readers.

In 2015’s “Dory Fantasmagory: The Real True Friend,” our heroine sets off for school, her backpack stuffed with Dad’s dirty laundry, “extra salami” and lemon juice. Her siblings block the door. Her big sister warns, “You. Won’t. Have. Any. Friends.”

“The most important thing for you to remember is, DON’T BE YOURSELF. Can you do that?”

Of course not. Nor should anyone ever have to.

Dory blends her very imaginary and very real worlds together, and emerges with the true friendships she deserves – both with children at school and with characters in her own mind. Young readers rooting for Dory, and laughing alongside her, will see that it’s OK to have full conversations with an imaginary witch named Mrs. Gobble Gracker, or bark like a dog, if the moment moves you. In fact, other children may well want to play along.

It’s sometimes fun to be imaginative, silly and uniquely yourself – and children can be true to themselves, including at school.

Liz Rosenberg does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/08/14/staying-hopeful-and-true-to-oneself-is-a-lesson-these-5-kids-books-offer-to-kindergartners-and-other-children/

“It’s all in your head.”

By the time many people with functional neurological disorder arrive in our clinic, they have heard these five words more times than they can count. They are told their brain scan was normal. Their electroencephalogram, a test that measures the brain’s electrical activity, is reassuring. “The good news is you don’t have epilepsy,” they’re told.

No test can explain why they can’t walk without falling, why their leg won’t stop trembling, or why they experience seizures that leave them exhausted for hours, even days. Some begin to wonder if they really are imagining it.

Over the past several years working as the program manager of one of the few multidisciplinary clinics for functional neurological disorder, I have watched the same story unfold again and again, from long diagnostic journeys and deep uncertainty to the profound relief of finally being believed. Dr. Laura Strom, one of the neurologists at the clinic, often reassures patients, “Well, it’s good that it’s all in your head – because that’s where your brain is.”

For decades, this gap between normal test results and very real, debilitating symptoms had left patients with few answers. Today, neuroscience offers a different explanation.

Understanding functional neurological disorder

Every movement you make, every sensation you feel and every emotion you experience begins with your brain. The question was never whether the brain was involved in creating the distressing physical symptoms of functional neurological disorder, but how.

Brain imaging studies suggest that the networks responsible for movement, attention, emotion, body awareness and sensory processing are constantly communicating with one another. Rather than acting independently, these networks work together to create thoughts, perceptions and actions.

How these brain networks communicate, and occasionally miscommunicate, is one of the central questions researchers are trying to answer about functional neurological disorder.

One of the leading theories helping explain this condition is known as predictive processing. Rather than simply reacting to your world, this theory suggests that the brain is constantly making predictions. It combines past experiences, information from your surroundings and signals from inside your body to create your everyday experiences.

Think about walking up a flight of stairs. You don’t consciously calculate where to place every foot or which muscles to contract. Your brain has already predicted the movement before you make it. Most of the time, these predictions are remarkably accurate.

As new information reaches the brain, the brain compares it with existing expectations or predictions – shaped by current and past experiences – along with signals from the body. If the new information it receives doesn’t match up, the brain then updates its predictions. Scientists call this mismatch prediction error. Researchers believe the disruption of this updating process may be one mechanism behind this neurological disorder.

Although there is no single cause of functional neurological disorder, factors such as injury, illness, pain or significant stress may make the brain more likely to rely on prior predictions instead of new information. If the brain places too much weight on prior expectations or certain bodily signals, it can make adjusting predictions in response to new information more difficult.

For example, after an injury has healed, the brain may continue predicting that a movement or activity is unsafe. This could contribute to persistent weakness or difficulty walking despite no ongoing harm to the body. The result is symptoms that are involuntary, physically real and profoundly disabling, even though there is no damage happening to the brain or nervous system.

History of functional neurological disorder

Our current understanding of functional neurological disorder as a disconnect between the brain and body marks a dramatic shift from how doctors and researchers have perceived the brain over the past century.

At different points in history, this condition has been called hysteria or conversion disorder. It was conceptualized as “psychogenic,” meaning symptoms were thought to originate primarily from psychological factors rather than biological changes in the brain. Each name reflected the best explanation medicine had at the time but did not represent what people were actually experiencing.

Many of the symptoms now recognized as part of the disorder were primarily attributed to the emotional and psychological state of women and subsequently dismissed. These explanations reflect broader gaps and biases in how doctors approached women’s health concerns throughout history, contributing to decades of stigma and misunderstanding around functional neurological disorder and other conditions.

As neuroscience advanced, researchers began recognizing that symptoms could arise from changes in brain function rather than visible changes to the brain, such as injury or abnormalities seen through brain imaging. Today’s models focus more on brain networks and the dynamic, interconnected relationship between the brain, body and environment.

How common is functional neurological disorder?

Functional neurological disorder is more common than many people may realize. A 2025 review estimated that up to 5 million Americans are living with the condition, and people across the lifespan experience symptoms. Researchers estimate that mortality rates among patients with the condition are more than twice that of the general population.

Yet despite its prevalence, access to specialized care remains limited. The condition exists in a treatment desert, likely due to a mismatch in supply and demand for specialists and limited funding. Many healthcare professionals receive little to no formal education about functional neurological disorder during training.

Delayed diagnosis is only one consequence of misunderstanding this condition. Patients are frequently told they are exaggerating, faking symptoms, seeking attention or that everything is “just anxiety.” These misconceptions not only perpetuate stigma around the condition, they also delay appropriate treatment and expose people to unnecessary medical interventions.

Patients often become the ball in a game of medical ping-pong. Psychiatry refers them to neurology because the symptoms appear neurological. Neurology refers them back to psychiatry because their scans are normal. In this game, the only loser is the patient.

People with functional neurological disorder experience disproportionately high use of healthcare services, cycling repeatedly through emergency departments and specialty clinics in search of answers and validation. Some receive medications they don’t need. Others undergo invasive procedures before receiving the correct diagnosis.

Trauma, anxiety, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder are more common among people with the disorder, but many develop it without any history of trauma. Biological, psychological and social factors all play a role, highlighting how there is no single pathway that leads to the condition.

Future research and treatment

The story of functional neurological disorder is beginning to turn a corner. New multidisciplinary clinics are opening, research is accelerating, and, with that, understanding of the disorder continues to grow.

The treatment landscape for the disorder is evolving to help the brain learn new, healthier patterns to process the world. Psychotherapy, physical therapy, occupational therapy and speech therapy each play a role in retraining disrupted brain networks. Recovery looks different for everyone, but growing evidence shows that improvement is possible.

The most important step forward, however, happens before any therapy begins: when a healthcare provider believes their patient.

Maybe the medical community has misunderstood what “It’s all in your head” means all along. While every movement, sensation, emotion and thought begins with the brain, that does not make these symptoms imagined. It makes them neurological.

For the millions of people living with the disorder, understanding may be the beginning of recovery rather than another dead end.

Mackenzi Moore is affiliated with the Functional Neurological Disorders Society and the American Epilepsy Society. She serves as the Program Manager for the Functional Neurological Disorders Program at the University of Colorado.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/08/14/one-of-the-most-common-brain-disorders-is-one-of-the-most-misunderstood-how-functional-neurological-disorder-is-both-all-in-your-head-and-beyond-it/

Competitors in the Tour de France Femmes raised eyebrows recently after it was alleged that some riders were stuffing their bras to go faster during the time trials. Race organisers started checking riders’ clothes more closely before the race.

While this story sounds like a joke, there is a real reason that competitors would do this – and it all comes down to winning.

Adding extra chest padding is a strategy known among triathletes and cyclists as chest fairing. By changing the shape of your chest, it alters how air flows around the body. In cycling, less air resistance means you go faster – so even a small change can help.

But the Tour de France scandal is not the only time something like this has happened this year.

Earlier this year, some Olympic ski jumpers were accused of using injections to make their penis look bigger before getting measured for their suits.

Bigger measurements meant they could wear bigger suits, which create more lift in the air. The story drew enough attention for anti-doping officials to investigate.

The details may sound bizarre, but the reason behind them is not. As someone who studies human body size, shape and composition, I find these stories fascinating. They remind us that sport depends on body shape as much as fitness and hard work.

It’s pretty well accepted that athletes from different sports have different body shapes. Rowers are often tall with long arms and legs. Gymnasts are usually small and compact. Sprinters are strong and muscular. Long-distance runners tend to be lean. None of this is random. Certain body shapes make certain movements easier.

However, sport keeps getting more competitive. Most professional competitors have access to the right training, good coaching, proper nutrition and recovery. So athletes increasingly have to chase marginal gains – tiny advantages that mean little alone but add up when combined.

Anything from a slightly better racing position, a lighter piece of equipment or different clothing could provide some marginal gain for competitors. On their own, these do not seem like much. But added together, they can make a big difference.

Take padded bras. In 2024, scientists ran a computer simulation study to test how chest fairing changes drag on a bike. The best shape (of the chest) they tested cut drag by 3.6%. During a 15-mile time trial, that could save about 19.5 seconds, which is certainly enough to win or lose a race.

Cycling’s rule-makers already ban this. The Union Cycliste Internationale, known as the UCI, has clear rules against it. One rule says clothes cannot be used to change a rider’s body shape. Another bans anything hidden under clothes to cut wind resistance.

Riders have tried to get around these rules for years. Some have hidden water bottles or radios down their jerseys to do the same thing.

Triathletes have tried it too. In 2023, tests reported by the publication Triathlete found that hiding a water bottle in a jersey cut drag by 5-7%.

The ski jumping story follows the same pattern. Scientists tested how suit size affects a jump. Making a suit just 2cm bigger increased lift by 5% and drag by 4%. That added about 2.8 metres to a jump for every extra centimetre. In ski jumping, medals are won or lost by centimetres, so that is a big deal.

Swimming had its own version of this. In 2008, Speedo released a full-body suit called the LZR Racer, built with help from Nasa. The suit squeezed swimmers into a smoother shape and trapped air to help them float higher in the water, which allowed swimmers to go faster.

Swimmers wearing it won 94% of the medals at the Beijing Olympics and broke dozens of world records in two years. Swimming’s rule-makers banned full-body suits like this in 2010, saying the sport should test the swimmer, not the suit.

All of these tiny details matter because races can be won by fractions of a second. That is why stories like the Tour de France one get so much attention. The real question is whether athletes are changing their bodies in ways the rules do not allow.

Most people think athletes should be free to get better through training, nutrition and practice – as long as everyone can use similar strategies and they follow the rules. But even that isn’t as clear cut.

Someone can follow the rules but still have access to things that aren’t available to everyone, such as a better wind tunnel, a custom suit or a full-time biomechanics team. These cost money most athletes don’t have. So a rule that looks fair on paper can still hand an advantage to whoever can afford the best equipment and testing.

The real problem is telling the difference between cheekily pushing the boundaries and cheating. Then sports officials have to decide if something is a clever idea or an unfair advantage.

Athletes will always look for an edge and some will try new ways to go faster, jump further or perform better. Sometimes that leads to real scientific discoveries – while sometimes it leads to strange headlines.

Either way, these stories illustrate the same thing: winning in sport depends on understanding the body and how it moves through the world, not just on talent and effort. At the highest level, every gram, every centimetre and every second can matter, which is exactly why these weird stories get so much attention.

The author receives funding from UK Research and Innovation (UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship) for research on anthropometry in children and health, directly relevant to the topic of this article.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/08/14/from-padded-bras-to-penis-injections-how-changing-body-shape-can-give-athletes-a-competitive-edge/

A record 332 million people visited U.S. national parks in 2024, followed by roughly 323 million in 2025.

That’s a lot of love for national parks and lands. You might think that such big numbers of visitors automatically create windfalls for the towns and businesses that serve them. The National Park Service calls towns or counties within roughly 60 miles (about 100 kilometers) of a park boundary “gateway” communities. Gateway businesses operate in those jurisdictions.

Gateways are like the Main Street of the parks, which depend on them to lodge, feed and guide visitors. Generally speaking, stable business conditions mean less risk for businesses and a healthier Main Street.

Nationally, visitors spent a record US$29 billion at the parks themselves and $56 billion for lodging, gas, groceries and other goods and services in gateway communities. That supported about 340,100 jobs nationwide in 2024, the most recent year for which that data is available.

I research Main Street businesses, and I co-owned a company for more than two decades that manufactured oars and paddles. In the summer I live close to Maine’s Acadia National Park, where businesses in the gateway town of Bar Harbor say they’re having an off year in 2026.

And I’m concerned that gateway businesses face at least four main risks not seen in a typical Main Street ecosystem: Park boundaries can change and with them the gateway’s vicinity; park strategies to manage the surge in visitors can make the flow of customers more unpredictable; bouts of extreme weather and their local effects are growing more common; and workers who might get jobs at gateway businesses are being priced out of nearby housing.

Singly and together, these risks create a distinct category of challenge for this type of Main Street business.

Changing boundaries

First, a park’s boundaries can change.

A gateway economy and businesses in it, like a guide outpost or small hotel, can certainly benefit measurably from its proximity to protected park lands, as Headwaters Economics, an independent research firm, has found. But businesses built around those places can suffer setbacks when the boundaries themselves change.

That is what happened on July 13, 2026, when President Donald Trump signed proclamations shrinking by about 90% the size of Utah’s Grand Staircase–Escalante, created by President Bill Clinton in 1996, and Bears Ears, created by President Barack Obama in 2016. Both have seen their boundaries repeatedly redrawn. They were, briefly, fully restored by the Biden administration.

The Trump administration said it was able to do this because the 1906 Antiquities Act allows presidents to modify the footprint of a national monument – although there is significant legal disagreement about this point – and by extension where the gateway is, because national monuments sometimes eventually become national parks.

Rules in flux

Second, growing numbers of visitors pose a risk because attempts to manage congestion may alter access, timing and travel patterns in ways that disrupt gateway businesses.

Depending on the source of congestion – vehicles, bicycles, hikers – the National Park Service deploys different strategies in a series of locally based experiments that can be reversed.

In recent years it has eliminated, changed or reinstated many of its long-standing reservation systems with little warning. Yosemite, for example, has flipped its policy four times since 2020, and when it dropped reservations in 2023, wait times reportedly stretched to nearly three hours at entrance stations before the system was reinstated the next year.

Another example is when the National Park Service abruptly ended in 2026 four years of timed-entry reservations at Arches and Canyonlands.

The result is either increased congestion or more unpredictable park access. And it is left to gateway businesses to roll with the fallout.

Kai Palmer, co-owner of the Moab guiding company Desert Highlights, told The Times-Independent, a local newspaper, he worries that paying guests could now show up for a half-day tour and lose over an hour of it waiting in line, or get turned away entirely. These fears have come to pass in many national parks.

Extreme weather

Third, the increased frequency of bouts of extreme weather, which is tied to climate change, increases the risks gateway businesses face.

For example, Colorado’s Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park closed entirely in July 2025 for the first time in its 90-plus-year history.

The cause? A lightning-sparked wildfire tore through the South Rim, and campground reservations were canceled for the rest of the year. The park and its adjoining Curecanti National Recreation Area in 2025 had drawn 1.3 million visitors who spent $25.6 million in nearby communities.

In the Yellowstone Park gateway towns of Gardiner and West Yellowstone, Montana, drought and rising water temperatures in 2025 and 2026 have repeatedly triggered conditions that closed access to guided fishing.

The 2022 flood that washed out Yellowstone’s North Entrance road showed how sudden and lasting that damage can be: Jeannette Mikos, owner of the Yellowstone Basin Inn in Gardiner, told the Cowboy State Daily, a local media outlet, that she lost roughly $480,000 that year.

The road was not reopened until October 2022, after the peak tourist season had ended.

Compounding weather-related risks are the up-front, fixed costs of permitting and insurance to the businesses before the season starts. The roughly 15,000 outfitters and guides under permit on federal lands typically are very small businesses that depend on steady bookings.

Housing shortages

Fourth, the high cost of living in gateway communities reduces the number of workers available to staff gateway businesses.

There isn’t enough affordable housing for workers employed by gateway businesses near Acadia and other national parks. That shortage can strain those enterprises.

Headwaters Economics points to the paradox of what it calls an “amenity trap.” The unparalleled natural beauty and the allure of an active lifestyle draw many second-home buyers and drive the conversion of permanent housing stock to short-term rentals.

Parks often face limited buildable land due to natural boundaries, such as at the island-based Acadia National Park. That constraint contributes to the housing crises afflicting these seasonal recreation areas.

More than 1,000 workers put up with a 90-mile (about 145-kilometer) round-trip daily commute to Zion National Park from towns such as St. George, beyond the gateway town of Springdale, because there’s nowhere closer for them to live.

How long the trip can take varies depending on traffic, as Zion draws more than 17,000 visitors daily at peak season and over 4 million per year.

Meanwhile, in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, more than half of local businesses have cut their hours, closed for more days than planned or scaled back services due to staffing shortages that are at least partly caused by the shortage of affordable housing.

Historically, gateway businesses faced risks that were comparatively familiar and cyclical and tied to standard seasonal tourist traffic and traditional market challenges. The recent confluence of record visitor volume, fluctuating boundaries, climate anomalies and staffing shortages is fundamentally increasing the risks of owning, acquiring or starting a business in a gateway economy.

All told, this is transforming gateway entrepreneurship into a high-stakes balancing act.

Nancy Forster-Holt does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/08/14/small-businesses-at-the-gateways-to-americas-national-parks-face-4-big-risks-including-changing-boundaries-and-extreme-weather/

The people of Clacton have spoken. Well, 44% of them have, with the majority of eligible voters staying at home rather than cast their ballot in the byelection. Reform UK leader Nigel Farage, the winning candidate, also stayed away – snubbing the count at Clacton leisure centre after claiming police had warned him of an organised campaign to disrupt proceedings.

In the end, Farage received 63% of the vote, amounting to an endorsement from only 28% of the eligible electorate. That his second-place rival was a joke candidate standing as an “independent space warrior” wearing a bin-shaped helmet would seem to bear out the Daily Mail’s observation that “when voters are shouting at you, it’s bad. When they’re laughing at you, it’s over”. Count Binface received 9,455 votes – one in four of those cast.

Byelections are supposed to take place because a member is no longer able to serve. In Farage’s petulant speech of July 7, when he stood down as MP for the Essex constituency, he objected to being held accountable for undeclared payments from a foreign national. He stated that he could make some “real big money” in the US, where he said he had “plenty of offers”.

Farage went on to say he wanted the people of Clacton to judge him and now – after the votes have been counted – says the result “speaks for itself”.

Read more:
Why Nigel Farage is resigning as an MP, only to stand again – expert analysis

But this byelection was not an opportunity for the voters of Clacton to scrutinise the sources of Farage’s finances. No hard evidence was presented to them. And they have other things to do with their time than pursue the kind of forensic investigation that a parliamentary standards commissioner will be able to carry out. Now that Farage is once again an MP, the previously opened probe resumes.

It is not as if the voters of Clacton don’t have other pressing issues to think about. According to government findings, one part of the constituency (Jaywick) is the most deprived area in England. The number of people in Clacton leaving school with no formal qualifications is reckoned to be the second highest of any town in England. Parts of the district has one of the lowest life expectancies and highest under-75 mortality rates nationwide. Nearly half of the working-age population is economically inactive, heavily exceeding the national average.

This is a population that may well want to be pick a fight with “the establishment”. But promoting the career of a multimillionaire politician is probably not the best way to go about it

An expression of mood, not politics

So what does this byelection say about contemporary British politics? The Farage narrative suggests that it is about the heroic representation of the real people by a leader who is uniquely capable of speaking their language.

But what was most striking in the Clacton panto-plebiscite, where a record 34 candidates faced off against each other, was the cynical disconnect between Westminster politics and the experiences of people who feel ground down and institutionally neglected. (Not to mention so far from political decision-making that one in four of them chose to vote for a bloke with his tongue in his cheek and a bin over his head.)

This byelection was less about political choices than the expression of a public mood – democracy as a register of feelings rather than the “who gets what, when and how” summed up by American political scientist Harold Laswell.

Farage does not offer his followers a way out of their deprived status. After all, the one cluster of policies that really motivates him – ending mass immigration – is hardly going to invigorate Clacton. It is one of the least ethnically diverse constituencies in England, with 96% of residents classed as white.

The story that Farage tells – and he does so masterfully – is of a last-ditch attempt to save Britain from contamination by globalism, as if any contemporary nation state could possibly stand alone against the might of transnational corporations and the all-powerful bond markets.

Fittingly for a coastal town MP, Farage is a King Canute, publicly promising to hold back the cosmopolitan waves while privately accepting gifts from overseas billionaires.

The problem with Farage’s narrative is that it requires ongoing supplies of rhetorical fury to stir the passions of its believers. Reform UK faces competition from Rupert Lowe’s far-right Restore Britain party, with its support from Elon Musk, who fell out with Farage apparently over the Reform leader’s unwillingness to back far-right agitator Tommy Robinson.

The narrative of deep resentment has a self-inflating quality. For every outrage identified or manufactured, there is always greater public fury that can be ignited. The competition between rival groups to arouse ever-greater degrees of what Farage has called “pure cold rage” can have dangerous consequences.

It is unclear whether the electoral absurdity at Clacton will be seen by historians as a precursor to Farage’s reputational rehabilitation and onward march to Downing Street, or a further step on the slippery slope towards greater political ugliness. Either way, Count Binface’s footnote status in the chronicles is assured – along with the nearly 10,000 voters who believed that their future would be best represented by a dustbin.

Stephen Coleman 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.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/08/14/what-the-battle-between-nigel-farage-and-count-binface-really-tells-us-about-britains-mood/

I teach a university course called Hormones and Behaviour. What surprises students is that biological sex is not produced by a single switch. What surprises me is that many students have never been taught this before. It is basic biology, but it helps explain life.

Sex emerges through a sequence of events before birth and continues at puberty.
Chromosomes help direct the formation of gonads, the body parts that usually become ovaries or testes. Gonads make hormones. The body then has to respond to those hormones. In most people, these steps flow in the same direction. But in rare cases, they do not.

These cases are known as disorders, more recently differences, of sex development (DSDs). They are not new but they provide a useful way to understand how bodies develop. DSDs can affect hormone production. Some affect the body’s response to hormones. Some affect chromosomes or gonad development. Two people can have a DSD, yet have very different bodies, medical needs and life experiences.

Each condition reveals what can happen when one step in the normal sequence is altered. Here are five ways sex development can take a different path.

Congenital adrenal hyperplasia

This DSD affects around one in 16,000 births.

The adrenal glands, which normally produce small amounts of male hormones, even in females, are hyperactive in this condition.

A baby with two X chromosomes and ovaries can therefore be born with external genitals that look male.

Complete androgen insensitivity syndrome

In contrast, a child with complete androgen insensitivity syndrome (CAIS), can have XY chromosomes and internal testes that make testosterone, but their body cannot respond to that testosterone.

This lack of a response to testosterone keeps the developing fetus in its “default” female state, leading to female external genitals at birth.

Someone with CAIS will develop breasts at puberty. Since their external anatomy is typically female, people with CAIS are usually raised as girls and may only be diagnosed later, often when their periods do not start.

CAIS is estimated to affect one to five in 100,000 live born females.

5-alpha-reductase deficiency

Another condition, called 5-alpha-reductase deficiency, shows how sex development does not finish at birth.

The body needs an enzyme called 5-alpha-reductase to turn testosterone into a stronger version of the hormone before birth. When a genetic mutation inactivates this enzyme, an XY baby may be born with genitals that are read as female and may be raised as a girl. At puberty, however, the normal surge of conventional testosterone masculinises the body.

The condition is rare worldwide and its exact incidence is unknown, partly because conditions affecting sex development have often been surrounded by silence.

In parts of the Dominican Republic, where this condition is known as guevedoces, studies have reported surprisingly high local rates. A rare genetic mutation is more common in these isolated populations, about one in 90 males.

More recently, some of these communities have begun to recognise guevedoces at birth and raise them as boys.

Sex chromosomes disorders

Usually, females receive one X chromosome from their father and one X from their mother, and are therefore XX, while males receive one X chromosome from their mother and the Y chromosome from their father. However, a person with Klinefelter syndrome, affecting one in 500-1,000 male births, has XXY chromosomes, causing smaller testes, scant body hair, lower testosterone and reduced fertility. It is often never diagnosed.

On the other hand, Turner syndrome, or the loss, in females, of one of the two X chromosomes, affects one in 2,500 female births and impairs growth, puberty and fertility. It can affect physical appearance, for instance a wide neck and broad chest and often comes with health conditions such as hearing loss and kidney problems.

Swyer syndrome is rarer: a person has XY chromosomes but with a mutation in the Y chromosome that disrupts the signal that normally drives testes formation. The gonads do not develop into testes, testosterone remains low and the external and internal anatomy is typically female.

These are the clearer examples. Milder sex differences can result from mutations that reduce, rather than completely inactivate, an enzyme or hormone response. For example, non-classic congenital adrenal hyperplasia, where some enzyme activity remains. Their effects may be less obvious, and their incidence is often unknown because many cause subtler changes or are never diagnosed.

What this does and does not tell us

None of this is new. These conditions have been known to scientists for decades. But now genetic testing can identify the mutation behind some cases.

Specialist clinics and patient groups have pushed for clearer information for parents, better psychological support for patients and greater caution around irreversible childhood surgery when it is not medically urgent. Recent patient-centred research shows that clear information, good communication and psychological support are central to good care for people with DSDs. It’s unclear whether increased awareness has improved people’s lives, but the direction is clear: better information, specialist care and long-term support matter.

The lesson is not that sex is meaningless or endlessly fluid. These rare conditions do not provide a simple answer to every argument about sex and gender.

However DSDs do show sex is not a single event. Just like the growth of our body, it is a process. When chromosomes, gonads, hormones and the body’s response to them all follow the usual sequence, the result often looks simple. When one link changes, the body may no longer fit the binary pattern many of us were taught at school.

For the people affected, this is not an abstract puzzle. Some need lifelong hormone treatment. Some face infertility. Some discover their condition only as teenagers or adults. Chromosomes or sex designation at birth may explain part of the biology behinds DSDs. It does not explain what it feels like to grow up, go through puberty, seek fertility treatment or decide who needs to know.

Jean-Michel Fustin is a Medical Research Council-funded Senior Research Fellow in the Division of Integrative Physiology at The University of Manchester. He contributes the level-3 course Hormones & Behaviour.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/08/14/what-happens-when-someones-chromosomes-sex-hormones-and-body-dont-align/

In this fourth part in our series on how the UK has changed in the past 25 years, we look at health.

Life expectancy and illness

Michael Murphy, Emeritus Professor of Demography, London School of Economics

A good way to follow the health of a nation is to glance at what is known as period life-expectancy. This calculates how long a person born today would live if the current death rates remained exactly the same for the rest of their life. This had two major turning points in the UK over the period: a marked slowdown in improvements from around 2011, and a sharp, historically unprecedented fall in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The slowdown in improvement from the early 2010s was part of a wider pattern across high-income countries. The UK and the other five largest of these nations, including France, Germany and Italy, experienced similar stagnation, although the UK’s was somewhat more persistent.

How has the UK changed since the start of the century? From Blair to Burnham, from the dotcom era to AI agents, time has certainly not stood still. In this six-part series, a team of some 35 experts look at everything from defence spending to species populations to the rise of populism to try and make sense of the intervening years.

The graph below also shows that contrary to frequent claims that the UK’s mortality performance is uniquely poor, its period life-expectancy gains were broadly similar to these comparator countries and the OECD average between 2000 and 2024. For example, France’s period life-expectancy increased by an annual average of only four days more than UK over that time.

Changing life-expectancy

The most dramatic disruption occurred with the COVID 19 pandemic. The UK’s 179,000 COVID-related deaths in 2020–21 represented the largest mortality shock since the second world war. As it turned out, the nation’s mortality rate peaked in 2020 and has fallen each year since. By 2024 it had returned to levels close to 2019, the lowest ever, and we’ve seen a similar trend across western Europe.

Read more:
Britain’s quarter century: shrinking families, ethnic tensions and queer winners and losers

The long-term implications of the pandemic remain uncertain, but they are potentially severe and likely to affect all groups of society. Many people have experienced life-changing effects from long COVID. Evidence from earlier pandemics, including the 1918–19 influenza pandemic, also suggests that babies in their mothers’ wombs may have experienced long-term negative health effects from exposure to the virus.

Causes of death

Underlying these mortality trends in the UK are shifts in the major causes of death. In 2024 cardiovascular disease (26%), cancer (26%), respiratory disease (12%) and dementia (9%) accounted for three quarters of deaths in England.

Changes in cause of death classification make it difficult to see whether these have changed long term. But the early 2000s saw rapid declines in cardiovascular mortality, for instance, driven by improvements in treatment, prevention and reductions in smoking.

However, these gains have slowed, and since 2019 progress in reducing cardiovascular deaths has stalled. This reflects a combination of fewer medical breakthroughs in related chronic diseases such as diabetes and high blood pressure, and rising pressures on the health and social care systems.

More generally, changing risk factors will be important for the future. We’re smoking much less today, from 26% of adults in 2001 to 11% in 2023, which reduces the scope for further mortality gains from tobacco controls.

In contrast, obesity has become the top lifestyle danger, with the proportion of adults classified as obese in England rising from 20% in 2001 to 30% in 2024. These trends imply a growing future burden of cardiovascular disease, diabetes and also certain cancers, with long lag times before the full effects are observed.

This rise in obesity will also be contributing to rising levels of non-fatal but disabling conditions. As many as 26% of adults report chronic pain, and half of those report high-impact pain (meaning long-term pain that severely limits your ability to function in daily life). Low back pain is now the leading cause of years lived with disability in the UK, mirroring global trends.

Mental disorders are rising steadily, with common mental health conditions increasing from 17.5% in 2000 to 22.6% in 2023-24 among working age adults. The rates are higher among younger people: 26% among 16-24 year olds compared with 10% among those aged 75 and over.

There also appears to have been an increase in poor health in general. Witness the fact that healthy life expectancy in England increased modestly between 2000–02 and 2017–18 (the last period that did not include the COVID-19 pandemic), but only around half of additional years gained were spent in good health.

While mortality improvements are likely to resume, they may do so at a slower pace than in the late 20th century. The ageing population, rising obesity and worsening health among younger people all pose risks. The prolonged deterioration in US mortality linked to drug related deaths and “deaths of despair” also illustrates that you certainly can’t assume progress will continue. The UK’s future health will depend on its ability to address chronic disease, reduce risks like obesity and strengthen its ability to respond to future shocks.

Eating and drinking habits

David Dearlove, Principal Researcher, Healthy Life Mission, Nesta

Jurin Katayama, Analyst, Healthy Life Mission, Nesta

Lydia Leon, Senior Mission Manager, Healthy Life Mission, Nesta

In 2001 meal deals were a novelty, phones had buttons, and the Food Standards Agency (FSA) was a year-old watchdog. Twenty-five years on, Britain’s relationship with food is very different, with big changes in the types of food available and how we buy it, as well as how it is promoted and regulated.

When it comes to how people buy their food, supermarkets still dominate. The retail landscape has been disrupted by the rise of discounters like Aldi and Lidl, whose market share climbed from a mere 3% in 2002 to about 14% by 2021. But given that large supermarkets continue to supply over 80% of our average daily calorie intake, their influence over public health remains profound.

Food bought outside of the home has seen large changes. Across Great Britain, the density of fast food outlets – meaning per head of the population – rose by 36% between 2011 and 2024, outpacing the 17% growth in supermarket density. This supply surge reflects shifting demand – while only a quarter of UK adults ate out once a week or more between 2008 and 2012, in 2021 this rose to over 60%.

Unfortunately, food prepared out of home rarely is the healthy choice. Most of these meals exceed the recommended calorie intake for an eating occasion, and about 20% of meals contain over half the total recommended daily intake.

This physical saturation is mirrored in our digital lives, as ordering food to our door has become easier than ever. When Just Eat launched in 2001, ordering food online was a novelty. Today, platforms such as Just Eat, Deliveroo and Uber Eats connect us to thousands of takeaways at any hour, with their market worth £13.9 billion (2024). Online grocery shopping has also risen, from barely existing in 2001 to now making up around 12% of the grocery market.

Ever more marketing

The way food is bought and promoted has not only gone more digital, but is now dominated by pervasive marketing and personalised nudges. Outdoor food and drink advertising, covering everything from billboards to train carriages, has more than tripled in real terms over the past two decades, now accounting for £590 million in advertising-spend a year. The rise of apps and loyalty schemes has also expanded the ways customers can be reached, with regular notifications and time-limited “special” deals designed to make us order more often and in larger amounts.

Of the £2.4 billion spent on UK food advertising in 2024, investment in nutritious alternatives remains negligible. For instance, while advertising focusing on fruit and vegetables now accounts for less than 5% of traditional food and non-alcoholic drink advertising budgets, unhealthy foods account for closer to a third.

There has also been a shift in the regulatory landscape. We’ve seen a gradual move away from voluntary schemes such as Public Health England’s calorie, salt and sugar reduction programmes towards more interventionist policies, including the 2018 Soft Drinks Industry Levy, which incentivised many manufacturers to reduce sugar content to avoid charges.

Expanding on this, in 2025 the government announced the introduction of the healthy food standard policy. This will require large food businesses, including supermarkets, to report on the healthiness of their sales, and meet mandatory targets for improvement. Yet while the regulatory framework is improving, further intervention will be necessary to get the nation to eat more healthily.

Alcohol and drug use

Ian Hamilton, Honorary Fellow (Associate Professor) in Addiction at the University of York

Drugs, like fashion, change over time. Since the millennium, for instance, we have seen a surge in cocaine use. Once regarded as an expensive drug used by the elite, it is now more affordable than ever and more potent, which explains its greater popularity.

This has been facilitated by increased global supply and organised crime groups able to transport and distribute the drug effectively. Unfortunately, rising use has been accompanied by an equally rapid increase in cocaine fatalities, with nearly 1,300 in 2024 in England and Wales alone.

The last 25 years has witnessed the emergence of synthetic drugs, particularly synthetic opiates, which are much more potent than the traditional organic opiates such as heroin. Like cocaine, the rise in synthetic drugs has seen an increase in drug-related deaths, with the UK having the highest mortality rate in Europe.

Another group of synthetic drugs that have emerged are novel psychoactive substances, also known as legal highs, even though they were banned a decade ago. Examples include spice, a synthetic form of cannabis, and the stimulant referred to as monkey dust.

Read more:
Britain’s quarter century: wealth and widening inequality

As with all drugs, the negative consequences of using them are not experienced equally. It is the vulnerable, poor, homeless and living in the most deprived areas of the UK that are more likely to die or suffer poor health from using these drugs. Synthetic drugs have caused havoc and misery in prisons and among rough-sleeping populations.

Drug use in the UK 2000-25

Cannabis remains the most widely used illicit drug in the UK. Adult use has remained stable over the last 25 years. However, this disguises the trend of falling cannabis use for young people (aged 16-24 years) since 2020.

Alcohol and the internet

Without a doubt, the advent of the internet has directly and indirectly shaped which drugs are widely used and those that are not. For example the data shows that since the millennium, young people have shunned alcohol.

This is thought to be due in part to young people not wanting to be seen to be intoxicated or behaving badly because of drinking on social media. In parallel, this cohort are more health conscious and keen to adopt a healthy lifestyle which doesn’t include alcohol.

Over the same period, consumption of alcohol by adults has remained relatively stable. Older adults are now more likely to drink than their younger counterparts: 84% of those aged 55-64 years old compared to 65% aged 16-24 years old.

Alcohol-related deaths in the UK

The internet has also opened access to drugs through platforms like WhatsApp, Facebook and Telegram. People can simply browse dealer menus via Instagram, for example, or message a Telegram bot, and have drugs brought to their door within the hour.

What hasn’t changed is drug policy. Successive governments have stuck with the 1971 Misuse of Drugs Act, despite the fact that applying a 50-year-old policy to contemporary patterns of drug use is a terrible mismatch. When this legislation was enacted many of the most widely used drugs today didn’t exist. There is also nowadays a consensus that drug use should be framed by health rather than penal policy.

Yet there is no political appetite for policy change, just the continued mantra of getting tough on drugs by trying to disrupt supply and distribution. In contrast, organised crime is innovative and adaptable.

Sexual behaviour

Soazig Clifton, Academic Director for Britain’s National Surveys of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles (Natsal), University College London

By the early 2000s Britain had experienced decades of social and demographic change dating back to the second world war. Marriage rates had fallen, people were having children later and in smaller numbers, and family structures had become more diverse.

These changes were accompanied by increasingly liberal attitudes towards sexuality. Same-sex relationships were becoming more socially accepted. Younger generations were having sex earlier and marrying or cohabiting later than previous generations.

Public concern had also shifted. The widespread fears around HIV/Aids that had characterised the 1980s and early 1990s were receding. Attention had turned to the UK’s rate of teenage pregnancy, which was among the highest in Europe, and rising levels of chlamydia and other sexually transmitted infections.

The best evidence on population trends in sexual behaviour comes from Britain’s National Surveys of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles (Natsal), one of the largest scientific studies of sexual behaviour in the world. Conducted approximately every decade since 1990, Natsal provides representative snapshots of the population, offering a unique window into Britain’s changing sex lives.

The most recent published survey, Natsal-3 (2010-12), documented substantial changes in women’s sexuality during the 2000s. Women reported higher numbers of sexual partners and more same-sex experiences, with one in six women reporting sexual experience with another woman.

Vaginal and oral sex remained the core of the heterosexual sexual repertoire since the first survey in 1990. However, the 1990s and 2000s also saw increases in heterosexual anal sex, reported by around one in six people by 2010-12.

Yet despite increasing diversity in sexual behaviour, Natsal identified another trend: people were having sex less often. Among 16-44-year-olds in 2010-12, the median frequency of sex was three times per month, compared to four times in the two previous surveys.

Where are we now?

The latest Natsal data, collected between 2022 and 2024, will be published later this year. It will provide the first comprehensive picture of Britain’s sex lives after a decade shaped by economic uncertainty, the COVID pandemic and the growing digitalisation of everyday life. For the first time, Natsal-4 collected data on online sexual activities, including pornography use and sexting, as well as expanding measures of gender to include transgender and non-binary identities.

Other data sources offer clues about what we might find. Natsal-COVID, an online survey conducted during the pandemic, suggested further declines in sexual frequency and potential reductions in behaviour associated with sexually transmitted infections (although these comparisons are limited by methodological differences).

Read more:
Britain’s quarter century: Blair, populism and the battle over human rights

Meanwhile, data from the Office for National Statistics shows increasing numbers of people identify as LGBTQ+. Research with adolescents in Britain and other European countries has also shown declines in sexual experience. These changes sit alongside broader shifts in young people’s lives, including declining rates of smoking and drinking, rising levels of poor mental health and high rates of loneliness, more time online and less time socialising face-to-face.

Whatever Natsal-4 reveals, the picture will probably keep evolving. Societal change and new technologies including AI are likely to shape our sexual behaviour and intimate relationships in ways we cannot yet predict.

Mental health

Kevin Stone, Associate Dean for Partnerships and Business Development (Health and Social Care), University of South Wales

Sarah Vicary, Professor of Social Work and Mental Health, The Open University

In 2000, care in the community was gaining ground, but provision remained uneven. Although the closure of long-stay psychiatric hospitals had reshaped the system, hospital admission remained a dominant response to people experiencing an acute mental health crisis. Patient voices were also beginning to emerge more strongly against a backdrop of stigma, with growing demands for better quality care in both primary and secondary services.

Since then, we have seen significant changes in attitudes and responses to mental health needs. Mental health is no longer seen simply as a private struggle that should be hidden, but increasingly as a public health concern.

Awareness-raising has helped to create a culture in which speaking about mental health is more acceptable than it was in 2001, and more actively encouraged everywhere from workplaces to schools to the home. For those with severe diagnoses, the shift away from institutional care before the 1990s towards community-based support has also been clear.

Nonetheless, we are seeing more children and young people reporting adverse childhood experiences, trauma and neglect, all of which can lead to significant mental health needs. We also continue to see high numbers of detentions under mental health legislation involving people in severe mental distress, with a disproportionate impact on men from ethnic minority groups.

Mental health-related absences from work continue to be a problem – stress, depression and anxiety cost 22 million working days in 2024/25. Societal barriers like stigma still prevent many people from discussing their declining mental health or seeking help early, which undermines effective prevention.

The transformation

When it comes to raising awareness, anti-stigma campaigns such as Time to Change, led by Mind and Rethink Mental Illness, alongside World Health Organization initiatives, have contributed to changing behaviour and attitudes. World Mental Health Day each October and campaigns led by YoungMinds have helped reinforce this message. The same goes for public figures and people with lived experience, such as Stormzy and Davina McCall.

We have seen the growth of mental health first aiders in the workplace, mental health champions in schools, and helplines offering non-judgmental listening and support.

The principle that mental health should be valued as highly as physical health (known as parity of esteem), has increasingly shaped NHS policy. The NHS commissioners who oversee health services within particular areas have reinvented mental health services to place greater emphasis on community-based support and treatment.

This has included dedicated mental health workers in emergency departments, and doctors connecting patients to non-medical community activities to help improve their outlook (this is known as social prescribing). Access to psychological therapies has also improved and is now recognised through NHS Talking Therapies in GP practices and primary care settings.

The authorities are also giving more attention to societal factors affecting people’s mental health. When patients come to GPs with anxiety triggered by things like debt or poor housing, they are expected to refer them to a link worker to help overcome these problems. It’s now increasingly recognised that responses to mental health needs should never be about medication alone. There has also been growing recognition of the role played by family members, nearest relatives, friends and unpaid carers.

Yet NHS services are still too often forced to respond to crisis rather than prevent it. Funding pressures and workforce shortages have combined with the increased demand for mental health services to place the system under growing strain.

As well as addressing this, the wider challenge is to build a society and system that values prevention, compassion, choice, dignity and timely support. That way, mental health won’t just be protected in moments of crisis, but throughout the course of everyday life.

The Insights section is committed to high-quality longform journalism. Our editors work with academics from many different backgrounds who are tackling a wide range of societal and scientific challenges.

Kev Stone is a researcher for Resources For Nearest Relatives.

David Dearlove, Ian Hamilton, Jurin Katayama-Flores, Lydia Leon, Michael Murphy, Sarah Vicary, and Soazig Clifton do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/08/14/britains-quarter-century-experts-in-sex-mental-health-nutrition-and-addiction-assess-the-nations-changing-wellbeing/

When a dairy cow miscarries, a farmer loses far more than an unborn calf. Feed has been grown, land and water used, and greenhouse gas released during the cow’s pregnancy but milk production, a future animal and income will be lost.

One of the most important of these greenhouse gases is methane. Methane is produced by microbes within a cow’s stomach during digestion (known as enteric-methane) and most of it is breathed out into the atmosphere. Instead, healthier animals are more productive, so the amount of methane they emit is associated with more milk or meat, reducing the emissions associated with each litre or kilogram produced.

My research focuses on diseases in farm animals such as cows, goats and sheep. In a recent peer-reviewed journal paper, my team and I examined evidence from livestock systems around the world. We found that preventing disease can improve growth, milk production, fertility and survival, often lowering the emissions associated with each litre of milk or kilogram of meat. However, the available evidence is not yet strong or consistent enough for animal health to be included confidently in climate policy.

Studies investigating greenhouse gas emissions in livestock make different assumptions and usually use estimations rather than directly measuring them. Building on ongoing research supported by the Global Methane Hub (an international philanthropic alliance formed from more than 20 major climate foundations), we developed a new project called Halow (Health Approaches for Lowering Livestock Emissions). Recently approved as a major international research initiative of the Global Research Alliance on Agricultural Greenhouse Gases, it will test when improvements in animal health deliver genuine climate benefits.

There is no single way to transition to more sustainable livestock farming globally. Much of the debate in high-income countries focuses on eating less meat and dairy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. However, in low- and middle-income countries, demand for milk, meat and eggs is growing while access to diverse diets remains unequal.

The priorities for food production vary across different parts of the world. Wealthier countries looking to reduce excess consumption and total emissions, while many poorer countries need to improve access to nutritious food without allowing emissions to grow at the same rate. Livestock also provide income, savings, manure and power for farming. Preventing animals from dying or producing far below their potential could provide more food and income from resources already being used. That makes animal health part of a fairer climate response, but is not a licence for unrestricted expansion of livestock numbers.

What the losses mean

We previously calculated the potential impacts of reducing calf deaths and reducing pregnancy loss in livestock in our Kenya and Tanzania study.

Modelling data from farms in northern Tanzania, we calculated that cattle miscarriage increased emissions per kilogram of milk by 4% in Indigenous cattle and 15% in higher-yielding cattle. Including the losses from both cattle and goats, the estimated milk and meat protein lost was equivalent to the current annual animal-protein consumption of about 649,000 Tanzanians.

In the same paper, we looked at the productivity of local beef cattle in western Kenya, where 16% of calves died during their first year and most diagnosed deaths were linked to infection. At the current mortality rates, the protein loss was equivalent to the annual beef-protein consumption of about 4.5 million Kenyans.

Halving mortality to 8% reduced estimated enteric-methane emissions per kilogram of beef by 3.2%. However, as more calves survived, the herd produced more beef but also more enteric methane in total. The footprint of each kilogram became smaller, while emissions to the atmosphere increased.

This is not an argument for allowing calves to die. It is an argument for measuring food security, livelihood and climate outcomes together rather than assuming that improved efficiency guarantees an absolute reduction greenhouse gas emissions from livestock.

From evidence to climate policy

Countries estimate livestock emissions from animal numbers and standardised figures. Better health can change milk yield, growth, fertility, mortality and the number of replacement animals needed, however existing methods don’t always capture these effects accurately.

The Halow platform allows scientists like us to compare interventions across farming systems. It enables researchers to evaluate which ones work, at what cost and whether they reduce total emissions or only emissions for each unit of food. It will consider who benefits and recognise that negative results will matter too.

Animal health will not solve the livestock sector’s climate impact on its own. However, leaving disease out of climate policy ignores emissions that don’t produce food or benefit livelihood. A fair livestock transition means reducing excess consumption where it is high, improving access to nutritious food where it is low, and cutting avoidable losses everywhere.

Nick Wheelhouse receives funding from Environmental Defense Fund and the Global Methane Hub. He is co-lead of the Animal Health and Greenhouse Gas Emissions Intensity Network of the Global Research Alliance on Agricultural Greenhouse Gases and contributed to the development of the HAlow Flagship. He also currently Chairs the Food Standards Agency Advisory Committee on Animal Feedingstuffs

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/08/14/how-healthier-farm-animals-can-cut-greenhouse-gas-emissions/