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Homeschooling has exploded in popularity in recent years, particularly since the pandemic. But researchers are still exploring why parents choose to homeschool their children.

While the decision to homeschool is often associated with religion, a 2023 survey found that the two top reasons people cited as most important were a concern about the school environment, such as safety and drugs, and a dissatisfaction with academic instruction.

I studied giftedness, creativity and talent as part of my Ph.D. program focusing on students who are “twice exceptional” – that is, they have both learning challenges such autism or attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder as well as advanced skills. A better understanding of why parents choose homeschooling can help identify ways to improve the public education system. I believe focusing on twice-exceptional students can offer insights beyond this subset of the homeschooled population.

What we know about homeschooling

The truth is researchers don’t know much about homeschooling and homeschoolers.

One problem is regulations involving homeschooling differ dramatically among states, so it is often hard to determine who is being instructed at home. And many families are unwilling to talk about their experiences homeschooling and their reasons for doing so.

But here’s what we do know.

The share of children being homeschooled has surged since 2020, rising from 3.7% in the 2018-2019 school year to 5.2% in 2022-2023 – the latest data available from the National Center for Education Statistics. Over 3 million students were homeschooled in 2021-22, according to the National Home Education Research Institute.

And the population of homeschoolers is becoming increasingly diverse, with about half of families reporting as nonwhite in a 2023 Washington Post-Schar School poll. In addition, homeschooling families are just as likely to be Democrat as Republican, according to that same Post-Schar survey, a sharp shift from previous surveys that suggested Republicans were much more likely to homeschool.

As for why parents homeschool, 28% of those surveyed in 2023 by the Institute of Education Sciences said the school environment was their biggest reason, followed by 17% that cited concerns about academic instruction. Another 17% said providing their kids with moral or religious instruction was most important.

But not far behind at 12% was a group of parents who prioritized homeschooling for a different reason: They have a child with physical or mental health problems or other special needs.

This group would include parents of twice-exceptional children, who may be especially interested in pursuing homeschooling as an alternative method of education for three reasons in particular.

Some families have devoted significant resources, such as by creating home libraries, to homeschool their children.
AP Photo/Charles Krupa

1. The ‘masking’ problem

These parents may notice that their child’s needs are being overlooked in the public education system and may view homeschooling as a way to provide better individualized instruction.

Students who are twice exceptional often experience what researchers call the “masking” phenomenon. This can occur when a child’s disabilities hide their giftedness. When this occurs, teachers tend to provide academic support but hesitate to give these children the challenging material they may require.

Masking can also occur in reverse, when a student’s gifts tend to hide disabilities. In these cases, teachers provide challenging material, but they do not provide the needed accommodations that allow the gifted child to access the materials. Either way, masking can be a problem for students and parents who must advocate for teachers to address their unique range of academic needs.

While either type of masking is challenging for the student, it may be particularly frustrating for parents of twice-exceptional students to watch classroom teachers focus only on their child’s weaknesses rather than helping them develop their advanced abilities.

2. Individualized instruction

By the time a child enters school, parents have spent years observing their child’s development, comparing their progress with that of others their age. They’re also likely to be aware of their child’s unique interests.

While this may not be true for all parents, those who choose to homeschool may do so because they feel they have more of an ability and interest in catering to their child’s unique needs than a classroom teacher who is tasked with teaching many students simultaneously. Parents of students who demonstrate exceptional ability have expressed concerns about their child’s future educational opportunities in a public school setting.

Additionally, parents may become exhausted by their efforts to advocate for their child’s unique needs in the school system. Parents of students who demonstrate advanced abilities often pull their children out of public school after repeated efforts to improve communication between home and school.

3. Behavioral and emotional needs

Gifted students who have emotional or behavioral disabilities may find it difficult to demonstrate their abilities in the classroom.

All too often, teachers may be more focused on disciplining these students rather than addressing their academic needs. For example, a child who is bored with the class material may be loud and attempt to distract others as well.

Rather than recognizing this as signaling a need for more advanced material, the teacher might send the child to a separate area in the classroom or in the school to refocus or as punishment. Parents may feel better equipped than teachers to address both their child’s challenging behaviors and their gifted abilities, given the knowledge they have about their child’s history, interests, strengths and areas needing improvement.

Supporting students’ needs

Gaining a better understanding of the motivations driving parents to take their children out of the public school system is an important step toward improving schools so that fewer will feel the need to take this path.

Additionally, strengthening educators’ and policymakers’ understanding about twice-exceptional homeschooled students may help communities provide more support to their families – who then may not feel homeschooling is the only or best option. My research shows that many schools can do a better job providing these types of students and their parents with the support they need to thrive. Läs mer…

Every St Patrick’s day, thousands of Americans eat corned beef and cabbage as a way of connecting to Ireland. But this association sits uncomfortably with many Irish people.

That’s because the dish, while popular in the past, has nothing to do with St Patrick himself. St Patrick (also known as Patricius or Pádraig) was born in Roman Britain in the 5th century. He is the patron saint of Ireland and in later biographies, legend and folklore, he is depicted as almost single-handedly converting the Irish to Christianity, and breaking the power of the druids.

The entangled mix of history, myth and folklore that has been attached to the saint makes it difficult to isolate historical fact from hagiographical and folklore embellishments. So what, if anything, do the celebratory foods of today have to do with the real St Patrick? And would he have eaten any of those same foods himself?

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The real St Patrick

The little we know about the real Patrick comes from two, probably 5th-century, short Latin texts written by the saint himself. Those are the Confessio, which is believed to be Patrick’s autobiography, and the Epistola, a letter of excommunication to the soldiers of a British king Coroticus, after they killed and enslaved some of his converts.

A St Patrick’s Day greeting card from 1909.
Missouri History Museum

In these texts, food is only mentioned in the context of hunger and the miraculous appearance of pigs that are slaughtered to sustain starving travellers.

Other important biographies of St Patrick were written in the 7th and somewhere between the 9th and 12th century. The two 7th-century Latin texts were written by churchmen, Muirchú and Tírechán. The author of the later biography, The Tripartite Life of Saint Patrick, is not known, but it was written partly in Latin and partly in Irish. These hagiographies (writing on the lives of saints) were works in legend-building with little connection to the real Patrick.

They do, however, give us a glimpse of the food culture of early medieval Ireland, when Patrick lived. They make references to dairy produce, salmon, bread, honey and meats, including beef, goat and a “ram for a king’s feast”.

Herb gardens are discussed alongside details of the cooking culture with mention of copper cauldrons, kitchens and cooking women. Grain and dairy foods would have most common, with white meats abundant in summer, and grain – especially oats – associated with the winter and early spring.

It is these foods, along with cultivated cabbage and onion-type vegetables and wild greens and fruit, that most likely would have sustained Patrick.

Delicious miracles

Food is frequently the subject of Saint Patrick’s miracles. As a child, he is said to have turned snow into butter and curds. On his missionary work, he was said to have changed water to honey, and cheese into stone and back to cheese again. In another miracle, he turned rushes into chives to satisfy a pregnant woman’s craving.

The bountiful fish stocks of certain rivers are also attributed to the saint’s blessing. One such example is the River Bann in Northern Ireland which was known for its salmon.

The food in Patrick’s world had a defined Irish signature. There is an emphasis in the hagiographies on a range of fresh, cultured and preserved dairy produce and the use of byproducts such as whey-water.

Corned beef and cabbage has become a popular St Patrick’s Day meal, but bears little connection to the real Patrick.
Brent Hofacker/Shutterstock

The extensive and later abandoned Irish cheese-making tradition is referenced in mention of curds and fáiscre grotha (pressed curds). The differentiation between new milk and milk may indicate a skills-based culture of working with dairy in the preparation of a family of thickened, soured and fermented milks. The associated communities, of which Patrick would have been part, probably had a taste for highly flavoured and cultured milk and cheese products.

These foods are typical of a self-sufficient agrarian economy, producing food that was suited to Irish soil and climatic conditions including wild and managed woodland, coastline and farmland. It is this vision of an untouched Ireland that continues to inspire Irish food culture today. Läs mer…

Barnard’s Star is a small, dim star, of the type that astronomers call red dwarfs. Consequently, even though it is one of the closest stars to Earth, such that its light takes only six years to get here, it is too faint to be seen with the naked eye. Now, four small planets have been found orbiting the star. Teams in America and Europe achieved this challenging detection by exploiting precision instruments on the world’s largest telescopes.

Diminutive Barnard’s Star is closer in size to Jupiter than to the Sun. Only the three stars that make up the Alpha Centauri system lie closer to us.

The planets newly discovered around Barnard’s Star are much too faint to be seen directly, so how were they found? The answer lies in the effect of their gravity on the star. The mutual gravitational attraction keeps the planets in their orbits, but also tugs on the star, moving it in a rhythmic dance that can be detected by sensitive spectrograph instruments. Spectrographs split up the star’s light into its component wavelengths. They can be used to measure the star’s motion.

A significant challenge for detection, however, is the star’s own behaviour. Stars are fluid, with the nuclear furnace at their core driving churning motions that generate a magnetic field (just as the churning of Earth’s molten core produces Earth’s magnetic field). The surfaces of red dwarf stars are rife with magnetic storms. This activity can mimic the signature of a planet when there isn’t one there.

The Maroon-X instrument installed at the Gemini North telescope.
International Gemini Observatory/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/J. Bean, Author provided (no reuse)

The task of finding planets by this method starts with building highly sensitive spectrograph instruments. They are mounted on telescopes large enough to capture sufficient light from the star. The light is then sent to the spectrograph which records the data. The astronomers then observe a star over months or years. After carefully calibrating the resulting data, and accounting for stellar magnetic activity, one can then scrutinise the data for the tiny signals that reveal orbiting planets.

In 2024, a team led by Jonay González Hernández from the Canary Islands Astrophysics Institute reported on four years of monitoring of Barnard’s Star with the Espresso spectrograph on the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile. They found one definite planet and reported tentative signals that indicated three more planets.

Now, a team led by Ritvik Basant from the University of Chicago in a paper just published in Astrophysical Journal Letters, have added in three years of monitoring with the Maroon-X instrument on the Gemini North telescope. Analysing their data confirmed the existence of three of the four planets, while combining both the datasets showed that all four planets are real.

Often in science, when detections push the limits of current capabilities, one needs to ponder the reliability of the findings. Are there spurious instrumental effects that the teams haven’t accounted for? Hence it is reassuring when independent teams, using different telescopes, instruments and computer codes, arrive at the same conclusions.

The Gemini North telescope is located on Maunakea in Hawaii.
MarkoBeg / Shutterstock

The planets form a tightly packed, close-in system, having short orbital periods of between two and seven Earth days (for comparison, our Sun’s closest planet, Mercury, orbits in 88 days). It is likely they all have masses less than Earth’s. They’re probably rocky planets, with bare-rock surfaces blasted by their star’s radiation. They’ll be too hot to hold liquid water, and any atmosphere is likely to have been stripped away.

The teams looked for longer-period planets, further out in the star’s habitable zone, but didn’t find any. We don’t know much else about the new planets, such as their estimated sizes. The best way of figuring that out would be to watch for transits, when planets pass in front of their star, and then measure how much starlight they block. But the Barnard’s Star planets are not orientated in such a way that we see them “edge on” from our perspective. This means that the planets don’t transit, making them harder to study.

Nevertheless, the Barnard’s Star planets tell us about planetary formation. They’ll have formed in a protoplanetary disk of material that swirled around the star when it was young. Particles of dust will have stuck together, and gradually built up into rocks that aggregated into planets. Red dwarfs are the most common type of star, and most of them seem to have planets. Whenever we have sufficient observations of such stars we find planets, so there are likely to be far more planets in our galaxy than there are stars.

Most of the planets that have been discovered are close to their star, well inside the habitable zone (where liquid water could survive on the planet’s surface), but that’s largely because their proximity makes them much easier to find. Being closer in means that their gravitational tug is bigger, and it means that they have shorter orbital periods (so we don’t have to monitor the star for as long). It also increases their likelihood of transiting, and thus of being found in transit surveys.

The European Space Agency’s Plato mission, to be launched in 2026, is designed to find planets further from their stars. This should produce many more planets in their habitable zones, and should begin to tell us whether our own solar system, which has no close-in planets, is unusual. Läs mer…

The UK government has announced the abolition of NHS England, phased over two years. In practice, this will involve merging some functions and staff from NHS England into the Department for Health and Social Care (DHSC). As part of the change, the government has stated that it expects to reduce duplication and save hundreds of millions of pounds.

NHS England was established under the Health and Social Care Act of 2012 (the Lansley reforms) and is responsible for commissioning care and overseeing the day-to-day running of the NHS. This involves negotiating budgets for local care provision with bodies like integrated care boards and hospitals; performance management such as monitoring waiting times and quality measures; and implementing national initiatives across NHS organisations.

NHS England was established to provide operational autonomy, shielding the health service from daily political interference. It is an “arm’s-length body”, meaning it operates independently from the government but remains accountable to it. The DHSC sets strategic goals and oversees NHS England activities.

In practice, NHS England and DHSC have distinct roles, although they overlap in some areas. DHSC staff typically have broader policy expertise – for example, many have worked in other areas of the civil service, whereas NHS England staff often have more detailed knowledge of how the NHS works on the ground.

Risks

The loss of expertise within NHS England is probably the largest risk of the abolition. Alongside very experienced NHS managers and analysts, NHS England employs senior doctors and other health care workers who contribute valuable practical knowledge from the NHS frontline into policy roles.

A major risk of this move is the potential loss of this clinical expertise and operational insight into policymaking. Lord Darzi’s report on the NHS specifically cited the loss in management talent that occurred as a result of the 2012 reforms, and cautioned against further reorganisation that might repeat that disruption.

Another risk is that bringing NHS England functions directly under ministerial control risks increased politicisation of day-to-day NHS management.

The government will argue that other policy areas like defence, education and policing do not have such a large arm’s-length body between the department and the frontline. However, health and social care is a uniquely large (11% of GDP) and highly political organisation, with a fast-growing budget and faster-growing challenges.

Keir Starmer announcing that he will abolish NHS England.
PA Images / Alamy Stock Photo

NHS policy is already highly politicised, but abolishing NHS England risks the DHSC and the ministers being on the hook for every operational decision. This could lead to operational decisions being made to appease public opinion rather than promoting public health.

The government faces significant practical challenges in merging two organisations with different cultures, working practices and pay structures. Currently, NHS England (about 16,000 staff) is much larger than DHSC (about 3,000 staff). Many NHS England roles will have to move into the much smaller DHSC.

The transition itself will require investment, so the promised savings are unlikely to be achieved in the short term.

Opportunities

The main opportunity of the abolition is the removal of duplication between DHSC and NHS England.

Currently, both organisations maintain separate policy teams covering similar areas – for example, elective surgery waiting times or cancer care. And sometimes, it is unclear how well they work together or why both are necessary.

By consolidating within the DHSC, there is an opportunity to strengthen policy analysis. With one strong policy team in the DHSC, policy advice to ministers (DHSC) and policy implementation on the ground (previously NHS England) could be better coordinated and aligned with the government’s objectives.

Lord Darzi’s report on the NHS highlighted the growth of regulatory roles within NHS England, questioning whether too much accountability could be counterproductive.

The abolition of NHS England is also an opportunity to streamline regulation while strengthening local management roles and valuable policy analysis.

Another opportunity from the abolition of the organisation would be the strengthening of local NHS bodies like integrated care boards. These local bodies, designed to tailor healthcare to local area needs, may sometimes have been stymied by excessive central control.

The health secretary, Wes Streeting, has already expressed his desire to see more devolution of power and responsibility within the NHS. This process provides the opportunity to enact that promise.

What will happen next?

The abolition of NHS England and the transfer of some responsibilities back to the DHSC will take time and incur significant costs and disruption. Any benefits are likely to emerge only in the long term.

Before the introduction of NHS England, there were larger regional organisations (strategic health authorities) that were responsible for implementing policy at a regional level. Perhaps the re-emergence of similar regional bodies could smooth the transition from a central NHS England to a more decentralised health service. Läs mer…

The spat between Nigel Farage, the leader of the Reform party, and Rupert Lowe, the MP for Great Yarmouth, burst into the open when Lowe was suspended from the party. The allegation was that he had threatened violence to the party leadership, which he denies. The matter is currently being investigated by the police.

The row does not appear to have affected support for Reform in the polls. A YouGov poll completed on March 10, after Lowe’s suspension, shows Reform on 23% in vote intentions, compared with 24% for Labour and 22% for the Conservatives. It is still a three-party race at the top of British party politics.

In the 2024 general election a good deal of Reform’s support came from protest voters. These are voters who dislike all the mainstream parties and so see a vote for the party as a way of choosing “none of the above”. They are not attached to any party and can easily switch support when circumstances change. So why has support for the party not been affected by this row?

Protest politics and support for Reform

The answer to this question is that while Reform attracted a lot of discontented protest voters in the election, it has since acquired a more stable niche in British party politics. It is primarily a party of English nationalism, equivalent to the SNP in Scotland and Plaid Cymru in Wales. These three parties differ greatly in outlook and politics, but they occupy a similar place in the public’s minds.

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To examine Reform’s support from protest voters we can look at the relationship between spoilt ballots in the 2024 general election and support for the party in the 632 constituencies in England, Scotland and Wales. Normally, observers of British elections pay little attention to spoilt ballots (or “invalid votes” as they are described in official statistics). However, it turns out that they played an important role in the 2024 election which has a bearing on support for Reform.

Research shows that voters who spoil their ballots can be classified into two categories: those who simply make a mistake when filling in the ballot and those who are protesting about the current system.

Mistakes are easy to make in countries with complex electoral systems. However, in Britain, the first-past-the-post system in which everyone has just one vote, ensures that this is not a significant factor because ballot papers are so simple. The bulk of spoilt ballots are protests of various kinds, taking the form of blank ballots, write-in candidates, or abusive messages about parties and candidates.

This is illustrated in the Lancashire seat of Chorley, which is held by the speaker of the House of Commons, Lindsay Hoyle. By tradition none of the major parties challenge the Speaker by campaigning in his constituency. In the election there were no less than 1,198 spoilt ballots in his constituency. It is fairly clear that these were a result of some voters feeling disenfranchised by the absence of their preferred party on the ballot paper.

The relationship between the Reform vote share and the number of spoilt ballots in constituencies in the 2024 election

Protest voting takes different forms.
P Whiteley, CC BY-ND

There is a strong negative relationship (a correlation of -0.46) between the share of a constituency vote that went to Reform in 2024 and the number of ballots spoiled in that constituency. Where people were voting Reform, in other words, fewer people were spoiling their ballots. The implication is that the party picked up votes from people who would normally spoil their ballots or would not have voted at all if Reform had not stood in their constituency. These are the protest voters.

Identity politics and support for Reform

Not all support for Reform came from protest voters, however. The chart below compares the percentage of Reform voters with those who identified as English in the 2021 census in England. There is a strong relationship between the two measures (a correlation of 0.66). The more English identifiers there are in a constituency, the greater support for Reform. In effect, Reform has become an English national party.

The relationship between Reform voting and English identity in 2024

An English national party in the making.
P Whiteley, CC BY-ND

National identities can change over time, but the process of change is slow. There has been a growth in “Englishness” at the expense of “Britishness” over time and this is undoubtedly reinforcing support for Reform.

It means the party has a relatively solid base of supporters to rely on in future elections. While the row between the party’s leader and one of his MPs could play out in any number of different directions at this early stage, it would be wrong to suggest that Reform isn’t thinking big picture and long term.

Farage has clearly learnt from his past and will not let his current party disintegrate into chaos like UKIP or the Brexit party before it. Läs mer…

While Donald Trump’s special envoy was en route to Moscow to talk about a possible ceasefire deal with his opposite numbers in the Kremlin, Vladimir Putin enjoyed a meet-up with his old friend Alexander Lukashenko, the president of Belarus, and the atmosphere was reportedly congenial.

According to the Guardian’s contemporaneous report, the pair even shared a macabre joke at a press conference after their meeting about Europe being “done for”. Putin hastened to clarify that when Lukashenko said if the US and Russia came to an agreement, Europe would be “done for” he had of course been enjoying a pun. Apparently, said Putin, “pipeline in Russian means also being done for, so this will be to Europe’s benefit, because they will get cheap Russian gas. So they will have a pipeline.”

“That’s what I meant,” said Lukashenko. “Yes, that’s what I thought you did,” Putin replied. Smiles all round from the Russian media audience.

Putin explained that while he’s technically in favour of a ceasefire, there were a few things that needed to be cleared up and that he and Donald Trump would have a phone call to do just that. Top of the list was “removing the root causes of this crisis”, which most observers are translating as Putin maintaining his demand for all four provinces Ukraine that Russian troops currently occupy and an undertaking by Kyiv never to join Nato.

It’s unlikely to meet with the approval of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky. Zelensky has said he thinks that Putin will do “everything he can to drag out the war” – and Putin’s approach appears to bear this out. This accords with what Stefan Wolff and Tetyana Malyarenko wrote in reaction to the news that the US and Ukraine were at last seeing eye to eye, at least on the need for a halt to the killing.

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Wolff and Malyarenko, professors of international security at the University of Birmingham and National University Odesa Law Academy respectively, believe Putin will want to keep hostilities going as long as he can while still keeping in with the US president. They see Russia following a “two-pronged approach” – engaging with the White House over the ceasefire proposal while also pushing for further battlefield gains. They write:

The peculiar set-up of the negotiations also plays into the Kremlin’s hands here. Short of direct talks between Kyiv and Moscow, Washington has to shuttle between them, trying to close gaps between their positions with a mixture of diplomacy and pressure. This has worked reasonably well with Ukraine so far, but it is far less certain that this approach will bear similar fruit with Russia.

Read more:
US and Ukraine sign 30-day ceasefire proposal – now the ball is in Putin’s court

In all this shuttle diplomacy, one question that you hear more rarely is what the Ukrainian public will be prepared to accept. Over the past three years Gerard Toal of Virginia Tech University, John O’Loughlin of the University of Colorado and Kristin M. Bakke of UCL have provided us with some valuable insights based on polling of the Ukrainian public. They believe that while the majority of Ukrainians are war-weary and willing to make concessions, even ceding territory in return for peace, they are not willing to compromise their country’s political independence. They also don’t trust Putin and see the war in existential terms.

And, contrary to what Trump might have the world believe, Zelensky remains a popular leader. In fact the latest poll finds his support up ten points on the previous survey at 67%. (Incidentally, Trump posted on his TruthSocial website recently that Zelensky’s approval rating was 4%.) They conclude:

It will be in large part down to ordinary Ukrainians to shape what happens afterwards. An ugly peace may be accepted by a war-weary population. But if it has little local legitimacy and acceptance, peace is likely to be unsustainable in the long run.

Read more:
Are Ukrainians ready for ceasefire and concessions? Here’s what the polls say

Russia, meanwhile, has weathered the conflict remarkably well, certainly better than the analysts who forecast in the summer of 2022. It that stage, when Ukraine’s counter-offensive was pushing the invaders out of occupied territory, inflicting major casualties and destroying huge amounts of equipment, some observers thought that Russia’s economy would collapse under the weight of defeat and western sanctions.

Not so, writes Alexander Hill of the University of Calgary. Hill, a military historian, observes the ways in which the Russian war machine has adapted to conditions over the past two years, ditching the recklessness which saw it suffer such grievous losses in 2022 and using more conservative tactics coupled with smart adoption of new technology to give it an edge on the battlefield. He concludes: “While the Russian army remains a relatively blunt instrument, it is not as blunt as it was in late 2022 and early 2023.”

Read more:
Why Russia’s armed forces have proven resilient in the war in Ukraine

Turning off US aid

Of course, when the US suspended its intelligence-sharing for a few days last week it was a major boost for the Russians. Without data from US satellite coverage and other intelligence traffic, Ukraine’s defenders were left virtually deaf and blind at a crucial time. It gave Russia the space to push its advantage even further as it races to take more territory ahead of a possible peace deal.

The state of the conflict in Ukraine, March 10 2025.
Institute for the Study of War

It’s a bitter lesson for Ukraine to have to learn at this stage in the conflict, write Dafydd Townley and Matthew Powell, experts in international security and strategy at the University of Portsmouth. They believe relying too heavily on one ally for so much was never going to be a good idea and has been exposed as risky since Donald Trump returned to the White House. Perhaps even more risky, given the personality involved, is Ukraine’s dependence on data from ELon Musk’s Starlink satellite system. Musk himself has boasted that: “My Starlink system is the backbone of the Ukrainian army. Their entire front line would collapse if I turned it off.”

Egotistical self-promotion aside, Musk is probably right about this, but less so when he says there’s no alternative. Townley and Powell believe that it’s in Ukraine’s best interests to look into other satellite systems available to them and note that shares in French-owned satellite company Eutelsat, a European rival to Starlink have recently climbed by almost 400%.

Read more:
The US has lifted its intelligence sharing pause with Ukraine. But the damage may already be done

Many of us who are watching this conflict closely cringed when Trump announced he would cut off military assistance to Ukraine after his (one-sided, it has to be said) shouting match with Volodymyr Zelensky at the end of February. And the announcement that the Pentagon was halting intelligence-sharing as noted above simply made matters worse.

It felt like a spiteful move. Psychologist Simon McCarthy-Jones of Trinity College, Dublin, has written a book about spite which delves into, among other things, exhibitions of spitefulness in the public arena. It’s a fascinating read. A spiteful approach to foreign policy, he writes, is when we abandon what he calls “humanity’s superpower” – cooperation.

Trump’s approach, as exemplified by his treatment of Zelensky and also by his baffling decision to impose tariffs even on his friends and allies, “embraces selfishness, treating international relations as a zero-sum game where there can only be one winner”.

Read more:
Donald Trump’s foreign policy might be driven by simple spite – here’s what to do about it

One of the sticking points between the US and Ukraine has been the question of security guarantees in case of a ceasefire or even a longer-term peace deal. It seems increasingly far-fetched that Ukraine will be allowed to join Nato any time soon, so Nato article 5 protections, which would mean that all other member states would be obliged to come to its defence, will not be an issue.

Trump’s vice-president, J.D. Vance, has suggested that if Ukraine allows US companies access to its mineral resources this would in itself be a security guarantee feels equally improbable. And, in any case, how valuable have US security guarantees been in the past, asks historian Ian Horwood, of York St John University. Horwood pints to the Paris Peace accords of 1973 in which the Nixon administration promised to underwrite South Vietnam’s continued security, while withdrawing US combat troops. Within two years, North Vietnamese tanks were rolling into Saigon.

More recently the Doha agreement between the first Trump administration and the Taliban was made without involving the Afghan government and didn’t even last long enough for US and Nato troops to get out of Kabul. This sorry history will no doubt have given Zelensky food for thought.

Read more:
What is the value of US security guarantees? Here’s what history shows

Ukraine’s mineral wealth

All the while many of us have been asking what’s so special about Ukraine’s minerals. We’ve long known about the country as the “bread basket of Europe”, but what is not as widely understood is Ukraine’s mineral wealth. Geologist Munira Raji of the University of Plymouth, says Ukraine has deposits containing 22 of 34 critical minerals identified by the European Union as essential for energy security. This, she says, positions Ukraine among the world’s most resource-rich nations.

Where Ukraine’s minerals are and how much is in areas occupied by Russia.
Conflict and Environment Observatory: www.ceobs.org

Much of this cornucopia of geological booty is contained in what is known as the “Ukrainian shield” which sits underneath much of the country, writes Raji. Here she walks us through the riches beneath Ukraine’s soil and why America is so keen to get its hands on them.

Read more:
What’s so special about Ukraine’s minerals? A geologist explains

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The research team at the Atapuerca archaeological sites in Burgos, Spain, has just broken its own record by discovering, for the third time, the oldest human in Western Europe.

The team did so for the first time in 1994, when they unearthed the remains of a new human species, which they named Homo antecessor, at the TD6 level of the Gran Dolina site. These fossils, dated to around 900,000 years ago, challenged the previous notion that the earliest human presence in Western Europe was no older than half a million years.

Beyond the numbers, Homo antecessor also had a surprisingly modern-looking face. The Gran Dolina hominids exhibited a flat face that was, despite their antiquity, very similar to that of our own species, Homo sapiens. In a beautiful scientific paradox, Homo antecessor showed us the oldest face of modern humanity.

In 2007, in the Sima del Elefante (Pit of the Elephant), a site no more than 300 metres from the Gran Dolina, the oldest human in Europe was found once again. This time it was a human jawbone, found in level TE9, dated to approximately 1.2 million years ago.

The new jawbone, catalogued as ATE9-1, had a number of primitive features in the anterior part of the chin region and symphysis, which is logical given its great age. However, on the inner surface of the symphysis, the bone was vertical and more slender than expected, especially in comparison with other contemporary hominids.

Even so, the fossil was too fragmentary to be assigned to any species, or even to confirm or rule out its belonging to Homo antecessor. ATE9-1 was therefore classified as Homo sp., a term which recognised its belonging to the genus Homo, but also accepted our inability to refine it further with the evidence available at the time.

Never two without three

In 2022, against all odds, the excavation team at the Sima del Elefante site discovered the left half of a hominid face from level TE7. This fossil was found two and a half metres below the level where the ATE9-1 jawbone had been found, which meant that it was even older.

Over the following two years, our interdisciplinary and multi-institutional team – with substantial support from the Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution (IPHES) and the National Centre for the Investigation of Human Evolution (CENIEH) – devoted itself to studying and restoring the fossil.

We used both classical methods and advanced imaging techniques, including X-ray microtomography, which allowed us to visualise the interior of the fossils and manipulate them digitally without having to touch them. This meant we were able to reconstruct the puzzle, and compare it with other specimens without having to access the original fossils, which are scattered all over the world.

The new fossil was nicknamed “Pink”, an allusion to Pink Floyd’s album The Dark Side of the Moon, which translates into Spanish as “La cara oculta de la luna” – “cara oculta” means “hidden face”. I must also admit that the research team adopted this name in recognition of our colleague Rosa Huguet, researcher at IPHES-CERCA, coordinator of the work at the Sima del Elefante site, and the lead author of the study, published in the journal Nature – “Rosa” is Spanish for “pink”.

Archaeological excavation at level TE7 of the Sima del Elefante site (Sierra de Atapuerca, Burgos).
Maria D. Guillén / IPHES-CERCA.

Pink’s rugged face

The main conclusion of study just published in Nature is that Pink does not belong to the species Homo antecessor. The new fossil presents clear differences in the facial area, which is more robust and projected forward, in clear contrast with the slender face of the Gran Dolina hominids. Furthermore, we believe that in Pink the nose area was flattened and sunken, similar to that of the species Homo erectus and other non-human primates.

However, ATE7-1, as Pink was officially catalogued, also has some characteristics that do not allow us to classify it directly as H. erectus, such as its comparatively narrower and shorter face shape.

In view of these features, the Atapuerca team has decided to classify Pink as “Homo affinis erectus” (abbreviated as H. aff. erectus). This term recognises its similarities to H. erectus, but leaves open the possibility that it may belong to another species altogether.

The value of Atapuerca

This discovery reveals the existence of a human species that, until now, had not been documented in Europe. The European Pleistocene family photo album previously included H. antecessor, Neanderthals and modern humans. We can now add the slightly blurred photograph of a new relative, in the hope that further studies and more fossils will bring it into sharper focus.

The discovery also leads us to reflect on the research that can and should be done. There is no doubt that Atapuerca is an exceptionally rich archaeological and palaeontological site. For years now, the caves in Burgos have shown their ability to capture evidence, however scarce and fragmentary, of each and every one of the periods in which Europe was inhabited.

While luck does have a part to play in Atapuerca it is, above all else, tenacity and commitment that have made it such a significant area. Nothing is left to chance, and the site is proof that when you take science seriously, it yields results. In order for research in Atapuerca to prosper, it has taken time and constant dedication, both from the researchers and from the institutions that support it and ensure its sustainability.

Let us hope that this achievement will give us the encouragement we need to continue to look towards new horizons. Läs mer…

When you come home from a run or a sweaty gym session, do you immediately fling your clothes into the washing machine for a hot cycle? Or do you leave them on a chair (or the floordrobe) so you can wear them again tomorrow?

Earlier this year, the French government caused a stir with advice about how often you should wash your clothes. For sports clothes, it recommends up to three wears before you wash them.

This stems from legitimate environmental concerns – each laundry cycle consumes significant water and energy. Frequent washing can also degrade fabrics more quickly, contributing to textile waste.

But what about our health? If the thought of rewearing your stinky t-shirt or damp sports bra makes you squeamish, here’s what you need to know.

Sports clothes and sweat

In the past, exercise clothing was usually made from natural fibres (mainly cotton). Now, it’s mostly made of high-performance synthetic fabrics. These are designed to manage moisture, regulate temperature, improve breathability and control odour.

However research has shown this kind of exercise clothing, particularly synthetic fabrics, can harbour significant amounts of bacteria after just one use.

Polyester traps moisture, creating the warm, humid micro-environments bacteria prefer.

When clothing is damp, including from sweat, bacteria multiplies substantially much faster. There is a direct correlation between how much bacteria is present and how intense the smell is.

However, research shows innovations in textiles, such as the integration of silver nanoparticles in fibres, essential oil-based treatments, long-lasting antimicrobial treatments and structural fibre innovations are are making garments more durable and better at controlling bacteria.

So, is it safe to rewear gym clothes?

This depends on several factors:

Fabric type

Natural fibres such as cotton multiply fewer odour-causing bacteria than synthetics. So if you wear these fabrics to exercise in, they may last a few wears before needing a wash.

Exercise intensity and sweat level

Low-intensity activities that generate minimal or low sweat (including gentle yoga or walking), may allow for more re-wears than high-intensity workouts, as bacterial proliferation correlates directly with moisture levels in fabrics.

(In fact, the French government advice acknowledges how often you wash your sports clothes depends on how much you sweat.)

Season

Climate (temperature, humidity and airflow) significantly affects how much bacteria grows on fabrics. So it may be more reasonable to wash your clothes less in cooler months, when you sweat less.

Personal health

Some people should exercise greater caution rewearing gym clothes. For example, people with skin conditions, compromised immune systems and those prone to skin infections.

How often you wash exercise clothes can depend on the season and how much you sweat.
Ricardo Mattei/Shutterstock

So, if you’re wearing a cotton t-shirt and shorts do something light – such as a walk in the cool morning air – you might get away with wearing them again once or twice (especially if you air them properly between use).

But synthetic performance wear, or any clothes you wear to do moderate or intense workouts, should be washed after each use (a cold wash cycle is fine). This is particularly important for garments in contact with high-bacteria areas such as underarms, groin or feet.

Tips for clothes between wears:

Turn garments inside-out (this exposes the bacteria to the air) and hang them up immediately after exercise
Ensure items are completely dry before storing
Store in well-ventilated areas, never in closed containers such as a washing hamper or bag
When possible, hang clothes in the sun – brief UV exposure provides natural antimicrobial benefits
Keep items you’ve worn away from clean clothes.

The bottom line

In the end, it’s up to personal choice – each of us has to weigh up the environmental benefits with potential health concerns and exercise habits.

But some items should always be washed after each use: sports bras and underwear, socks, anything visibly soiled or smelly, and any clothing worn during high-intensity workouts or in hot weather. Läs mer…

A battle is underway on the mine sites in Western Australia’s remote Pilbara region. Unions are keen to get back into the iron ore industry after decades on the outer. Mining companies are desperate to keep them out.

At Rio Tinto site Paraburdoo, where both residential and fly-in-fly-out (FIFO) workers are employed, the Western Mine Workers Alliance announced on Thursday it had the signatures necessary to demonstrate majority support for enterprise bargaining. Over 400 workers had signed on.

Once ratified by the Fair Work Commission, the company will be obliged to negotiate an enterprise agreement with the union.

This is huge news, as enterprise agreements have been rare in the industry for many decades. Workers are generally on individual common law contracts which pay higher than the award but lack transparency and have no guaranteed yearly pay rise.

Many workers are FIFO, working 12-hour work shifts. The two weeks on, one week off roster is known colloquially as the “divorce roster”.

Unions are campaigning at Paraburdoo, as well as other Rio Tinto and BHP sites, for the option of “even time” rosters of one week on, one week off. These rosters have lower pay, however, due to working fewer hours per week on average.

Workers want better conditions

Long hours, extended periods away from home and a lack of autonomy can be a poisonous cocktail.

According to a study prepared for the WA government, about 30% of WA mining workers have “high or very high levels of psychological distress”.

Many WA mining workers operate on fly in, fly out rosters.
King Ropes Access/Shutterstock

Another study of FIFO workers mainly from WA found the likelihood of workers experiencing high or very high levels of mental distress was increased by a factor of four when they felt “very or extremely stressed by their immediate supervisors”.

The problem with insecure work

Job insecurity affects a significant proportion of the workforce. Sexual harassment plagues the industry and in some cases is linked to insecure work.

Haul truck driver Astacia Stevens testified to a parliamentary inquiry that her supervisor told her “if you want your shirt [a permanent position], you have to get on your knees first”.

She refused and was later sacked. What Stevens characterised as an anti-union culture had made her “reluctant to join” her union.

There is now an historic class action against BHP and Rio Tinto, alleging “widespread and systemic sexual harassment and gender discrimination over the past two decades” nationwide.

Unionists are also campaigning on pay, saying recent pay rises haven’t kept up with inflation.

Many workers are on contracts which may not have a guaranteed yearly pay rise.
Alan Porritt/AAP

The rise and fall of union power in the Pilbara mines

The Pilbara iron ore industry today has few union members, but used to be a bastion of militant unionism. In its periods of strength and subsequent decline, from the 1970s to the 1990s, the story of Pilbara iron ore unionism mirrors that of Australian unionism more broadly, but in an exaggerated and time-compressed way.

Unions improved work in the 1970s. Low pay, long hours, and “soggy” food were the norm when the Pilbara iron ore industry started in the 1960s. Union pressure changed this. Shifts were reduced to eight hours and workers gained a say over the work process.

Across Australia, the union movement was confident and militant in the 1970s. Yet the Pilbara was particularly so.

While the average Western Australian worker in 1973 went on strike for a quarter of a day, the average Pilbara iron ore worker struck for just over 11 days in that year.

One union delegate, interviewed as part of my PhD research, recounted:

We had industrial muscle and we used it. There was no fear.

Workers’ meetings on site would decide what issues to take up, when to strike and for how long. Often, union officials would only be told afterwards.

While strikes often provoked the ire of management and politicians, they dramatically improved workers’ lives. Unionists campaigned on community issues and even set up a cooperative during the 1979 Hamersley Iron strike.

Workers lived in towns near mine sites, and socialised together after hours, some playing sport every night of the week.

The unions were pushed out

In 1986, Robe River (now owned by Rio Tinto) broke with the other iron ore companies and launched a full-frontal attack on unions. In spite of expectations, unions did not adopt a strike strategy to defend themselves and lost out.

Two years later, amid industrial action and a divided management, Mount Newman Mining (now part of BHP) tried and failed to do the same thing. That company did not de-unionise until 1999.

During the mining boom of the 2000s, the Pilbara mines were a union wasteland, despite rebuilding efforts.

In the ten-week Hamersley Iron strike in 1979, workers staved off attacks on union influence and won a 30% pay rise.
Calistemon, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

What could a renewed union presence mean?

Just last year, BHP train drivers showed how a renewed union presence might address these issues. They are a rare example of unionisation in the industry today, as I write in my book.

On Monday February 12 2024, workers voted for a 24-hour strike on the Friday if their demands weren’t met. At 11am on the Thursday, BHP came to the table to avert the strike. Pay was increased by an initial 4%, and then 4% a year over the following four years.

Rosters are now the even time (two weeks on, two weeks off) roster the workers fought for. The agreement is based on an average 42-hour week, not the 56-hour average work week (for lower pay) that is standard for many across the industry.

This is the context in which hundreds of Pilbara workers are joining their unions and fighting for enterprise agreements. Läs mer…

Earlier this week, Saturn gained a whopping 128 new official moons, as the International Astronomical Union recognised discoveries from a team of astronomers led by Edward Ashton at the Academia Sinica in Taiwan. The sixth planet from the Sun now has a grand total of 274 moons, the most of any planet in the Solar System.

The discovery has raised a lot of questions. How do you spot moons, and why hadn’t anybody seen these ones already? Doesn’t Jupiter have the most moons? What are they going to call all these moons? Are there more out there? And what exactly makes something a moon, anyway?

Two moons, Enceladus and Janus, hover over Saturn’s rings. This image was taken by the Cassini mission.
NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute

These new discoveries cement Saturn’s place as the winner of the Solar System’s moon competition, with more confirmed moons than all of the other planets combined. But it hasn’t always been this way.

Jupiter’s four largest moons – Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto – were the first ever discovered orbiting another planet. They were spotted by Galileo Galilei more than 400 years ago, in 1610. Saturn’s first known moon, Titan, was discovered by Dutch astronomer Christiaan Huygens 45 years later.

Jupiter’s four largest moons: Io, Europe, Ganymede and Callisto. These images were taken by the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) on the New Horizons spacecraft.
NASA/JHU-APL/Southwest Research Institute

The new batch of 128 moons was discovered by stacking images from the Canada France Hawaii telescope. Some of Saturn’s other moons were discovered by space voyages, and some during what are called “ring-plane crossings”.

When the Voyager 1 spacecraft passed by Saturn, it took images that were used to discover the moon Atlas. The Cassini Mission later discovered seven new Saturnian moons.

A ring-crossing is where Saturn’s rings seem to disappear from our point of view here on Earth. This is when Saturn is at just the right angle so we’re looking at the rings exactly side-on (that is, when we can only see the edge of the rings).

Titan was discovered during a ring-plane crossing, and so were 12 other moons. Saturn’s rings will be edge-on twice in 2025, in March and November.

Hubble Space Telescope images of the 1995 Saturn ring-plane crossing. In the lower image we can see Saturn with its ring edge-on, nearly disappearing. Two of Saturn’s moons can be seen as bright dots in the very thin ring.
Reta Beebe (New Mexico State University), D. Gilmore, L. Bergeron (STScI), NASA/ESA, Amanda S. Bosh (Lowell Observatory), Andrew S. Rivkin (Univ. of Arizona/LPL), the HST High Speed Photometer Instrument Team (R.C. Bless, PI), and NASA/ESA

The moon race

From 2019 to 2023, Jupiter and Saturn were fighting for first place in the moon race.

In 2019, Saturn surpassed Jupiter with the discovery of 20 new moons. This took the count to 82 for Saturn and 79 for Jupiter.

Just a few years later, in February 2023, Jupiter took the lead with 12 new moons, beating Saturn’s 83 moons at the time. Only a short time later, still in 2023, the same astronomers who discovered the recent 128 moons discovered 62 moons orbiting Saturn. This placed the ringed planet firmly in the lead.

Elsewhere in the Solar System, Earth has one moon, Mars has two, Jupiter has 95, Uranus has 28 and Neptune has 16, for a total of 142 moons. We only need to discover ten more moons around Saturn to give it double the number of all the other planets combined.

Regular or irregular?

The newly discovered moons are all small. Each one is only a few kilometres across. If something that small can be a moon, what really counts as a moon?

NASA tells us “naturally formed bodies that orbit planets are called moons”, but even asteroids can have moons. We crashed a spacecraft into an asteroid’s moon in 2022. Earth has had a few mini-moons, some only a couple of metres in size. The line of what is and isn’t a moon is a bit hazy.

Moons orbiting planets in the Solar System can be either “regular” or “irregular”. The new moons are all irregular.

One of Saturn’s irregular moons, Phoebe. Phoebe was discovered in 1898 and was the first irregular moon of Saturn ever discovered, This image was taken by the Cassini mission.
NASA/JPL

Regular moons are formed around a planet at the same time as the planet itself forms. Irregular moons are thought to be small planets (planetesimals) that are captured by a planet as it finishes forming. They are then broken into pieces by collisions.

Regular moons tend to orbit their planets in nice, circular orbits around the equator. Irregular moons typically orbit in big ovals further away from planets, and at a range of angles. Saturn has 24 regular moons and 250 irregular moons.

Studying these moons can tell us about how moons form, and reveal clues about how the Solar System formed and evolved.

Saturn’s rings are made of small chunks of ice and rock. Astronomers think they formed out of pieces of comets, asteroids and moons that were torn apart by Saturn’s gravity.

So for Saturn in particular, irregular moons can tell us more about the formation of its beautiful rings.

What’s in a name?

Names of astronomical objects are governed by the International Astronomical Union (IAU). Originally, all moons in the Solar System were given names from Greco-Roman mythology.

But the large number of moons, particularly of Saturn and Jupiter, means the IAU has expanded to giants and gods from other mythology. And it’s all about the details. If binary moons are discovered, they are required to be given names of twins or siblings.

Saturn’s first seven moons were given numbers instead of names. In 1847, John Herschel named them after the Greek Titans. After they ran out of titans and Greek mythological giants, they expanded the naming system to include Inuit and Gallic gods and Norse giants.

Discoverers get to suggest names for moons, and the names they suggest are given priority by the IAU. In the past, there have been competitions to name new moons of Jupiter and Saturn.

With 128 new moons for Saturn, it might take a while to come up with names that follow the IAU rules. Maybe we’ll even see the addition of different mythologies. We’ll have to wait and see. Until then, each moon has a name made of a string of numbers and letters, such as “S/2020 S 27”.

An image of five of Saturn’s moons taken by Cassini. The moons from left to right are: Janus, Pandora, Enceladus, Mimas, and Rhea.
NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute

Will we find more moons?

Without a solid definition of what a moon is, it’s hard to say when (or if) we will ever finish finding them. Everyone agrees we shouldn’t call every single chunk of rock in Saturn’s rings a moon, but exactly where to draw the line isn’t clear.

That said, there is probably a limit to the number of moon-like objects astronomers are likely to want to add to the list. Edward Ashton, who led the discovery of the new moons, doesn’t think we’ll be finding too many new moons until our technology improves. Läs mer…