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You have probably heard the saying that the eyes are the windows to the soul, but now it turns out that they are also connected to how we breathe. Scientists have long studied the size of our pupils to understand attention, emotion and even medical conditions. But now, new research has surprisingly revealed that they change size in sync with our breathing.

Our pupils are never static; they constantly adjust in response to both external and internal factors. The most well known is that they control how much light enters the eye, just like a camera aperture.

You can easily test this yourself: look into a mirror and shine a light into your eye, and you’ll see your pupils shrink. This process directly affects our visual perception. Larger pupils help us to detect faint objects, particularly in our peripheral vision, while smaller pupils enhance sharpness, improving tasks like reading.

Indeed, this reflex is so reliable that doctors use it to assess brain function. If a pupil fails to react to light, it could signal a medical emergency such as a stroke.

Doctors will check patients’ pupils to see if they’ve had a stroke.
Doodeez

However, it is not just light that our pupils respond to. It’s also well established that our pupils constrict when focusing on a nearby object, and dilate in response to cognitive effort or emotional arousal.

As the German pupil-research pioneer Irene Loewenfeld once said: “Man may either blush or turn pale when emotionally agitated, but his pupils always dilate.”

For this reason, pupil size is often used in psychology and neuroscience research as a measure of mental effort and attention.

The fourth response

For many decades, these three kinds of pupil response were the only ones that scientists were sure existed. Now, myself and our team of researchers at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm and the University of Groningen in the Netherlands have confirmed that breathing is a fourth.

In what will now be known as “pupillary respiratory phase response”, pupils tend to be largest during exhalation and smallest around the start of inhalation. Unlike other pupil responses, this one originates exclusively in the body and of course happens constantly. Equally uniquely, it covers both dilation and constriction.

There had in fact been anecdotal hints of a connection between breathing and our pupils for more than 50 years. But when the team reviewed past studies the evidence was inconclusive at best. Given how widely pupil size is used in both medicine and research, we realised it was crucial to investigate this further.

We confirmed through a series of five experiments with more than 200 participants that pupil size fluctuates in sync with breathing, and also that this effect is remarkably robust. In these studies, we invited the participants to our lab and recorded their pupil size and breathing pattern while they were relaxing or performing tasks on a computer screen.

We systematically varied the other key pupil-response factors throughout the study – lighting, fixation distance and mental effort required for tasks. In all cases, the way that breathing affects the pupils remained constant.

Whichever way you breathe, the effect on pupil size remains the same.
LuckyStep

Additionally, we examined how different breathing patterns affected the response.

Participants were instructed to breathe solely through their nose or mouth and to adjust their breathing rate, as well as slowing it down and speeding it up. In all cases, the same pattern emerged: pupil size remained smallest around the onset of inhalation and largest during exhalation.

What now

This discovery changes the way we think about both breathing and vision. It suggests a deeper connection between breathing and the nervous system than we previously realised. The next big question is whether these subtle changes in pupil size affect how we see the world.

The fluctuations are only fractions of a millimetre, which is less than the pupil response to light, but similar to the pupil response to mental effort or arousal. The size of these fluctuations is theoretically large enough to influence our visual perception. It may therefore be that our vision subtly shifts within a single breath between optimising for detecting faint objects (with larger pupils) and distinguishing fine details (with smaller pupils).

In addition, just as the pupillary light response is used as a diagnostic tool, changes in the link between pupil size and breathing could be an early sign of neurological disorders.

This research is part of a broader effort to understand how our internal bodily rhythms influence perception. Scientists are increasingly finding that our brain doesn’t process external information in isolation – it integrates signals from within our bodies, too. For example, information from our heart and gastric rhythms have also been suggested to enhance or hinder the processing of incoming sensory stimuli.

If our breathing affects how our pupils change, could it also shape how we perceive the world around us? This opens the door to new research on how bodily rhythms shape perception – one breath at a time. Läs mer…

In the weeks ahead of the German election, the far-right party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) consistently polled around 20%. For the first time, the AfD poses a challenge to mainstream parties’ longstanding strategy of isolating the far right.

The rise of the AfD is striking, given the country’s history of authoritarianism and National Socialism during the 1930s and 1940s. For decades, far-right movements were generally stigmatised and treated as pariahs. Political elites, mainstream parties, the media and civil society effectively marginalised the far right and limited its electoral prospects.

The AfD’s breakthrough in the 2017 federal election shattered this status quo. Winning 12.6% of the vote and securing 94 Bundestag seats, it became Germany’s third-largest party — unlocking viable political space to the right of the centre-right party CDU/CSU for the first time in the postwar era.

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The AfD was founded in 2013 by disaffected CDU members. This included economics professors Bernd Lucke and Joachim Starbatty, and conservative journalists Konrad Adam and Alexander Gauland. It began as a single-issue, anti-euro party advocating Germany’s exit from the Eurozone.

Dubbed a “party of professors”, it gained credibility through the support of academics and former mainstream politicians, lending it an “unusual gravitas” for a protest party. While nativist elements were arguably present from the start, the AfD was not initially conceived as a far-right party.

When it first ran for the Bundestag in 2013, its four-page manifesto focused exclusively on dissolving the Eurozone. At the time, the party advocated political asylum for the persecuted and avoided harsh anti-immigrant or anti-Islam rhetoric, cultivating more of a “bourgeois” image.

This helped the AfD build what political scientist Elisabeth Ivarsflaten has called a reputational shield — a legacy used to deflect social stigma and accusations of extremism.

Initially, the AfD distanced itself from far-right parties in neighbouring countries. However, successive leadership changes between 2015 and 2017 saw the party adopt a more hardline position, particularly on immigration, Islam and national identity. By 2016, its platform had largely aligned with those of populist radical right parties elsewhere.

Far-right views

Today, the party can unequivocally be classified as far right. This umbrella term captures the growing links between “(populist) radical right” (illiberal-democratic) and “extreme right” (anti-democratic) parties and movements. Ideologically, the far right is characterised by nativism and authoritarianism.

Nativism is a xenophobic form of nationalism, which holds that non-native elements form a threat to the homogeneous nation-state. In Germany, nativism carries a historical legacy. “Völkisch nationalism” was one of the core ideas of the 19th and early 20th centuries that was broadly adopted by National Socialism to justify deportations and, ultimately, the Holocaust.

Völkisch ideology is based on the essentialist idea that the German people are inextricably connected to the soil. Thus, other people cannot be part of the völkisch community.

The AfD has evolved into a far-right party by continuously radicalising its positions. It acted like a Trojan horse, importing völkisch nationalist ideology into the parliamentary and public arena, which used to be blocked by the gatekeeping mechanisms of German democracy.

The AfD carved out a niche for itself by advocating stricter anti-immigration policies. This came in response to the so-called “refugee crisis”, when then-Chancellor Angela Merkel welcomed more than a million asylum seekers into Germany. At its campaign kickoff rally in January 2025, AfD’s chancellor candidate Alice Weidel vowed to implement “large-scale repatriations” (or “remigration”) of immigrants.

AfD co-chairwoman Alice Weidel delivers a speech at the meeting of the German Bundestag.
Filip Singer/EPA-EFE

The party advocates a return to a blood-based citizenship, insisting that, with very few exceptions for well-assimilated migrants, citizenship can only be determined by ancestry and bloodline rather than birthright.

Additionally, the party upholds the white, nuclear family as an ideal and has pledged to dismiss university professors accused of promoting “leftist, woke gender ideology”. The party also calls for the immediate lifting of sanctions against Russia and opposes weapons deliveries to Ukraine.

In recent years, the party has embraced the far-right strategy of flooding the media and public discourse with controversy, misinformation and inflammatory rhetoric, to dominate attention and transgress traditional political norms.

A striking example is former AfD-leader Alexander Gauland’s 2018 claim that the 12 years of Nazi rule were “mere bird shit in over 1,000 years of successful German history”. With this remark, he sought to reframe modern Germany as a continuation of its pre-1933 history, while downplaying the significance of the Nazi era.

Normalising the AfD

Until recently, the far right was consistently excluded by mainstream political parties. It was a founding myth of the old Federal Republic of Germany that democratic forces do not cooperate with the far right. At least on the parliamentary level, this worked quite well as a part of Germany’s “militant democracy”.

However, the political firewall — the Brandmauer — has started to crumble. The AfD has since celebrated the election of its first mayors at the local level.

The success of the AfD has especially been fuelled by the narrative of a “refugee crisis” in Germany. Harsh political rhetoric about migration has contributed to the party’s electoral success, as well as mainstream adoption of some of its positions.

Oddly enough, the AfD is especially successful in rural, remote areas with low levels of migration. It is weak in more globalised, university-oriented urban areas.

Read more:
German party leaders are united against immigration – but there is little evidence for a key part of their argument

Ahead of the 2025 elections, Friedrich Merz, the lead candidate of the CDU, broke a longstanding political taboo when his proposal to tighten asylum policies narrowly passed in the Bundestag with backing from the AfD. Meanwhile, German media have increasingly treated AfD representatives as legitimate political contenders.

Protests in Berlin against the cooperation between Christian Democrats and the far-right AfD party.
Hannibal Hanschke/EPA-EFE

Once marginalised in political debates, they are now regularly invited to talk shows. And they have received international legitimacy from figures such as US vice-president J.D. Vance, and X owner Elon Musk.

This election may give an indication of how far the AfD’s normalisation will go and how it will affect Germany’s political future. Beyond electoral success, the main question will be to what extent mainstream parties will incorporate far-right ideas in their political agenda.

What is already clear, however, is that the political landscape has shifted. The boundaries that once kept the far right at the margins are no longer as firm as they once were Läs mer…

At a time of political tension in Germany, the Bauhaus – arguably one of most influential architecture, art and design schools in the world – has become the target of far-right attacks.

Hans-Thomas Tillschneider, a member of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) and a member of the regional parliament of Saxony-Anhalt in eastern Germany, has blamed his area’s economic problems on Bauhaus modernism.

His unlikely diagnosis came in response to the regional conservative CDU government’s “think modern” campaign, which seeks to attract investment into the area and cites the Bauhaus movement as an example of locally grown excellence.

Tillschneider asserts that for the area’s economic stagnation to be resolved “we do not need to think modern, we need to think conservatively.” He rejects Bauhaus ideas as diffused with communist ideology. With these attacks, Tillschneider has started a quasi-re-enactment of a historical culture war over German national identity and social anxieties.

Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius.
Wikipedia/Louis Held

Founded in 1919 by architect Walter Gropius in the German city of Weimar, the Bauhaus and its staff shared a programme of material utopianism. This was expressed via an explorative workshop concept that departed from traditional modes of teaching.

Such avant-garde practices moved the Bauhaus politically to the left, which would make it vulnerable to ideological attack throughout the Weimar republic, Germany’s first (and failed) democracy.

In the contentious debate about national identity that followed the end of the monarchy in 1918, Bauhaus artists inhabited an uncomfortable position between two schools of thought among the educated elite.

One side had opened up to modern aesthetics (such as impressionism and expressionism). The other – the conservatives – instead embraced an artistic nationalism that had manifested with German unification in 1871.

They saw “true art” as coming from the people and in turn educating them as loyal citizens. Aesthetically, conservatives found these values expressed in Weimar classicism. Curiously, given the emphasis on art by the people, this was a rather exclusive, high-brow form of literature, theatre and visual arts.

Bauhaus ideas, instead, were anti-bourgeois, avant-garde and experimental, while at the same time postulating the importance of creating art for everyone to access and enjoy. Such democratisation of style, however, was difficult to achieve, and most of what the Bauhaus produced remained unaffordable to the masses. Nevertheless, these clashing visions politicised culture during the interwar years.

The reconstructed Bauhaus school in Dessau.
Wikipedia/Lelikron, CC BY-SA

In 1925, the school had to move from Weimar to Dessau (in Saxony-Anhalt) after it lost its funding. This was the fallout of a dispute with the conservative political parties that ruled the city at the time.

In Dessau, the Bauhaus teachers built a school building that followed their modern aesthetic principles. Despite repeated attempts by Gropius to depoliticise the Bauhaus by pointing to its aesthetic pluralism, internal debates about the place of architecture in society and politics continued.

The point of contention was the concept of “New Objectivity” (Neue Sachlichkeit) which found expression in Neues Bauen: modularised construction which introduced the industrialised pre-fabrication of building parts in a turn away from traditional crafts.

Eventually, Gropius left the Bauhaus and in his place came the openly socialist architect Hannes Meyer. After taking over as director in 1928, he repoliticised the school and moved it back to the left.

In the heated political climate of the late Weimar republic, the Bauhaus encountered a new existential threat. When the Nazis took over in local elections in 1931, they requested the destruction of the Bauhaus school.

The Bauhaus moved again in 1932, this time to Berlin, where it continued as a private institution to avoid renewed conflict with the ever more powerful Nazis. Nevertheless, when Adolf Hitler seized power in early 1933, the school and its staff became victims of the Nazis’ anti-socialist measures.

The Bauhaus school closed on July 20 1933 and its staff dispersed, often to faraway places. Many went to the United States, where they continued in the legacy of the “Bauhaus spirit” by joining the international modernism movement that became the defining Western aesthetic in the 1950s.

Tillschneider, pictured in 2021.
EPA

Although the artistic influences and expressions had remained diverse throughout the lifetime of the school, postwar discourse has streamlined it to simple geometric shapes, a preference for the colours white, blue, red and yellow, and an emphasis on horizontal lines and perspectives.

The Nazis had labelled Bauhaus aesthetics as “degenerate”. In the cold war era, the socialist East German government called out Bauhaus modernism and its disciples as cosmopolitan in the pejorative sense.

They were accused of abandoning German national heritage for the sake of international “formalism”, elevating form – as pertaining to function – over cultural content. Tillschneider has put it even more provocatively: “They denied man’s connection to land and his cultural roots”. While a huge interpretative overstretch, these statements do not come as a surprise.

This year marks the centennial of the move to Dessau, where the school building still stands proudly as a Unesco world heritage site. Tillschneider used this moment to perpetuate the culture war that the AfD has become known for over the past decade.

He is equating the CDU to an oversimplified depiction of the Bauhaus legacy – one that is anti-crafts, anti-bourgeois and internationalist – he implies his political rivals are against German tradition and culture. These are the nativist sentiments that fuel the AfD. It is a strategy of cheap wins at the expense of the electorate’s anxieties about Germany’s cultural and national identity. Läs mer…

When three former PayPal employees, Steve Chen, Chad Hurley and Jawed Karim, registered the domain www.youtube.com 20 years ago, they wanted to create an online dating site based around videos of users. In 2016, Chen told the SXSW conference: “We thought dating would be the obvious choice.”

But despite offering to pay users to upload videos of themselves, nobody came forward. When their concept failed, they hatched a new idea for the same domain: “OK, forget the dating aspect, let’s just open it up to any video,” said Chen.

What followed was revolutionary. Having started as a small project, YouTube rapidly grew into one of the most influential platforms in media history, reshaping journalism, media, entertainment and social interactions.

Its first-ever video, “Me at the Zoo” – featuring Karim casually describing the elephants at San Diego Zoo – set the tone for democratised content creation, and also the type of content that would become so significant for YouTube: vlogging – where people communicate their own blog-style entries on video, often delivered direct to camera.

The simplicity of uploading and sharing any type of video, combined with the potential of online content going viral, made the platform an instant hit.

In October 2006, just over a year after the video platform’s launch, Google acquired YouTube for US$1.65 billion (£1.3 billion) – a move that proved one of the most significant tech acquisitions in history. The platform embarked on monetising its growing library of content via online advertising, not only generating huge profits for Google but also providing content creators with a share.

The increasing profits prompted content creators to deliver better content.

Whereas traditional media outlets such as television controlled video production and distribution, YouTube suddenly allowed anyone with a camera to share their voice. This shift led to the rise of independent creators, from beauty vloggers and gamers to educators and activists.

And so the platform has given birth to an entirely new profession: the YouTuber. Early pioneers built massive audiences, inspiring a new wave of content creators who could earn a living through ad revenue, sponsorships and crowdfunding.

In the UK in 2010, for example, a group of young content creators nicknamed “Brit Crew” became popular on YouTube. They were relatable, fun to watch, and uploaded videos regularly.

Today, the highest-paid YouTuber worldwide, according to Forbes magazine, is MrBeast, with more than 360 million subscribers and 10 billion views. In reality, MrBeast is Jimmy Donaldson, a content creator and businessman from Greenville, North Carolina. But the views his videos attract are still nowhere near the most-watched YouTube video of all time, “Baby Shark”, with 15 billion views.

Baby Shark: the YouTube video with most views to date.

Donaldson has often talked about understanding YouTube metrics and its algorithm as a key component to his success. He particularly pays attention to a measure known as “retention rate”, noting where viewers stop watching to improve his future videos. He says the algorithm prioritises things that are difficult to accomplish, such as getting high retention rates on a long video, over simply getting a large number of views.

MrBeast is emblematic of the rise of influencers on YouTube: content creators with lots of followers who look to them for inspiration and lifestyle tips. Established companies and brands have sought to develop partnerships with key influencers in order to promote products and services to their often huge global audiences.

Overall, detailed audience numbers for YouTube are difficult to come by. However, Statista reports that the platform now has more than 2.5 billion active monthly users.

Citizen journalism

YouTube also plays a critical role in modern journalism. The platform, along with others such as Facebook and Twitter-X, has allowed citizen journalists to document events in real time, from protests and social movements to natural disasters and political uprisings – especially since YouTube introduced live streaming in 2011.

During major global events such as the Arab Spring and Black Lives Matter protests, influential coverage emerged from people capturing and sharing their footage on YouTube. This shift has challenged traditional news media, which now often relies on user-generated content as a key source of reporting.

Similarly, some major world events are streamed live on YouTube, from election coverage to the Olympics to the Glastonbury music festival. There has also been growth in the popularity of video podcasts on the platform – one of the most popular, the Joe Rogan Experience, attracts millions of views per episode.

Misinformation and conspiracy theories

Despite its success, YouTube has faced significant challenges. The rapid spread of hate speech, misinformation and conspiracy theories has led the platform to implement stricter content moderation policies. In recent years, YouTube says there has been a substantial drop in the number of videos that violate its policies as a result, although some experts say these numbers can be interpreted in different ways.

YouTube also continues to face controversies over its data collection, and how its algorithms reinforce conspiracy “rabbit holes”.

Regulation has become a pressing concern. Governments worldwide are scrutinising YouTube for its role in spreading harmful content. Many countries are discussing how to better protect children online: in the UK, YouTube is the most popular website or app among younger users, used by nearly nine in ten children aged 3-17. (Officially, YouTube does not allow children below the age of 13 to use the platform without supervision, but there are clearly many ways around this for younger users.)

There is a also drive among regulators to ensure fair competition in the digital marketplace, given YouTube’s dominant position.

As YouTube enters its third decade, AI could become a powerful tool for creators – from speeding up the process of adding effects to videos, to creating video content from scratch. YouTube will also face continued competition from short-form video platforms such as TikTok and Instagram.

In my opinion, the growing demand for high-quality, authentic content will shape YouTube’s future. The platform needs to focus on protecting and empowering its creators and their diversity, while nurturing its existing community.

One thing is clear: YouTube has transformed the way we both consume and create media. From its humble beginnings to becoming a cultural phenomenon, YouTube’s 20-year journey is a testament to the power of digital platforms and social media in shaping modern society. Whether it continues growing or evolves into something entirely new, its impact on global culture is undeniable. Läs mer…

Here in Atlanta, the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library and Museum has been part of my daily life for years. Parks and trails surrounding the center connect my neighborhood to the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historical Park downtown and everything in between.

At the end of December 2024, thousands of people walked to the library to pay their respects to the former president as he lay in repose. The cold, snow and darkness of the evening were a stark contrast to the warmth of the volunteers who welcomed us in. Our visit spiraled through galleries exhibiting records of Carter’s life, achievements and lifelong work promoting democracy around the world.

U.S. presidents have been building libraries for more than 100 years, starting with Rutherford B. Hayes. But the urge to shape one’s legacy by building a library runs much deeper. As a scholar of libraries in the Greek and Roman world, I was struck by the similarities between presidential and ancient libraries – some of which were explicitly designed to honor deceased sponsors and played a significant role in their cities.

Trajan’s library

The Ulpian Library, a great library in the center of Rome, was founded by Emperor Trajan, who ruled around the turn of the second century C.E. Referenced often by ancient authors, it could have been the first such memorial library.

Trajan’s Column now stands at the center of Rome.
AP Photo/Pier Paolo Cito

Today, someone visiting Rome can visit Trajan’s Column, a roughly 100-foot monument to his military and engineering achievements after conquering Dacia, part of present-day Romania. A frieze spirals from bottom to top of the column, depicting his exploits. The monument now stands on its own. Originally, however, it was nestled in a courtyard between two halls of the Ulpian Library complex.

Most of what scholars know about the library’s architecture comes from remains of the west hall, an elongated room almost 80 feet long, whose walls were lined with rectangular niches and framed by a colonnade. The niches were lined with marble and appear to have had doors; this is where the books would have been placed. Writers from the first few centuries C.E. describe the library having archival documents about the emperor and the empire, including books made of linen and books bound with ivory.

Trajan dedicated the column in 113 C.E. but died four years later, before the library was complete. Hadrian, his adoptive son and successor, oversaw the shipment of Trajan’s cremated remains back to Rome, where they were placed in Trajan’s Column. Hadrian completed the surrounding library complex in 128 C.E. and dedicated it with two identical funerary inscriptions to his adopted parents, Trajan and Plotina. Scholars Roberto Egidi and Silvia Orlandi have argued that Trajan’s remains could later have been transferred from the column into the library hall.

Memorial model

Either way, I would argue that Trajan’s decision to have his remains included in the library complex, instead of in an imperial mausoleum, established a model adopted by other officials at a smaller scale. In the eastern side of the Roman empire – what is now Turkey – at least two other library-mausoleum buildings have been identified.

One is the library at Nysa on the Maeander, a Hellenistic city named for the nearby river. Under the floor of its entry porch is a sarcophagus with the remains of a man and a woman, possibly the dedicators, that dates to the second century C.E., the time of Hadrian’s reign.

The ruins of the library at Nysa on the Maeander.
Myrsini Mamoli

Another is the Library of Celsus, the most recognizable ancient library today, found in the ancient city of Ephesus. Named after a regional Roman consul and proconsul during the reign of Trajan, the building was founded by Celsus’ son, designed as both a place of learning and a mausoleum.

The library’s ornate, sculpted facade contained life-size female statues, making it an immediately recognizable landmark. Inscriptions identify the statues as the personifications of Celsus’ character, elevating him into a role model: virtue, intelligence, knowledge and wisdom.

Upon entering the room, the funerary character of the library became quite literal. The hall was designed like the Ulpian Library, but a door gave access to a crypt underneath. This held the marble sarcophagus with the remains of Celsus, the patron of the library. The sarcophagus itself was visible from the hall, if one stood in front of the central apse and looked down through two slits in the podium.

An endowment covered the library’s operational expenses in ancient times, as well as annual commemorations on Celsus’ birthday, including the wreathing of the busts and statues and the purchasing of additional books.

The life-size statues on the facade of the Library of Celsus.
Myrsini Mamoli

Power and knowledge

These two provincial libraries highlight how sponsors hoped to be associated with the virtues a library fosters. Books represent knowledge, and by dedicating a library, one asserted his possession of it. Providing access to learning was an instrument of power on its own.

Beyond the handful of memorial libraries, many other ancient Roman public libraries were great cultural centers, including the Forum of Peace in Rome, dedicated by Emperor Vespasian; the Library of Hadrian in Athens; and the Gymnasium in Side, a city in present-day Turkey.

The most magnificent libraries combined access to manuscripts and artworks with spaces for meetings and lectures. Several had great leisure areas, including landscaped sculptural gardens with elaborate water features and colonnaded walkways. Literary sources and material evidence testify to the treasures that were held there: busts of philosophers, poets and other accomplished literary figures; statues of gods, heroes and emperors; treasures confiscated as spoils of war and exhibited in Rome.

A model of how Hadrian’s Library may have looked, complete with a landscaped courtyard.
Joris/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

Like the Ulpian Library itself, they continued the long tradition of Hellenistic public libraries, established by the most famous library of antiquity: the Library of Alexandria. Founded and lavishly endowed by the Hellenistic kings of Egypt, the Ptolemies, the building was meant to portray the king as a patron of intellectual activities and a powerful ruler, collecting knowledge from conquered civilizations.

In ancient Greece and Rome, anybody who could read had access to public libraries. Rules of use varied: For example, literary sources imply that the Ulpian Library in Rome was a borrowing library, whereas an inscription from the Library of Pantainos in Athens explicitly forbid any book to be taken out.

But these buildings were also meant to shape their sponsors’ legacies, portraying them as benevolent and learned. Presidential libraries in the United States today follow the same principle: They become monuments to the former presidents, while giving back to their local communities. Läs mer…

Director Walter Salles’s first feature film since 2012, the Oscar-nominated I’m Still Here is a return to home ground, and a return to strength, for the Brazilian auteur. At 68, Salles reconnects with his youth, telling a story in which he does not figure, but takes up the role of witness to the pain of others.

I’m Still Here is adapted from the autobiographical novel Ainda Estou Aqui by Salles’s contemporary, the writer Marcelo Rubens Paiva. The novel recounts Paiva’s father’s disappearance in 1971, under the repressive dictatorship of Emílio Garrastazu Médici, through the memories of the author’s mother, Eunice Paiva.

In Salles’s film, the Paivas lead an enchanted life in a house facing Leblon beach in Rio de Janeiro, until the long arm of the military regime wrecks their dream.

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Beloved family head, Rubens (Selton Mello), an engineer and congressman secretly collaborating with the underground opposition, is kidnapped by state police under the pretence of a routine interrogation. It then befalls his wife Eunice (Fernanda Torres) to sustain family life and give their children a sense of future while trying to find out what happened to her husband.

It’s the second act of the film, particularly the harrowing yet restrained sequences of Eunice’s days-long detention, that reveal the stakes of the story. Her traumatic experience in jail and increasingly desperate search for her husband afterwards is framed as a transformative journey. It’s one that will culminate 25 years later, when the memory of the disappeared is reinstated in the official archives of the nation’s history.

I’m Still Here adopts a linear style of storytelling and classical three-act structure (stability, disruption, reparation) that serves historical closure, reinforced by the display of the Paiva family’s photographic archive in the closing credits.

This familiar convention takes on a special poignancy in I’m Still Here, where the private archive is a powerful alternative to a discredited “official” media narrative. The reconstruction of everyday life conveys endurance and resistance. This in turn brings to the fore the gendered dynamics of the Paiva household.

Rubens’s underground political activity against the regime means that he leads a double life to which Eunice, for all her loving closeness to her husband, remains ignorant of. This is sorely tested when Rubens disappears. With him the main source of income, it leaves Eunice and the children to cobble together a new existence in São Paulo.

Adopting Eunice’s perspective throughout, the film observes how her relationship with her eldest daughters begins to fracture as they find different ways of coping with traumatic loss and an uncertain future. However, the film stays clear of melodrama, leaving Eunice to internalise the process instead.

In the lead role, the prolific 59-year-old actor Fernanda Torres carries the film as effortlessly in fitted pencil skirts and chic geometric patterns of late 1960s fashion. Her screen chemistry with the slightly younger Selton Mello – they are the perfect couple while happiness lasts – is palpable.

Torres’s controlled, nuanced performance navigates the family’s shift in fortunes with measured calm and steely determination, even as she gradually comes to terms with the fact that she’s on her own.

Brazilian director Walter Salles.
Shutterstock

In this way, the film is a clear-cut tribute to a “feminine” politics of resilience. This matches the preference for a linear biopic over focus on fraught alliances and betrayals that may have determined the course of 1970s political life in Brazil.

Despite its stark subject matter and suffering heroine, the retro pleasures of I’m Still Here form one of the film’s strongest aspects. The measure of the family’s loss is given by a sweeping first act. Despite the all too readable signs of what’s to come (the film opens with Eunice enjoying a solitary swim in crystalline waters, disturbed by the sound of helicopters hovering above), the viewer is invited to live in the joyous present of the Paiva household.

The dynamic camerawork captures the energy of the children, connecting the space of the beach with the open-doors house where Eunice and Rubens act as genial hosts for their friends.

Through references to the vibrant tropicália musical movement the film celebrates and mourns not only the centrality of music to Brazilian cultural life, but the tastes of a cosmopolitan, white liberal middle class (to which Salles also belongs) whose lives and aspirations were cut short by the dictatorship.

Marcello Rubens Paiva.
Harald Krichel / Wikipedia

Torres’s real-life mother, the decorated Brazilian actress Fernanda Montenegro, plays the older Eunice in the film’s closing scenes. The match is near perfect, as they both command the same intense yet guarded look.

Eunice’s character arc signifies the nation’s rise to consciousness. She goes back to study in her forties, becoming a lawyer working on behalf of the rights of indigenous women and in support of the families of the disappeared.

This personal engagement in justice and reparation is blighted by dementia. In 2014, the nonagenarian Eunice played by Montenegro is a silent, wheelchair-bound Alzheimer sufferer. This epilogue, shot in bleached digital textures vividly contrasts with the vibrant memories captured in the (recreated) Super-8 films shot by the Paivas.

As Brazil pulls itself together after the twin catastrophes of COVID and Bolsonarism, I’m Still Here’s cautionary tale for the present may be curtailed by the fact that its emotional core is placed so firmly in mourning its past, depicted as a idyllic moment of happiness and optimism before Brazil was robbed of its future. Läs mer…

Director Walter Salles’s first feature film since 2012, the Oscar-nominated I’m Still Here is a return to home ground, and a return to strength, for the Brazilian auteur. At 68, Salles reconnects with his youth, telling a story in which he does not figure, but takes up the role of witness to the pain of others.

I’m Still Here is adapted from the autobiographical novel Ainda Estou Aqui by Salles’s contemporary, the writer Marcelo Rubens Paiva. The novel recounts Paiva’s father’s disappearance in 1971, under the repressive dictatorship of Emílio Garrastazu Médici, through the memories of the author’s mother, Eunice Paiva.

In Salles’s film, the Paivas lead an enchanted life in a house facing Leblon beach in Rio de Janeiro, until the long arm of the military regime wrecks their dream.

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Beloved family head, Rubens (Selton Mello), an engineer and congressman secretly collaborating with the underground opposition, is kidnapped by state police under the pretence of a routine interrogation. It then befalls his wife Eunice (Fernanda Torres) to sustain family life and give their children a sense of future while trying to find out what happened to her husband.

It’s the second act of the film, particularly the harrowing yet restrained sequences of Eunice’s days-long detention, that reveal the stakes of the story. Her traumatic experience in jail and increasingly desperate search for her husband afterwards is framed as a transformative journey. It’s one that will culminate 25 years later, when the memory of the disappeared is reinstated in the official archives of the nation’s history.

I’m Still Here adopts a linear style of storytelling and classical three-act structure (stability, disruption, reparation) that serves historical closure, reinforced by the display of the Paiva family’s photographic archive in the closing credits.

This familiar convention takes on a special poignancy in I’m Still Here, where the private archive is a powerful alternative to a discredited “official” media narrative. The reconstruction of everyday life conveys endurance and resistance. This in turn brings to the fore the gendered dynamics of the Paiva household.

Rubens’s underground political activity against the regime means that he leads a double life to which Eunice, for all her loving closeness to her husband, remains ignorant of. This is sorely tested when Rubens disappears. With him the main source of income, it leaves Eunice and the children to cobble together a new existence in São Paulo.

Adopting Eunice’s perspective throughout, the film observes how her relationship with her eldest daughters begins to fracture as they find different ways of coping with traumatic loss and an uncertain future. However, the film stays clear of melodrama, leaving Eunice to internalise the process instead.

In the lead role, the prolific 59-year-old actor Fernanda Torres carries the film as effortlessly in fitted pencil skirts and chic geometric patterns of late 1960s fashion. Her screen chemistry with the slightly younger Selton Mello – they are the perfect couple while happiness lasts – is palpable.

Torres’s controlled, nuanced performance navigates the family’s shift in fortunes with measured calm and steely determination, even as she gradually comes to terms with the fact that she’s on her own.

Brazilian director Walter Salles.
Shutterstock

In this way, the film is a clear-cut tribute to a “feminine” politics of resilience. This matches the preference for a linear biopic over focus on fraught alliances and betrayals that may have determined the course of 1970s political life in Brazil.

Despite its stark subject matter and suffering heroine, the retro pleasures of I’m Still Here form one of the film’s strongest aspects. The measure of the family’s loss is given by a sweeping first act. Despite the all too readable signs of what’s to come (the film opens with Eunice enjoying a solitary swim in crystalline waters, disturbed by the sound of helicopters hovering above), the viewer is invited to live in the joyous present of the Paiva household.

The dynamic camerawork captures the energy of the children, connecting the space of the beach with the open-doors house where Eunice and Rubens act as genial hosts for their friends.

Through references to the vibrant tropicália musical movement the film celebrates and mourns not only the centrality of music to Brazilian cultural life, but the tastes of a cosmopolitan, white liberal middle class (to which Salles also belongs) whose lives and aspirations were cut short by the dictatorship.

Marcello Rubens Paiva.
Harald Krichel / Wikipedia

Torres’s real-life mother, the decorated Brazilian actress Fernanda Montenegro, plays the older Eunice in the film’s closing scenes. The match is near perfect, as they both command the same intense yet guarded look.

Eunice’s character arc signifies the nation’s rise to consciousness. She goes back to study in her forties, becoming a lawyer working on behalf of the rights of indigenous women and in support of the families of the disappeared.

This personal engagement in justice and reparation is blighted by dementia. In 2014, the nonagenarian Eunice played by Montenegro is a silent, wheelchair-bound Alzheimer sufferer. This epilogue, shot in bleached digital textures vividly contrasts with the vibrant memories captured in the (recreated) Super-8 films shot by the Paivas.

As Brazil pulls itself together after the twin catastrophes of COVID and Bolsonarism, I’m Still Here’s cautionary tale for the present may be curtailed by the fact that its emotional core is placed so firmly in mourning its past, depicted as a idyllic moment of happiness and optimism before Brazil was robbed of its future. Läs mer…

We are all familiar with elastic materials – just think of a rubber band which can return to its original shape after being stretched.

Humans have used elastic materials for millennia. These days, they’re in everything from optical fibres to aeroplanes and buildings. But until now, scientists haven’t been able to pinpoint exactly how these materials return to their original shape. What happens at the level of their molecules?

Published today in the journal Nature Materials, our new study uses the properties of flexible crystals to understand how interactions between molecules give rise to elasticity. This provides new insight into the model of elasticity developed by English polymath Robert Hooke more than 300 years ago.

Our findings will allow us to develop new ways of designing components for complicated aerospace and building materials or electronic devices.

The mystery of elasticity

A material is elastic if it can return to its original structure after being deformed. For example, a rubber band goes back to its original shape after it’s been stretched. However, it will snap if pulled too hard. This is known as a “non-elastic change” – it means the material can no longer return to its original shape.

The most useful elastic materials can undergo large changes in their structures and still return to their original shape. There are many engineering uses for this. As one example, bridges are designed to move elastically in high winds to prevent them from falling down.

All materials are at least a little bit elastic: they can restore themselves after very small changes in structure. If you shake a piece of paper, it will still lie flat. But if you fold it, the crease is permanent – a non-elastic behaviour that is essential for origami.

Prior to our research, there were two main approaches to understanding elasticity.

In the 17th century, Robert Hooke first described how elastic materials work. He discovered that the force needed to stretch an elastic material is proportional to the distance it is stretched, and described this mathematically.

However, knowing this doesn’t provide much insight for chemists and physicists like ourselves, who work to develop new materials with better elastic properties.

More recently, computers have been used to calculate the elastic properties of a material using its structure and the basic laws of physics. But while it’s nice for a computer to understand the problem, it doesn’t necessarily make it easier for humans to grasp. This is where our work on flexible crystals comes in.

A thin, flexible crystal can be bent reversibly and repeatedly – showing its elastic properties.
UQ/QUT

How can a crystal be flexible?

Crystals, which are normally hard and brittle, are made up of a repeating pattern of atoms or molecules. Because the atoms or molecules are stacked neatly in place, it is hard to move them.

This is why diamond – a crystal of carbon atoms – is hard, while coal, also mostly made of carbon but not a crystal, is soft and crumbly.

The structure of a diamond, showing connections between the carbon atoms (blue spheres).
Pieter Kuiper/Wikimedia Commons

In the flexible crystals we have developed, there are weak interactions between the molecules. These crystals are made of a combination of simple organic molecules and metal ions.

Interactions between them allow the crystals to be bent so much, they can be tied in a knot without the crystal breaking.

Our new approach allows humans to understand how the subtle interactions between molecules in crystals give rise to elasticity.

A flexible crystal in the shape of a thin strand is tied in a loose knot.

We first used X-ray diffraction, a technique for determining the positions of atoms and molecules in crystals, at the Australian Synchrotron. This allowed us to understand how the arrangement of molecules in our flexible crystal changes when it’s bent.

We then used a computer to model the interactions between pairs of molecules. Our results showed these interactions could be used to calculate elasticity just as accurately as theoretical models of the entire crystal.

So, what makes our crystal highly elastic? Our results show that none of the interactions between atoms are “happy” with the structure of the crystal when it is bent. Some would like it to move one way, others in the opposite direction. They have to compromise.

This means the molecules and atoms don’t strongly resist to changes, making the crystal highly elastic despite its molecular structure which is typical of a regular, inflexible crystal.

We could not have learned this with either of the traditional approaches for analysing elasticity.

A single crystal cantilever prepared with a steel ball approximately 55 times the mass of the crystal. The ball rises back higher than the neutral position against gravity when the force holding it is released.
UQ/QUT

We were also able to calculate how much energy is stored within a crystal when it is bent, and found it was enough for the crystal to lift a mass 30 times its own weight one metre in the air. This is similar to shooting an arrow with a bow. When you draw the bow, you store elastic energy. Upon the release of the arrow, that elastic energy is transformed into kinetic energy – movement.

Our flexible crystals are not yet robust enough to be used in the construction of bridges or skyscrapers.

But the new understanding our study brings to elasticity could lead to new ways of preparing smart devices, wearable electronics, or even components for spacecraft. Läs mer…

Rising global temperatures are a particularly acute threat for the world’s sea turtles. That’s because the temperature of a turtle’s nest controls the sex of their offspring.

Coming ashore onto a beach (often the beach from where they hatched), sea turtles use their flippers to carefully scoop out the sand and create flask-shaped nests in the sand in which they lay their eggs. There is no maternal care for these nests – their success depends solely on the environment. Hotter nests will produce more female hatchlings, but fewer babies will survive into adulthood once temperatures rise above a critical threshold.

Unless sea turtles find a way to counteract rising nest temperatures, climate change could produce an increasing number of females and fewer offspring – a frightening scenario for sea turtle biologists like us.

Fortunately, we were pleased to discover that green and loggerhead turtles that breed in North Cyprus are arriving earlier in the year to offset some of the impacts of rising incubation temperatures.

A green turtle hatchling heads to the sea in Cyprus.
Matt Wall

Since the early 1990s, the Society for the Protection of Turtles and our team at the University of Exeter have been working together to monitor and protect the green and loggerhead turtles that nest on the beaches of North Cyprus.

Every summer, a team of dedicated volunteers patrols nesting beaches to record every nest that has been laid. They place temperature data-loggers into these nests and tag every female they encounter. The result is a unique database of over 1,300 individual female turtles for whom the date, location and hatching success of her nests is known.

Using this database, we were able to show that, since 1992, green and loggerhead turtles in North Cyprus are nesting more than half a day earlier each year (greens 0.61 days, loggerheads 0.78 days). Before the mid 2000s, no turtles had been recorded nesting before June, but now we expect to see quite a few nests from the start of May.

Do the seasons feel increasingly weird to you? You’re not alone. Climate change is distorting nature’s calendar, causing plants to flower early and animals to emerge at the wrong time.

This article is part of a series, Wild Seasons, on how the seasons are changing – and what they may eventually look like.

If temperatures keep rising at current rates, we estimated that to maintain current sex ratios, the loggerhead turtles would need to keep nesting half a day earlier each year. To prevent a decrease in hatching rates, they’ll need to nest 0.7 days earlier each year.

This means that, for the time being, our loggerheads are shifting their nesting dates early enough to maintain current incubation temperatures and, therefore, sex ratios and hatching success. Good news.

Though our study in loggerheads offers cause for optimism, there is no guarantee that the females will continue to nest earlier and earlier each year. To try to understand if this might be the case, we wanted to understand whether temperature was the main factor driving this earlier nesting.

Temperature isn’t everything

For individual green turtles, we confirmed that the temperature is an important factor in causing them to nest earlier. In fact, we found that individual females will nest 6.47 days earlier for every degree celsius increase in sea temperature.

However, we also showed that how many times a female has bred before and the number of times she lays eggs in a breeding season explain an equal amount of the variation in her lay dates. These observations have important effects when we think about what is happening to the green turtle population as a whole.

Researchers have studied loggerhead turtle breeding behaviour in Alagadi, North Cyprus.
Brad Clarke

As a result of conservation measures such as protecting the nests from predation and relocating nests laid too close to the high water line we have seen a big population increase in the green turtles at our study site in North Cyprus. Since 1992, numbers have grown from 55 nests per year to over 400.

Understanding the current trend of earlier nesting is complicated. But, for now, we can be assured that sea turtles are doing just enough to counteract the negative effects of climate change – which is fantastic news.

The turtles are doing their bit. Now, it is up to us to ensure the continued conservation and long-term monitoring of this charismatic ocean ambassador to give them the best chance of survival in our changing world.

Don’t have time to read about climate change as much as you’d like?
Get a weekly roundup in your inbox instead. Every Wednesday, The Conversation’s environment editor writes Imagine, a short email that goes a little deeper into just one climate issue. Join the 40,000+ readers who’ve subscribed so far. Läs mer…

South Africa’s finance minister, Enoch Godongwana, cancelled the unveiling of the country’s 2025 budget as it was due to be released. The move is unprecedented in the country’s history.

The reason for the abrupt cancellation was the failure of the minister to get cabinet approval for the proposal to raise value added tax (VAT) from 15% to 17%. VAT is the second biggest contributor to tax collection after personal income tax, followed by corporate taxes.

The strongest opposition to the idea came from parties that have joined the African National Congress in a government of national unity which was formed after the ruling party lost its majority in polls in June 2024.

To understand the finance minister’s efforts to raise VAT it’s helpful to revisit the revenue proposals of a year ago.

In the 2024 budget, all the additional revenue was to come from a “stealth tax” on personal income. Because personal income tax is levied at increasing rates as income rises, the tax burden rises as wages go up if tax thresholds are not adjusted for inflation.

In the Treasury’s estimates, R16.3 billion (US$889 million) was raised in 2024/25 by not making inflation-related adjustments to the personal income tax brackets and rebates. This meant that another 200,000 income-earners became taxpayers, and everyone’s effective tax rate was raised.

This has been a long-standing trend. Over the past decade, the tax threshold (for individuals under the age of 65) has declined from R115,000 (in today’s prices) to R95,750, bringing about 850,000 more people into the tax net.

Above the threshold, tax rates were raised by one percentage point in 2015 and the 45% rate was introduced in 2017.

As a strategy for raising personal income tax, the results have been impressive. Personal income tax has increased from 8% of GDP in 2014 to nearly 10%. In the nine months to December 2024, personal income tax increased by over 13% compared with the same period in 2023. Even after taking account of the revenue windfall from retirement fund withdrawals following recent reforms, this signals a substantial erosion of households’ disposable income.

But that is precisely the problem. Taxes collected on goods and services (mainly VAT and excise duties) increased by just 0.4% last year by comparison with 2023. Revenue from corporate income tax declined. The implication is clear: higher taxes on personal income are at least partially offset by reduced consumption and declines in revenue from other sources.

So the Treasury has taken the view, this year, that there should be relief given in the personal income tax and that additional revenue will have to come from taxes on consumption.

There are good reasons for this: personal income tax has contributed a rising share of the overall tax burden over the past decade, while households also face rising costs of electricity, housing and services. However, raising VAT also has its downsides: it generates revenue by raising prices relative to the costs of production, and effectively also reduces households’ spending power.

The Treasury’s estimate is that an increase in VAT from 15% to 17% would raise an additional R60 billion (US$3.3 billion) in revenue. To offset the impact on low-income households, the schedule of basic foods that don’t attract VAT will be extended beyond the present list of 21 items to include various specified meat cuts and tinned and bottled vegetables. In addition, above-inflation adjustments to social grants are proposed.

The main argument against increasing the VAT rate is that it is regressive – it has a greater impact on lower-income households than on the rich. But a two percentage point VAT increase would also be a substantial shock to overall consumption spending. It would temporarily raise inflation and it would have a negative impact on business income and profitability.

The arguments for a higher VAT rate, rather than other tax increases, are in part about its broad base and comparative ease of collection.

There are nonetheless valid concerns from an administrative perspective. The Treasury argues that other countries have higher VAT rates than South Africa (Morocco, Turkey, Brazil and India, for example). But this is not in itself protection against the potential impact of a higher tax rate on non-compliance and tax fraud.

The upsides

There may be deeper economic considerations behind the Treasury’s tax proposal.

The most compelling arguments for VAT as a revenue source are in its basic design structure: what is taxed and what is not. There are two key features. The first is that it taxes imports and zero-rates exports. The second is that the VAT base excludes investment.

The import VAT is sometimes seen as an unfair form of trade protection. But it simply levels the consumption tax across foreign and domestic-produced goods. And it’s simpler than excise and sales taxes.

The important consideration for domestic production is that the VAT encourages exports.

The exclusion of investment from the VAT base caused some controversy when the tax was introduced in 1990. Some argued that this would bias economic development in favour of capital and against labour. But investment and employment are complements. To achieve higher rates of employment, South Africa needs far greater levels of investment. Since 2013, investment has fallen as a percentage of GDP from 19% to less than 15%: nowhere enough to generate growth sufficient to bring down South Africa’s unemployment rate.

Because the VAT base is consumption, not investment, it supports expansion of the economy’s productive capacity.

Managing the fallout

But this doesn’t change the short-term impact on the cost of living that would result from a VAT rise. A higher tax burden will reduce demand and inhibit growth at first, before potentially contributing to fiscal stability and lower interest rates.

If the tax increase is to be avoided, then the spotlight will have to fall on the expenditure side of the budget. This is a far harder discussion than tax policy – there are a thousand options to consider, and there are vested interests wherever you look.

If Godongwana’s VAT rate increase is to be rejected, tough choices on the alternatives will have to be confronted. Läs mer…