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Climate models are some of the most complex pieces of software ever written, able to simulate a vast number of different parts of the overall system, such as the atmosphere or ocean. Many have been developed by hundreds of scientists over decades and are constantly being added to and refined. They can run to over a million lines of computer code – tens of thousands of printed pages.

Not surprisingly, these models are expensive. The simulations take time, frequently several months, and the supercomputers on which the models are run consume a lot of energy. But a new algorithm I have developed promises to make many of these climate model simulations ten times faster, and could ultimately be an important tool in the fight against climate change.

One reason climate modelling takes so long is that some of the processes being simulated are intrinsically slow. The ocean is a good example. It takes a few thousand years for water to circulate from the surface to the deep ocean and back (by contrast, the atmosphere has a “mixing time” of weeks).

Ever since the first climate models were developed in the 1970s, scientists realised this was going to be a problem. To use a model to simulate climate change, it has to be started from conditions representative of before industrialisation led to the release of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

To produce such a stable equilibrium, scientists “spin-up” their model by essentially letting it run until it stops changing (the system is so complex that, as in the real world, some fluctuations will always be present).

An initial condition with minimal “drift” is essential to accurately simulate the effects of human-made factors on the climate. But thanks to the ocean and other sluggish components this can take several months even on large supercomputers. No wonder climate scientists have called this bottleneck one of the “grand challenges” of their field.

Can’t just throw more computers at the problem

You might ask, “why not use an even bigger machine?” Unfortunately, it wouldn’t help. Simplistically, supercomputers are just thousands of individual computer chips, each with dozens of processing units (CPUs or “cores”) connected to each other via a high-speed network.

One of the machines I use has over 300,000 cores and can perform almost 20 quadrillion arithmetic operations per second. (Obviously, it is shared by hundreds of users and any single simulation will only use a tiny fraction of the machine.)

It takes an extraordinary amount of computing power to simulate long-term change in the ocean.
andrejs polivanovs / shutterstock

A climate model exploits this by subdividing the surface of the planet into smaller regions – subdomains – with calculations for each region being performed simultaneously on a different CPU. In principle, the more subdomains you have the less time it should take to perform the calculations.

That is true up to a point. The problem is that the different subdomains need to “know” what is happening in adjoining ones, which requires transmitting information between chips. That is much slower than the speed with which modern chips can perform arithmetic calculations, what computer scientists call “bandwidth limitation”. (Anyone who has tried to stream a video over a slow internet connection will know what that means.) There are therefore diminishing returns from throwing more computing power at the problem. Ocean models especially suffer from such poor “scaling”.

Ten times faster

This is where the new computer algorithm that I’ve developed and published in Science Advances comes in. It promises to dramatically reduce the spin-up time of the ocean and other components of earth system models. In tests on typical climate models, the algorithm was on average about ten times faster than current approaches, decreasing the time from many months to a week.

The time and energy this could save climate scientists is valuable in itself. But being able to spin-up models quickly also means that scientists can calibrate them against what we know actually happened in the real world, improving their accuracy, or to better define the uncertainty in their climate projections. Spin-ups are so time consuming that neither are currently feasible.

The new algorithm will also allow us to perform simulations in more spatial detail. Currently, ocean models typically don’t tell us anything about features smaller than 1º width in longitude and latitude (about 110km at the equator). But many critical phenomena in the ocean occur at far smaller scales – tens of meters to a few kilometres – and higher spatial resolution will certainly lead to more accurate climate projections, for instance of sea level rise, storm surges and hurricane intensity.

How it works

Like so much “new” research it is based on an old idea, in this case one that goes back centuries to the Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler. Called “sequence acceleration”, you can think of it as using past information to extrapolate to a “better” future.

Among other applications, it is widely used by chemists and material scientists to calculate the structure of atoms and molecules, a problem that happens to take up more than half the world’s supercomputing resources.

Sequence acceleration is useful when a problem is iterative in nature, exactly what climate model spin-up is: you feed the output from the model back as an input to the model. Rinse and repeat until the output becomes equal to the input and you’ve found your equilibrium solution.

In the 1960s Harvard mathematician D.G. Anderson came up with a clever way to combine multiple previous outputs into a single input so that you get to the final solution with far fewer repeats of the procedure. About ten times fewer as I found when I applied his scheme to the spin-up problem.

Developing a new algorithm is the easy part. Getting others to use it is often the bigger challenge. It is therefore promising that the UK Met Office and other climate modelling centres are trying it out.

The next major IPCC report is due in 2029. That seems like a long way off but given the time it takes to develop models and perform simulations, preparations are already underway. Coordinated by an international collaboration known as the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project, it is these simulations that will form the basis for the report. It is exciting to think that my algorithm and software might contribute.

Read more:
Noise in the brain enables us to make extraordinary leaps of imagination. It could transform the power of computers too Läs mer…

The Earth now supports over eight billion people who collectively have transformed three-quarters of the planet’s land surface for food, energy, shelter and other aspects of the human enterprise.

Wild animals must not only contend with how their habitats have been changed, but also endure the increasing presence of people in almost all environments, from expanding wildland-urban interfaces to the frontiers of outdoor recreation and nature-based tourism.

We are in the midst of a global biodiversity crisis, with high extinction rates and many wildlife populations showing clear evidence of decline (such as caribou and lions).

As a wildlife ecologist and conservation biologist, I am concerned that we are putting the squeeze on wildlife in ways that can increase conflicts and displace animals from the habitats they need.

Observing animal behaviour

If we are to protect the animals we treasure for their ecological, economic and cultural values, we must find ways to promote human-wildlife coexistence. To successfully adapt our own behaviours, we must also understand whether and how animals can adapt to us.

Two key challenges have limited this understanding. First, it is hard to observe animals in the wild. Encounters are rare because animals are elusive, and the mere presence of a human observer may influence our understanding.

Second, it is not generally feasible to conduct experiments — hallmarks of rigorous science — that manipulate human activities in varied contexts. In a recent study published in Nature Ecology and Evolution, my colleagues and I set out to tackle these challenges by using the COVID-19 pandemic as a form of “unplanned experiment.”

The pandemic was a tragedy, but it created a rare opportunity to learn about human-wildlife interactions. Government lockdowns to stem the spread of the virus forced us to stay close to home, drastically changing our typical movement patterns.

This “anthropause” spurred scientists to ask how animals responded — our curiosities were piqued by unusual sightings.

Camera trap photo of a black bear stealing garbage near the town of Sooke, B.C.
(UBC WildCo), Author provided (no reuse)

Captured images

Our team recognized that such anecdotal observations could be prone to biases; we sought a more systematic approach to cover a wide range of species and locations while overcoming the elusive nature of wild animals. The popularity of motion-triggered wildlife camera traps has made it much easier to glimpse into the secret lives of animals.

These remote cameras work diligently to capture photographs of animals — including humans — that wander past, without the need for observers to be physically present.

Recognizing this opportunity, we assembled a team of more than 200 scientists from 21 countries that were monitoring mammals before and during the lockdowns. We sifted through millions of images of 163 species of wild mammals, collected from more than 5,000 camera traps. After estimating changes in the amount and timing of activity for animals as small as snowshoe hares and as big as African elephants, some striking patterns emerged.

Contrary to popular narratives, we did not see an overall trend of wildlife running free while humans sheltered in place.

Rather, we saw great variation in the activity of people and wildlife. While some areas emptied of people as parks closed, others saw increases in use, such as urban greenspaces or rural refuges where people sought solace from pandemic pressures.

Comfort with humans

Animals had a wide range of reactions to the changes in human activity, with the strongest pattern being that their responses depended on their position in the food chain and the condition of the landscape. Predator species, like wolves and wolverines, tended to be warier of people, reducing their activity when more people were around and being lost altogether from the busiest areas.

By contrast, prey species, including large herbivores like deer or moose, often increased activity when more people were around, potentially to take advantage of the “human shield” that deterred predators.

A camera trap captures a wolverine along a hiking trail during closure of the popular Joffre Lakes Provincial Park, B.C.
(UBC WildCo), Author provided (no reuse)

Notably, animals living in wilder landscapes were more sensitive to increases in human activity, while their urban cousins tended to be more tolerant but shifted to being more active at night. This highlights that even within the same species, animals can have different responses to people depending on where they live.

We believe that wildlife managers should take note of these results. Levels of outdoor recreation and other human endeavours may need to be carefully managed in wildland landscapes to avoid displacing the sensitive animals that depend on these more remote areas.

While in more modified landscapes — such as near cities and farms — animals may become habituated to humans, even attracted to “free food” like garbage or gardens, while working to avoid conflicts by moving frequently and using the cover of darkness.

CBC looks at human-bear encounters.

Human-wildlife coexistence in these developed areas requires care to remove unhealthy attractants that may promote conflict, while limiting disturbances at night so animals can access the food, cover and mates that they need to persist.

Overall, our study highlights the tremendous complexity of animal behaviours, and the fact that there are no silver bullets when it comes to coexistence. It is clear that animals are working hard to adapt to humanity’s ever-expanding presence, and that we need to do our part to ensure we can keep sharing space with the wildlife we cherish.

Establishing and maintaining effective biodiversity monitoring systems, including the camera trap surveys that underpinned our analysis, will be critical as we strive to understand and steward our ever-changing ecosystems. Läs mer…

Many Americans think of power outages as infrequent inconveniences, but that’s quickly changing. Nationwide, major power outages have increased tenfold since 1980, largely because of an aging electrical grid and damage sustained from severe storms as the planet warms.

At the same time, electricity demand is rising as the population grows and an increasing number of people use electricity to cool and heat their homes, cook their meals and power their cars. A growing number of Americans also rely on electricity-powered medical equipment, such as oxygen concentrators to help with breathing, lifts for movement and infusion pumps to deliver medications and fluids to their bodies.

For older adults and others with health conditions, a loss of power may be more than an inconvenience. It can be life-threatening.

We study environmental health, including the effects of extreme heat and storms on people. In a new study, we analyzed data from New York City and the surrounding area to understand how severe weather drives power outages and who is most at risk, particularly in urban areas.

Low-income communities often at highest risk

How quickly power returns in a community is often shaped by history.

Discriminatory practices such as redlining and zoning, which prevented nonwhite residents from obtaining mortgages or owning homes in certain areas, left marginalized groups living in more disaster-prone areas with poorer quality infrastructure. Studies show that both factors make these communities more likely to experience prolonged power outages.

Current policies can also exacerbate outages for these populations. For example, many electric utilities prioritize power restoration to regions with community assets, such as mass transit, hospitals, police or fire stations, and sewage and water stations, as well as regions with larger populations.

Without electricity, residents can’t even run fans to cool down.
Timothy A. Clary/AFP via Getty Images

Though these guidelines appear neutral, they can inadvertently prolong outages for less populated areas and areas lacking resources, including these key assets. For example, following Tropical Storm Ida in September 2021, Con Edison outlined areas with important community assets as priorities for restoring power. Manhattan had power back within hours, while many low-income and largely nonwhite parts of Queens, the Bronx and Brooklyn waited for days.

Emerging evidence from studies on power outages in Texas, Florida, the Southeast and a national study, along with our new research in New York, shows that outages especially burden communities that don’t have adequate funding.

Complex weather and battery-life thresholds

Across New York state, we found that 40% of all outages from 2017-2020 followed severe weather – heat, cold, wind, rainstorms, snowstorms or lightning – within eight hours. While each type of severe weather alone could lead to prolonged outages, in combination they resulted in much longer outages.

Statewide, for example, strong winds alone led to outages lasting 12 hours on average, and heavy precipitation resulted in outages lasting six hours on average. But when wind and precipitation happened simultaneously, the outages lasted closer to 17 hours on average.

A six- to eight-hour power-restoration threshold is particularly important for people who rely on electricity to power medical equipment. Many of these medical devices have backup batteries with capacities that do not exceed eight hours. That’s one reason researchers considered eight hours to be a critical power restoration window for health.

We also looked at whether socially vulnerable communities faced more weather-driven outages than other communities. In short, the answer was yes, though the effects varied in different parts of the state and by the type of weather event.

In New York City, we found that heat-, precipitation- and wind-driven outages occurred more frequently in socially vulnerable communities, including in Harlem, Upper Manhattan, the South Bronx and eastern Queens. This matters because socially vulnerable neighborhoods have higher poverty rates and lower-quality housing. Community members may lack access to health care or suffer from underlying health conditions.

Social vulnerability and heat-driven power outages from 2017 to 2020 in New York City. Higher social vulnerability scores indicate greater vulnerability.
Nina Flores

On average, the duration of precipitation-driven outages was longest in areas of the city with the highest social vulnerability. In neighborhoods with vulnerability scores in the top 25% – meaning the most vulnerable neighborhoods – outages lasted 12.4 hours on average, compared with 7.7 hours in those neighborhoods in the bottom 25%.

In rural parts of the state, outages related to downpours or snowstorms were also longest in areas with high social vulnerability.

Outages are quick to follow heat spikes

As temperatures rise over the summer, it’s important for communities to consider the dangers that outages can present for disabled persons, older adults and others with health conditions, particularly in socially vulnerable communities.

Extreme heat is one of the most dangerous meteorological phenomena. It causes nearly 400 premature deaths a year in New York City, according to city estimates.

With the granular data we obtained from the state Department of Public Service, we could zoom in on how fast outages began following extreme weather.

Across the state, outages began quickly – within six hours of extremely hot temperatures spiking – likely as more people turned on their air conditioners. This means the outages likely occur while it is still hot, exposing individuals to extreme heat, without power for air conditioners or fans.

The overlap between social vulnerability and severe weather-related outages in New York. Green counties have the most social vulnerability and outages. Bright blue counties have a large number of outages but lower social vulnerability. The orange and gray areas have low numbers of outages.
Nina Flores

Coupled with higher outdoor temperatures and the prevalence of underlying health conditions, socially vulnerable communities face heightened exposure to heat-driven outages and greater risk from them.

How cities can reduce risks as temperatures rise

This outage trend will likely continue as climate change intensifies, bringing more frequent extreme weather to an aging grid in which many parts are nearing or surpassing their life spans.

There are steps communities and power providers can take to reduce people’s exposure to power outages and the health harms that can accompany them.

In the short term, cities can develop targeted plans for these communities to ensure that residents have ways to cool off during heat waves. That includes providing ample cooling centers, swimming pools and public parks with shade trees. It can also include transportation support for older adults and others with mobility issues.

Parks with shade trees and fountains, like this one in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn, can offer some respite from hot buildings during heat waves.
AP Photo/Eduardo Munoz Alvarez

In the long term, reducing these risks means updating the power grid, weatherizing buildings, planting trees to reduce urban heat island effects and investing in distributed energy resources, such as solar power and batteries for energy storage.

We believe this work should prioritize communities that most need these updates, following the lead of New York state’s Weatherization Assistance Program, which aims to improve energy efficiency for low-income households. Läs mer…

A record number of people will go to polls in 2024 to vote in national elections around the world. People who came of age during the last electoral cycle will have an opportunity to cast their votes for the first time.

In wealthier countries with rapidly ageing populations, such as the US and the UK, there will again be record inter-generational divisions in turnout and political preferences.

In recent elections, a high proportion of people aged 18–24 supported Democratic party candidates and the Labour party. In 2020, 61% voted for Joe Biden (compared to 37% for Donald Trump) in the US, and 62% voted Labour in the UK’s 2019 general election (compared to 19% for the Conservatives).

Ahead of the UK’s upcoming general election, which could take place as late as January 2025, successive polls have placed the Conservatives at 10% or less among young adults.

Nevertheless, the new generation of young voters in the US and the UK are disillusioned with mainstream electoral politics and are unenthusiastic about casting their votes. In fact, turnout rates for young adults (aged 18–30) are around a third lower than for adults of all ages in these countries.

Youth support for main parties in the US and UK national elections since 1990.
James Sloam, CC BY-NC-SA

Overwhelming youth support for the Democrats and Labour masks a desire for a more radical form of politics that addresses young people’s concerns. Opinion polls often do a poor job of explaining youth priorities across broad categories such as the economy and health. But my own research from 2022 with young Londoners reveals clusters of priorities relating to economic, social and environmental issues.

These issues include housing, personal wellbeing and safety, group rights for women or minorities and broader international questions around climate change and the ongoing situation in Gaza. Compared to older generations, young people are also much more comfortable with diversity in society and much less concerned about immigration.

In the US and the UK, these sentiments were effectively articulated by Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn in recent elections.

Sanders and Corbyn were both viewed by young adults as authentic and radical, believing in what they said, and offering meaningful solutions to pressing problems like low wages, unaffordable housing and university tuition fees. In the 2016 US primaries, Sanders received more votes from young Americans (aged 18–30) than Hilary Clinton and Trump (the two final candidates) put together.

Youth electoral participation (or non-participation) is also defined by a country’s electoral system. In countries with proportional representation, the trend towards socially liberal values and greater state intervention has led to increased support for alternative political parties.

For example, the Green party in Germany became the largest political party among those aged 18–24 at the 2021 federal election. It secured the votes of just under a quarter of young adults – almost as much as the two main parties (Social Democrats and Christian Democrats) combined.

A visualisation of the key political issues identified by young Londoners.
James Sloam, CC BY-NC-SA

Division among the young

Young people are, of course, not all the same. There are important divisions within this age group based on gender, socioeconomic status and ethnicity.

In the UK’s 2017 general election, 73% of young women voted Labour compared to only 52% of young men. And in the 2022 US mid-terms, 71% of young women voted Democrat compared to 53% of young men – a difference that was driven by the 2022 Supreme Court ruling allowing individual states to ban abortion.

In response to the ruling, young women registered to vote in record numbers, casting their ballots against Republican candidates who supported the decision.

These differences are reflected in participation in social movements. For example, the 2019 climate strikes were overwhelmingly comprised of young women and girls. The protests of one girl, Greta Thunberg, in a town square in Sweden, quickly spread into a global movement of millions of young people.

Socioeconomic status plays an equally important role. Young people from poorer backgrounds or with low levels of educational attainment are much less likely to turn out in elections than graduates or young people in full-time education.

In the UK, around two-thirds of university students turned out in recent general elections compared to around one-third of young people from the lowest social group. Young people from low-income backgrounds, if they do turn out, are often drawn to populist right-wing causes, such as the candidacies of Trump in the US and Marine Le Pen in France – especially in the case of young, white men.

The latter point illustrates how race or ethnicity shape youth participation. This is particularly true in the US where an estimated 87% of black youth voted for Biden in 2020 against just 10% for Trump.

However, the support of young minoritised ethnic voters for progressive candidates and parties has proved frustrating, as existential economic and security issues have not been addressed. It was the Black Lives Matter movement and citizen-generated evidence, rather than politicians and parties, that shone a spotlight on police brutality and discrimination in the US and many other countries.

Read more:
Black Lives Matter protests are shaping how people understand racial inequality

The forthcoming elections in the UK, the US and many other rich democracies are likely to be defined by inter-generational cleavages. However, it is far from certain if young people will be drawn to the polls.

There is a dilemma for progressive candidates and parties regarding how far they are willing to go to appeal to younger generations given the inter-generational divisions that exist. Yet this is fast becoming a risk worth taking.

Successive generations of young people are entering the electorate with socially liberal views and positive attitudes towards state intervention to address economic, social and environmental challenges: from poor mental health, to the cost of housing, to concerns about pollution and climate change. Läs mer…

We often assume young people are smarter, or at least quicker, than
older people. For example, we’ve all heard that scientists, and even more so mathematicians, carry out their most important work when they’re comparatively young.

But my new research, published in Developmental Review, suggests that cognitive differences between the old and young are tapering off over time. This is hugely important as stereotypes about the intelligence of people in their sixties or older may be holding them back – in the workplace and beyond.

Cognitive ageing is often measured by comparing young adults, aged 18-30, to older adults, aged 65 and over. There are a variety of tasks that older adults do not perform well on compared to young adults, such as memory, spatial ability and speed of processing, which often form the basis of IQ tests. That said, there are a few tasks that older people do better at than younger people, such as reading comprehension and vocabulary.

Declines in cognition are driven by a process called cognitive ageing, which happens to everyone. Surprisingly, age-related cognitive deficits start very early in adulthood, and declines in cognition have been measured as dropping in adults as young as just 25.

Often, it is only when people reach older age that these effects add up to a noticeable amount. Common complaints consist of walking into a room and forgetting why you entered, as well as difficulty remembering names and struggling to drive in the dark.

The trouble with comparison

Sometimes, comparing young adults to older adults can be misleading though. The two generations were brought up in different times, with different levels of education, healthcare and nutrition. They also lead different daily lives, with some older people having lived though a world war while the youngest generation is growing up with the internet.

Most of these factors favour the younger generation, and this can explain a proportion of their advantage in cognitive tasks.

Indeed, much existing research shows that IQ has been improving globally throughout the 20th century. This means that later-born generations are more cognitively able than those born earlier. This is even found when both generations are tested in the same way at the same age.

Currently, there is growing evidence that increases in IQ are levelling off, such that, in the most recent couple of decades, young adults are no more cognitively able than young adults born shortly beforehand.

Together, these factors may underlie the current result, namely that cognitive differences between young and older adults are diminishing over time.

New results

My research began when my team started getting strange results in our lab. We found that often the age differences we were getting between young and older adults was smaller or absent, compared to prior research from early 2000s.

This prompted me to start looking at trends in age differences across the psychological literature in this area. I uncovered a variety of data that compared young and older adults from the 1960s up to the current day. I plotted this data against year of publication, and found that age deficits have been getting smaller over the last six decades.

Next, I assessed if the average increases in cognitive ability over time seen across all individuals was a result that also applied to older adults specifically. Many large databases exist where groups of individuals are recruited every few years to take part in the same tests. I analysed studies using these data sets to look at older adults.

I found that, just like younger people, older adults were indeed becoming more cognitively able with each cohort. But if differences are disappearing, does that mean younger people’s improvements in cognitive ability have slowed down or that older people’s have increased?

I analysed data from my own laboratory that I had gathered over a seven-year period to find out. Here, I was able to dissociate the performance of the young from the performance of the older. I found that each cohort of young adults was performing to a similar extent across this seven-year period, but that older adults were showing improvements in both processing speed and vocabulary scores.

The figure shows data for a speed-based task where higher scores represent better performance.
CC BY-SA

I believe the older adults of today are benefiting from many of the factors previously most applicable to young adults. For example, the number of children who went to school increased significantly in the 1960s – with the system being more similar to what it is today than what it was at the start of the 20th century.

This is being reflected in that cohort’s increased scores today, now they are older adults. At the same time, young adults have hit a ceiling and are no longer improving as much with each cohort.

It is not entirely clear why the young generations have stopped improving so much. Some research has explored maternal age, mental health and even evolutionary trends. I favour the opinion that there is just a natural ceiling – a limit to how much factors such as education, nutrition and health can improve cognitive performance.

These data have important implications for research into dementia. For example, it is possible that a modern older adult in the early stages of dementia might pass a dementia test that was designed 20 or 30 years ago for the general population at that time.

Therefore, as older adults are performing better in general than previous generations, it may be necessary to revise definitions of dementia that depend on an individuals’ expected level of ability.

Ultimately, we need to rethink what it means to become older. And there’s finally some good news. Ultimately, we can expect to be more cognitively able than our grandparents were when we reach their age. Läs mer…

Dressed in a mini skirt and passionate about boys, music, dance and fashion, the 1960s teenage girl is a pop culture icon, the seeming beneficiary of the ascendancy of mass youth culture in the west and of unprecedented social and cultural changes.

Quite how real women actually experienced – and benefited from – this era of social change is more complex. For the past six years, I have led the first detailed study of girls growing up in Britain between the 1950s and 1970s. In order to understand how this era has shaped women’s experiences and identities in later life, my colleagues and I conducted interviews with 70 women born between 1939 and 1952.

We also explored data on girlhood from Britain’s first birth cohort study, as well as the English longitudinal study of ageing.

The current Teenage Kicks exhibition, on show at the Glasgow Women’s Library and online until May 18, delves into eight of our interviewees’ stories. Edinburgh-based artist Candice Purwin has illustrated the striking diversity they relay: girls growing up in very different circumstances navigated the possibilities and pitfalls of the 1960s and early 1970s in very different ways.

Swinging London

Our interviewees were from different social class backgrounds and across both rural and urban locations. To spark memories, we played music that these women would have listened to when they were young. We talked with them about their personal photos.

Andrea.
Candice Purwin/University of Manchester, CC BY-NC-ND

One interviewee, Liz, was the epitome of a modern, mobile, young woman. At 17, she was earning an income, travelling to Europe with friends and enjoying the consumerism of swinging London. She told us about visiting clubs and shopping in new department stores. At 19, she left to work in the US.

This sense of London as a place of opportunity was a recurrent theme. Andrea embarked on a science degree in London, aged 18. Coming to the capital meant being able to escape village life and the scrutiny of her religious parents.

Andrea found freedom to engage in student politics and to come out as a lesbian. Being gay was a stigmatised identity at the time. She recalled furtive visits to London’s only lesbian club, the Gateway Club. “A crummy place really,” she said, “down in the basement, small, hot and dark.”

Another interviewee, Joyce, grew up in poverty in an overcrowded home in central London. She said she felt like “the bee’s knees” when she started earning money. She described the pair of white boots she was able to buy, to wear when she went out dancing.

Like her peers, though, Joyce mainly spent her leisure time walking the streets with friends and going to cafés. “We sat there all night with one coffee,” she said, “sometimes two, if you were feeling rash.”

Valerie.
Candice Purwin/University of Manchester, CC BY-NC-ND

In rural areas, girls were often dependent on limited public transport to access leisure venues, shops and cafes in nearby towns. Going to the cinema was a major expedition.

Valerie, who grew up on a farm near Portsmouth on England’s south coast, said: “We couldn’t get there until 6 o’clock and we had to be on the 9 o’clock bus back.” As films were often shown on a continuous loop throughout the day, she said “you’d pick up a film half way through, watch it until the bit that you came in at, and then leave.”

For girls abroad, the capital represented the opportunities Britain itself promised. One interviewee, Cynthia, migrated from St Kitts, in search of better prospects. “Jobs were easy to find when I came to Britain,” she said.

Cynthia worked as a machinist in a clothing factory by day. By night, she studied typing and administration. These new qualifications helped her secure a better-paid job as a secretary in a solicitor’s office.

Cynthia.
Candice Purwin/University of Manchester, CC BY-NC-ND

Unequal access

We found that access to the widening educational and professional opportunities for girls was uneven. More were going to university and into professional training. Most, however, left school at 15 without qualifications and with limited work prospects.

Joyce thrived at school but left at 15 when her mother became ill. Later, she took evening classes and became a telephonist.

Pamela too was a star pupil but her mother thought it pointless educating a daughter. “She’s only going to get married!”, her mother would say. Once in the workforce, however, Pamela excelled and quickly progressed into management.

Like others whose education was foreshortened due to hardship and sexism, Pamela and Joyce later regretted not having been able to pursue their studies further.

Young adults on London’s Carnaby Street in the 1960s.
National Archives UK/Wikimedia

In popular culture, the 1960s are associated with growing permissiveness. Most of the women we spoke with, however, said that, as girls, they feared getting pregnant out of wedlock.

The pill became available to married women in 1961. But access for single women was restricted until 1974. Even access to basic sex education was limited.

Pamela fell in love at 17 and got pregnant. Her mother insisted that she give up both that relationship and her baby. She eventually started a new relationship and married at 20. This was an abusive marriage. Taking control of her fertility, she went on the pill and by age 24, she had secured a divorce.

The unprecedented trend towards early marriage meant youth was typically short-lived. In 1965, 40% of brides were under 21. Easier access to divorce from 1969 proved an important development for many.

Women speak about aspects of their younger selves having stayed with them in later life. Many live with what we call “shadow selves”, the feeling that they could have been a different person and had a different life if things had gone differently when they were young.

Some of our interviewees explained that it was not possible to rectify what they missed in their youth. Others spoke about using retirement to make up for missed opportunities. Most advise their own children and grandchildren to make the most of being young. Läs mer…

In March 2024, a 39-year-old man became the first person in England and Wales to be convicted of the new offence of cyberflashing, part of the Online Safety Act. He had sent unsolicited photos of his genitals to a 15-year-old girl and a woman.

Cyberflashing now being a criminal offence is a welcome change, and the creation of this offence was informed by our research.

But as researchers of young people’s use of social media, we have concerns that this is not enough to to counter the widespread normalisation of image-based sexual harassment and abuse, including digital flashing, in youth culture. A significant problem is that young people rarely report that they have encountered this – and without reports, no convictions can take place.

In 2019, we researched cyberflashing interviewing 144 teens about their experiences of non-consensual sexual images on social media platforms. We followed this research up with a survey of 336 young people, carried out during the pandemic lockdown of spring and summer 2020.

Together, the interviews and survey data present a compelling picture of how widespread cyberflashing is among young people.

We found that 75% of girls from our qualitative interviews had received some form of unwanted male genital images or videos. One 14-year-old girl said:

There was this guy on Snapchat, I didn’t know him but I thought my friend knew him, so I accepted this follow request and then on his story it was like who wants to see my big… you know, and then I saw like a text from him, because you know you do so I thought it was like a streak [an ongoing chat conversation], so when I pressed on it and it was a picture of his like dick […] I blocked him.

In our survey, we found that 37% of girls had been sent an unwanted sexual image and of these 80% said it left them feeling “disgusted”.

The survey also found that young people rarely reported their experiences. Only 17% of the young people in our survey reported cyberflashing to social media platforms, 5% told their parents and just 2% reported it to school.

Young people were very unlikely to talk to their school about their experience.
DGLimages/Shutterstock

A 15-year-old girl explained in an interview that normalisation and acceptance of the issues plays a role in lack of reporting:

[Young people] they think it’s normal … yeah, it’s normal, or they didn’t do anything, and that is sexual assault, but most teenagers don’t know that, so they don’t do anything about it, and they just leave it.

In our interviews, girls explained that while images from strangers were often upsetting, they felt better able to ignore or block such images than when they came from boys they knew. It was much worse for victims if the sender was in their immediate peer group at school. A 13-year-old said:

Yeah, if they go to the same school as you then you see them every day, and it just reminds you of like what they did.

In some cases, the harassment comes from boys the girls are close to. A 14-year-old said:

I had a friend, yeah, and her boyfriend must have sent her a dick pic, and then he carried on trying to pressure her to send one, I feel that’s what happens the most, these boys try and pressure them like into sending it back, because oh I send, or oh if you love me you’ll send it back to me.

These “transactional dick pics” are a doubled form of harassment: girls are being cyberflashed accompanied by requests to send sexual content back. Our survey found that girls felt much more pressure to send nudes (44%) than boys (15%).

A new criminal offence is a good step, but it doesn’t sufficiently address the culture shift that is so desperately needed.

Recommended changes

More extensive privacy settings for social media sites would be a start, given our research showed incidents of image-based sexual harassment and abuse from unknown adults as well as peers.

Sex education at school should also give young people the tools to understand harassment online and digital consent. The current updated government guidance on education regarding sharing nudes and semi nudes does include a footnote to our own online sexual harassment guidance. But the government document still does not adequately cover basic elements of image-based sexual harassment and abuse including cyberflashing, upskirting and AI deepfakes.

Parents and adults in the wider community need resources to help them understand and respond to tech facilitated abuse, including how to talk to young people about these issues.

We have produced lesson plans and resources for schools. In the evaluation report of these resources, young people, school staff and parents had vastly improved their understandings of digital sexual violence and bystander interventions.

Schools need to take an approach that builds in understanding of the impact of trauma on young people. It’s also vitally important that boys are included in this discussion. Excluding boys and boys’ voices may push them deeper into misogynistic ideologies. Creating peer mentorship programmes and setting up youth discussion groups within schools around issues of digital consent are effective ways to shift attitudes.

A focus on education will help young people know their rights and give them the tools they need to stay safe. Läs mer…

The COVID pandemic affected several aspects of children’s health and wellbeing. The number of children referred to specialist mental health teams in England has soared by more than 50% in just three years, for example. But recent research from my colleagues and I reveals that problems such as these were increasing even before the pandemic.

Our study explored changes in the health and wellbeing of 36,951 primary school children between 2014 and 2022. We analysed the data from anonymous annual surveys given to children aged between eight and 11 in Wales. The questions covered various aspects of health and wellbeing such as physical activity, diet, sleep and mental health and wellbeing.

It shows a significant decline in various aspects of childhood health and wellbeing over an eight year period. While societal factors like Brexit, the pandemic and the cost of living crisis likely play a role, our research suggests a decline was underway even before these events.

Understanding these trends is crucial. Childhood experiences significantly affect adult health and behaviour, with half of all mental health problems established by age 14.

Decline in swimming and cycling

We found a particularly troubling decline in swimming and cycling ability. For example, 85% of children reported being able to swim 25 metres in 2018, but that percentage dropped to 68% by 2022.

This is concerning as activities such as these are essential for developing fundamental movement skills and coordination in childhood. Funding cuts to free swimming schemes in 2019 in Wales and the closure of swimming pools during the pandemic to prevent virus transmission will have not helped the situation.

The decline in swimming ability disproportionately affected children from disadvantaged backgrounds, further highlighting the potential for such cuts to widen existing inequality.

Swimming ability significantly declined according to the research.
Michael Kemp/Alamy

We also identified a decline in fruit and vegetable consumption, while there was a rise in eating sugary snacks. Sugar intake spiked in 2020, coinciding with the COVID lockdowns. This suggests a possible link between the increase in time spent at home and unhealthier dietary choices.

School routines often provide structure and regular mealtimes, which may have been disrupted during the pandemic. These findings may support arguments for universal free school meals, which could help reduce the inequality in access to a healthy and balanced diet.

Mental health issues, including emotional and behavioural difficulties, also increased. Emotional difficulties affected between 13% and 15% of children between 2017 and 2018. But that percentage increased to 29% between 2021 and 2022. Girls also reported higher emotional and behavioural difficulties than boys.

There was also an increase in children worrying and feeling lonely, and this was present even before the pandemic. This highlights the need to provide settings which promote socialisation and support children’s wellbeing.

More than a pandemic problem

Our research suggests the decline in children’s health and wellbeing that began before the pandemic has either continued or plateaued. This indicates that more complex issues are present and require further action than simply assuming that returning to pre-pandemic routines would improve matters.

The wellbeing of school-aged children is a cornerstone of future public health. Our findings, based on children’s own experiences, underscore the urgent need for interventions to address this concerning trend. This is particularly significant as children’s voices are often absent from policy and planning discussions.

Read more:
More mental health support in schools makes sense – but some children may fall through gaps

Governments and public bodies must prioritise developing and implementing effective, long-lasting ways to reverse these trends. Policies and funding should address critical aspects of childhood health and wellbeing. These include essential physical skills like swimming and cycling, confidence and independence in physical activity, and children’s overall wellbeing and ability to socialise. Creating supportive environments within schools and communities is also crucial.

Greater investment is needed in these areas and a stronger focus on listening to children and understanding their needs. Only then can we bring about meaningful change and ensure a brighter future for children everywhere. Läs mer…

When its six-week abortion ban went into effect on May 1, 2024, Florida joined nearly two dozen other U.S. states that ban abortion or greatly restrict it.

These laws came into effect after the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision to overturn Roe v. Wade ended nearly 50 years of the constitutional right to abortion in the United States.

Florida health officials in 2023 reported more than 84,000 abortions statewide, including nearly 7,800 from out-of-state residents.

The Tampa Bay Times recently reported that about 2 in 5 abortions in Florida over the past six years occurred in the first six weeks of pregnancy, meaning that roughly 60% of the procedures performed over that time frame would be illegal under the new restrictions.

The new laws in Florida and other states are sending some Americans across the border into Mexico to access an abortion, where the procedure was legalized in recent years.

Clinics in Mexico do not require proof of residency, so solid numbers about who they are treating are hard to come by. But providers in Mexico report they have been seeing more Americans.

In 2022, Luisa García, director of Profem, an abortion clinic in the border city of Tijuana, told NPR that the percentage of patients coming from the United States had jumped from 25% to 50% in just the two months following the Dobbs decision.

My research and teaching focuses on gender and sexuality in Latin America and the Caribbean. I often ask students to think about the differences between the United States and Latin America — and the struggles the two regions share.

Different paths

In recent years, the U.S. and Mexico have each struggled over access to abortion care, with the two countries moving in opposite directions.

The year before the U.S. Supreme Court reversed Roe, the Mexican Supreme Court ruled the criminalization of abortion by the northern state of Coahuila unconstitutional. This decision set a precedent that led to decriminalization at the federal level in 2023.

Change has since been slow. Only 13 of Mexico’s 31 states have modified their penal codes to reflect the court’s resolution, with Jalisco being the latest state to do so, in April 2024.

Unlike in the U.S., federal laws in Mexico do not automatically overrule local ones. But Mexican women living in states where abortions are illegal can still have one in a federally run hospital or clinic. And the federal statute protects the staff of those facilities from punishment.

Marea Verde movement

A crucial force behind the legalization of abortion care in Latin America is a movement called Green Tide, or Marea Verde, which emerged in Argentina and expanded across the region over the past two decades.

Although it began as a collective fight for abortion rights, Green Tide has grown to encompass issues such as the prevention of violence against women and members of the LGBTQ+ community, as well as femicide – the violent death of women motivated by gender.

Expansion of abortion access in Mexico

Following the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in 2022, Mexican organizations offering abortions have expanded locations to increase choices for Mexican and U.S. residents seeking care. For example, Fundación MSI opened its newest clinic in Cancún late last year.

It chose this location intentionally, MSI’s Latin America regional managing director told the health news website Stat. Cancún’s status as a popular tourist destination means that multiple U.S. airports offer direct flights for about US$400 round trip. In-person abortion services range from $250 to $350. MSI’s website caters to Americans by offering information in English and featuring links to search for flights.

In Mexico, an ‘acompanante’ often accompanies other women who want to terminate their pregnancy but don’t know where to turn or fear hostility at public clinics.
AP Photo/Maria Alferez

To assist those traveling to Mexico, Mexican and American abortion rights groups created the Red Transfronteriza, a transnational network that supports those crossing the border in search of care but whose primary mission has become the shipping of misoprostol and mifepristone, the pills generally used to induce abortions, into the United States.

One group that is part of the network on the Mexican side of the border is Guanajuato-based Las Libres, or The Free Ones. In September 2023, its founder estimated that her organization had sent abortion pills to approximately 20,000 women in the U.S. since the Dobbs decision.

Red Necesito Abortar, or I Need to Abort Network, was founded in 2017 by Sandra Cardona and Vanessa Jimenez in the northern city of Monterrey, Nuevo León, to help those seeking abortion services.

History of abortion, US-Mexico border

Although the Dobbs decision brought renewed attention to the issue, the relationship between the United States and Mexico and people from both countries seeking abortions has a long history.

Women’s studies professor Lina-María Murillo, who studies the U.S.-Mexico borderlands and teaches a course on global reproduction, explains that abortion in the United States was legal and performed by midwives before the Civil War. In the following decades, declining birth rates and gender inequality led to restrictions across the country and a nationwide ban in 1910.

As Murillo’s research has documented, criminalization led women seeking abortions to travel to Mexico more than a century ago.

These border crossings ultimately declined as Mexican abortion restrictions were enforced and clinics shut down by the late 1960s. At the same time, U.S. activists and doctors contributed to the narrative that portrayed Mexico as a dangerous place where “back alley” abortions were performed by “butcher” physicians. Murillo argues that these myths contributed to a loosening of abortion restrictions in several U.S. states like California and New Mexico, helping set the stage for Roe v. Wade.

As elections loom closer in the United States, abortion will likely take center stage once again – including in Florida, where a referendum to reverse the six-week ban will be on the November ballot. Läs mer…

As hundreds of New York police officers in riot gear were called in to clear away a student protest at Columbia University on Tuesday night, the university president Nemat Shafik was saying she had “no choice” but to take this action.

Earlier that day, after defying administrative orders to disband their two-week encampment, a group of Columbia students had broken into and occupied a major academic building on campus, causing considerable damage. The incident and other protests have not only brought tensions over the Gaza war protests erupting across American universities to a fever pitch, it has also made the political stakes much clearer.

In recent weeks, a palpable unease has gripped some Democrats, fearing that anger among young people displayed at campuses such as Columbia’s could spill over into November’s election. Headlines like “The campus is coming for Joe Biden” (The Economist) and “How protests against Israel and war in Gaza could hurt Biden in November” (PBS) underscore the gravity of concern among certain White House officials.

Yet, despite the political pitfalls that campus protests pose for Biden on the left, dissatisfaction among young people over the Israel-Hamas war is unlikely to initiate a major swing in the 2024 presidential election. What it could do, however, is turn the broader electorate against Biden if he fails to take a stiff enough line against the most extreme agitators. Here’s why.

Protesters are unrepresentative

If there’s one point to glean from the recent spate of campus protests, it’s that participants are unrepresentative of young Americans as a whole. While protests have since rippled out to other institutions, demonstrations have mostly originated at America’s most prestigious (and expensive) universities, including Columbia, Harvard, Yale and Princeton.

Elite universities tend to foster progressive, activist student bodies that don’t look like the demography of American higher education generally, much less the US youth population overall.

Also, just a tiny fraction of students, even at elite institutions, are active in the Gaza demonstrations. At Columbia, for example, only about 200 students were arrested at a school that enrols more than 30,000.

Reports suggest that some protesters are non-students, and that outsiders have been responsible for orchestrating public displays. Some protesters don’t even have strong or well-formed views on Israel.

Zooming out, there’s no clear consensus among America’s youth on how the US should deal with Israel, or that it’s a top concern in the forthcoming election. According to the most recent Harvard Institute of Politics Survey of Young Americans, a slight majority, 51%, of young voters support a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas. For 18- to 29-year-olds around 41% have no firm position on America’s alliance with Israel.

Among youth voters, ordinary domestic issues like the cost of living are almost certain to be more salient in driving ballot box decisions than violence in the Middle East. For instance, according to the same Harvard IOP poll, only 2% of young Americans cite the Israel-Palestine conflict as the issue that concerns them the most.

A campsite of supporters of Gaza popped up around Columbia University, New York.
Sipa/Alamy

Campus protests could trigger a backlash in favour of support for Israel — not against it. Some Americans are unhappy about the student protests, which will only be exacerbated by the recent violence at Columbia. And one poll suggests that overall 80% of Americans support Israel in the war against Hamas.

While there’s doubtlessly sympathy among Democrats (and Americans as a whole) for a Gaza ceasefire, much of the rhetoric employed on campuses — such as chants of “from the river to the sea”, calls for a “global intifada”, or exhortations for Israel to “go to hell” — threaten to undermine public support.

Other examples of student agitation will also earn enemies. The hoisting of the Palestinian flag over Harvard Yard, the central courtyard at Harvard University, in violation of school policy. A UCLA student wearing a Star of David necklace appeared to be denied access to a campus entrance by protesters. One masked protester yelling: “Never forget the 7th of October. That will happen not one more time, not five more times, not 10 more times, not 100 more times, not 1,000 more times, but 10,000 times.” And another demanding “humanitarian aid” be provided in the form of a meal plan from university officials after occupying an academic building. The list goes on.

Read more:
US election: two graphs show how young voters influence presidential results as Biden gets poll boost

In part, the campus protests over Gaza can be seen as an outgrowth of the protests that Biden has seen in the primary elections. In the Michigan primary, for example, the state with the highest percentage of Arab Americans in the country, more than 100,000 Democrats voted “uncommitted” to express their discontent with the administration’s policies.

Yet if Biden were to align himself more closely with these protests, he’d encounter resistance from Jewish and other voters who demand his full-throated support of Israel. That could open up a lane for Donald Trump, who’s already trying to frame campus protests as evidence of chaos under the current administration.

Even before the recent violence, Republican senator Tom Cotton had labelled the Columbia protests a “nascent pogrom” and encouraged enlisting the National Guard to quell student “mobs”.

Former Harvard president Larry Summers has observed that: “Academic leaders who fail to enforce regulations at many of our leading universities are giving a political gift to Donald Trump and his acolytes.”

Biden has said that he “condemn[ed] the antisemitic protests”, while also “condemn[ing] those who don’t understand what’s going on with the Palestinians”. Although the both-sideism statement has been criticised, it largely reflects Biden acknowledging the complexity of the issue.

Young voters will be critical to Biden winning in November. If Democrats can get that age group out to vote out, they may just nudge Biden over the line. However, this means appealing to far more young people than those who attend the country’s top universities. Läs mer…