How the Emperor Justinian tried to Make Rome Great Again-and failed

When the Emperor Justinian succeeded to the Roman Empire in 527 AD it was already well past its best. All the western provinces-lands we now call Britain, France, Spain, North Africa, even Italy and Rome-had been lost in the previous century. What was left, the Eastern Empire governed from Constantinople, was still the most powerful state, primus inter pares. But no longer the sole hegemon it had been. However Justinian had big ideas: he would fully restore the glory of the Roman Empire. He would rebuild all the cities and defences which had decayed. He would reunite all Christians under his leadership and build a series of new churches across his domain. Above all decided “to reconquer all the countries possessed by the Romans to the limits of the two oceans”[1]

At first it went well. North Africa was captured, after a struggle. Forces were despatched as far as parts of Spain, with limited success. But it was in Italy that things started to go wrong. When Justinian became Emperor, Italy still had a thriving economy: there were big cities, Catholics, even a Pope. It was Roman in everything but name, being ruled by barbarian Ostrogoths. But names and titles mattered to Justinian. Accordingly he launched a series of wars (535-554 AD) designed to reconquer what he saw as Rome’s ancient homeland, and thereby restore its former glories. It didn’t matter that he had the help of able men like Belisarius and Narses: nor that he spent immense amounts of money and lost thousands of men; nor that he tried, and kept on trying. The contending armies swept back and forth across the peninsula, killing. taking and re-taking cities, destroying farms, aqueducts and roads. Even Rome suffered a long and disastrous siege. When the Empire finally prevailed, it wasn’t for long because the Lombards invaded in 568 AD and quickly wrested most of it away from Imperial control.

And back home did anyone thank their ambitious Emperor? Effectively, the citizens were bankrupted by the cost of all those armies, churches and palaces. Constantinople was torn apart by riots between sports fans. And the Christians, whom Justinian so loved, were divided into two irreconcilable factions, the Monophysites and the Orthodox, a feud which would have disastrous consequences for his successors. Of course Justinian was not to blame for the plague that struck the empire. But there was little left in the kitty to repair the ravages it unleashed., When Justinian died in 565AD he left the Empire larger-but fatally weakened in economic and human terms. He was a consequential Emperor, but he was a dreamer, unable to grasp that some things are truly lost forever. We shall leave the last damning words to Professor Davis

But the historian of Europe is forced to admit that by undertaking a reconquest of the West when all his forces were needed to defend his empire on the Persian and Slavonic frontiers, Justinian exhausted the resources of his Empire in pursuit of a policy which could not possibly succeed,[2]

Can anyone think of any modern parallels?

1] RH Davis A History of Medieval Europe Longman 1989 p 50

[2] ibid.p61

#roman empire #politics #economics #history #justinian #church #christianity

Debra MacKenzie on microplastics-and a master class in balanced reporting

So-are all our bodies full of microplastics, ready to reach out their oily hands and strike us all down with heart disease, tumours and goodness knows what else, or not? It’s a story we’ve covered before (LSS 9 4 24) and to be fair we even approached it with a certain moderation (LSS 12 3 25)

But who are we to advise you, when we can point you at once to the works of science journalist Debra Mackenzie, writing in the Guardian? [1] Not only is the science interesting. She also gets to the heart of why scientific controversies arise. In the case of microplastics, because one lot of researchers (medical folk) are approaching the problem one way. And another lot (analytical chemists) come from somewhere different, with other methodologies And this is ominous: as we have seen time and again, with CFCs, with tobacco and with fossil fuels, there could be interested parties who will be waiting to pounce on those disputes , to use them to allege that the science is not certain, that no action is needed. To quote one of the more chilling passages of Debra’s article

The plastics industry is more powerful than the CFC-makers were, and it has friends who know how to manufacture doubt. (Researchers I spoke to said that their papers have been denounced to journal editors by chemical industry figures who were not analytical experts.)

Now we at LSS are not medical experts. gentle readers. We do not know where the truth lies, although we may suspect. And, as in many scientific debates, there may be actors with differing levels of enthusiasm about where the evidence ultimately points. In any case, you should read Mackenzie’s article. You will learn a great deal more than just about plastics..

[1]https://onlinescientias.wordpress.com/wp-admin/post.php?post=13505&action=edit

#health #pollution #microplastics #science

Gold is King #3: How one of our old blogs really has come true!

Long standing readers (surely “long suffering”?-ed) will recall our two blogs Gold is King….(LSS 26 10 24) and ….Did we actually get something right?(LSS 23 4 25).Which severally predicted that a deteriorating security situation in general, and the policies of the Trump Administration in particular, would have two consequences. First that the dollar would start to lose reserve status. And that in the absence of any credible alternative, Gold would become the only reliable safe haven, and that its price had la way to rise. Now help has arrived from someone who really knows what they are talking about, the astute Richard Partington of the Guardian. Have a look at this killer quote from his succinct article The Dollar is losing Credibility: why Central Banks are scrambling for Gold: [1]

Investors – private and sovereign – believe their strategic reserves are no longer safe in dollar terms, as they can be confiscated overnight. The dollar is losing the credibility as the nominal anchor of the global monetary system because the Fed is losing credibility, and US Congress is losing its credibility.

And he explains how and why all the most astute and powerful people in the world can see nothing but gold as the only safe place in which to park their assets in the foreseeable future.

At the risk of blowing our own trumpet,(oh, come on!-ed) and in the sure and secure knowledge that we never offer financial advice, only economic commentary, and that wistful, we wish to adduce the following points:

1 Is LSS possessed of an eeerie mystic prescience? No. Even a stopped clock is right twice a day. But when real professionals like Partington confirm our thoughts, it means the facts are pretty grim indeed.

2 Isn’t this a lot of log rolling by the Guardian, which has a bit of a reputation for being a Lefty at times? No-all commentators are starting to agree, including a pretty astute lot at the Financial Times. And if you believe they are Lefties, then you might as well believe in a Flat Moon and the Abominable Yeti.

3 Is the dollar finished as the world’s reserve currency? Not yet. But its fall from 66% of global reserves to 57% in a single decade suggests all is not as healthy as it once was and that alone gives cause for concern.

4 So why has another currency not replaced the dollar? The experts we consulted think that Europe is too weak for the Euro to be a runner. While China’s yuan is just not convertible, and its political system is so different, that they rule it out altogether

5 What about all these ‘ere funny digital currencies, wotsit? We don’t even go there, we know nothing about them.

6 Is this more Trump-bashing? No. We think Mr Trump has a right to act in what he believes is America’s interests. We merely report the consequences of what happens when everybody acts like that.

7 Does LSS like what’s happening? No. we hate it. A world in which the principle economic activity becomes digging a metal out of the ground and then burying underground again somewhere else is operating far, far below its optimal economic potential. It would do much better with a single reserve currency, peaceful trade and stable international relations based on Law. But some of you will have found our thoughts on that matter elsewhere in our sequence of blogs.

[1]https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/jan/16/the-dollar-is-losing-credibility-why-central-banks-are-scrambling-for-gold?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

#dollar #gold #economics #trade #currencies #international relations

Friday Night: How about a Glass of Sherry?

Photo by Antonio Garcia Prats on Pexels.com

Southwest Spain, the Costa de la Luz, that tucked-away corner where the Atlantic meets the mouth of the Guadalquivir is off the beaten track as far as many tourists are concerned. Its empty marshes and estuaries, flat low farmlands and ancient cities as about as far as one can imagine from the concrete canyons of the Costa del Sol, Benidorm and all those tattoos. Which is odd because this region was civilised for thousands of years while all the beer and paella joints were tiny fishing hamlets. Famous too, for many things. And one of them is Sherry wine to which we devote today’s little blog

Sherry from the D.O. Jerez–Xérès–Sherry spans a small but wildly expressive family of wines, all born in the “Sherry Triangle” of Jerez, Sanlúcar, and El Puerto. Fino is the palest and driest: crisp, saline, aged under flor, tasting of almonds and sea‑spray—drink it fridge‑cold with olives, almonds, jamón, or seafood. Manzanilla, made only in Sanlúcar, is even more briny and delicate, perfect with fried fish or prawns. Amontillado begins life under flor but finishes oxidatively, giving a haunting mix of hazelnut, caramel, and dried herbs; serve cool with artichokes, consommé, or mushrooms. Oloroso is fully oxidative—rich, nutty, sometimes leathery—best slightly cool with game, stews, or hard cheeses. Palo Cortado sits mysteriously between Amontillado and Oloroso: elegant, aromatic, and complex, a contemplative wine for roasted meats or simply a quiet evening. Sweet styles—PX and Moscatel—are luscious, raisiny, and dessert‑like, wonderful with blue cheese or poured over ice cream But we found this excellent site called the Sherry Region [1] will tell you everything you want to know, and for which we have no room here, including history, types of wine and lots, lots more about this fascinating part of Iberia.

No trip to the Sherry Country would be complete without a trip around one of the fascinating Bodegas belonging one of the different companies These are not tiny lodges, but large production facilities which face each other across the streets like the premises old car companies did in Birmingham in the 1970s. We dare not advertise: but the one which we often choose offers wine trains, guided tours and huge vaults with ancient barrels containing the chalked autographs of some of the most famous people who have ever lived in the last 126 years. Yes they liked a drop of this stuff too. And you will find out why when you attends the generous tasting at the end, which can become convivial indeed. We will close with this warning: don’t go to the one in the morning, or that’s the rest of the day written off.

[1] Sherry Region | El Marco de Jerez | Sherry Wines Origin – Sherry Wines

#Spain #Jerez de la Frontera #Cadiz #sherry #wine #Atlantic #tourism

Do the Twistronics-and change the world

What happens if you take two sheets of graphene and rotate one slightly relative to the other?” It’s a question all of us must have asked ourselves at one point or another (it is?-ed) but never really found time to answer. But two remarkably intelligent men did: Allan MacDonald, a theoretical physicist who posed it; and Pablo Jarillo‑Herrero who answered it by building ultra‑clean, precisely controlled graphene heterostructures –you know: the kind of devices where quantum subtleties become visible. Well, we said they were clever! Their work, and the prize which they won for it are admirably summarised by the erudite Selva Vargas Reátegui for El País [1]

Her excellent article contains much more on the details, so read it. Suffice it to say, the discovery not only revealed all sorts of weird and wonderful properties in graphene. It actually created a whole new field of learning: Twistronics. Because researchers soon learned to twist not just bilayers as in graphene, but trilayers, multilayers, and heterostructures of many 2D materials. The field exploded because twist angle becomes a new starting point for designing quantum matter. While still early, the work hints at possibilities such as: designer superconductors, quantum simulation platforms, ultra‑sensitive sensors and novel electronic devices based on correlated phases. Ok we are a tad shaky on one or two of these ourselves, but if it helps build something to do the ironing, we’re all in.

But the real point for us is conceptual. Changing the geometry alone can utterly change the properties of a material. It feels a bit like the time when some unknown genius in Old Mesopotamia started mixing tin with copper. As small, as unexpected and as potentially world changing. Oh, and another point: economics. The more you spend on basic science and research, the more your chances rise of repeating the trick somewhere else. Leaders of the world, you have nothing to lose but your accountants.

Premio Fronteras para los descubridores del ‘ángulo mágico’ que genera supermateriales | Ciencia | EL PAÍS English speakers: you need to hit the translation button

#Twistronics #graphene #quantum physics #geometry #bronze age #materials science

Hot years and wild fires: Is this the start of a true doom loop?

Two stories today give us serious pause for thought. Both concern our old bête noire of climate change. It’s not the bad news per se: we’re kind of inured by now. It’s the way they open the door to thoughts with actual evolutionary consequences: but more of that later.

The first story, from Ajit Niranjam of the Guardian, is a grim reprise of current trends. [1] 2025 is the third hottest year on record. For us their killer fact is context: El Niño, which had boosted heating trends in 2023 and 2024, was waning by 2025, so even that fig leaf has been stripped away. And talking of stripping away, what about the forests, which might have soaked up a little more of all that lethal CO₂ affording us a few more years of life? Well as this truly impressive piece of visual journalism by Ashley Kirk and Pablo Gutiérrez shows, they are being devasted by the very wildfires which global warming has brought about. This is what information theorists call a self re-inforcing feedback loop which would be intellectually interesting to study if anyone is left alive to do so.

And the evolutionary reason we are so worried? Our species carries ancient cognitive machinery that buckles under modern complexity. Human cognition defaults to fast, intuitive, pattern‑matching heuristics — brilliant for spotting predators in the savannah, disastrous for interpreting climate models This “cognitive autopilot” leaps to conclusions, prefers simple stories, and treats feelings as evidence. A species that cannot update beliefs in the face of overwhelming evidence, that treats data as optional, that cannot overcome its own cognitive biases is evolutionarily brittle. It will eventually be outcompeted by one that can. Can anyone think of a name for it?

[1] Human activity helped make 2025 third-hottest year on record, experts say | Climate crisis | The Guardian

[2] Mapped: how the world is losing its forests to wildfires | Wildfires | The Guardian

#climate change #global warming #evolution #atmosphere #weather #extinction

My Home is damaged: time to sue Big Oil?

It’s a question a lot of people are asking as the world is increasingly lashed by the storms, floods and wild fires unleashed by global warming. And when you realise that the world’s fossil‑fuel giants collectively command over six trillion dollars a year — more economic power than most nations on Earth-it’s a tempting pot of money to aim at. What would you do with even one of those trillions? So we asked our Legal People: Can an individual sue a fossil fuel company to pay for flood/fire/storm damage, or the rising insurance premiums, that go with all those things?

The chances of getting anywhere on your own are slim. Firstly, you must show that any damage has been made worse by global warming (there will always be a background level of storms and things). Secondly, that a specific company’s emissions and /or “misinformation” caused that extra damage. And above all that the company chosen has a “duty of care” anyway. Quite a big ask when you think how much legal brainpower that $6 trillion is going to buy against you.

However, joining in with group actions increases your chances of getting something back. [1] . In the USA there are now 86 lawsuits against fossil fuel companies, including the very biggest. This class alleges that these companies “knew about the dangers of global warming and did nothing”. Even worse, it is alleged, they “actively misled” about those dangers. These suits will be fiercely contested; and the Jury will decide, as they say.[2] But there is a juicy second front opening. Home owners in Washington State are suing oil companies for climate‑driven increases in insurance costs. which they allege “are driven by global warming.”[3] As such costs may well be set to rise astronomically for all of us, their battle is indeed a noble one.

In the meantime there at least two things you can do. Work with climate litigation NGOs Groups like ClientEarth, Global Legal Action Network,[4] and the Climate Litigation Network are actively exploring new legal strategies. Document your damages If future cases open the door to compensation, having detailed records of storm impacts and repair costs will matter. Courts are increasingly willing to treat climate damage as a foreseeable, preventable harm caused in part by corporate deception. That shift is what makes future individual claims more plausible. There’s little doubt at fossil fuel companies represent a big barrel of money. Could some of it one day belong to you?

[1] https://theconversation.com/more-than-two-dozen-cities-and-states-are-suing-big-oil-over-climate-change-they-just-got-a-boost-from-the-us-supreme-court-2050

[2] Big Oil in Court – The latest trends in climate litigation against fossil fuel companies – Zero Carbon Analytics

[3]Homeowners Sue Oil Companies as Climate Damage Drives up Insurance Rates – Environmental Magazine

[4] GLAN – Global Legal Action Network

#global warming #climate change #fossil fuels #legal action #money #insurance

Autism: How many types?

Readers will recall the ancient controversy over claims that Autism was caused by the MMR vaccine. We didn’t believe those claims much then, and probably even less so now. But amid all the shouting we think that a point was missed. Is there really a single psychiatric condition called “autism”; or does that word conceal more than one condition lurking underneath?(see also LSS 28 8 25; 15 5 25 et seq)

Michael Marshall examines this question in a wide ranging article for the New Scientist[1] Now : when you do things as well as Marshall and the New Scientist do, you’ve every right to put it behind a paywall. So for those of you who can’t go round we’ll zoom in on two of the more intriguing research projects MIchael discusses, as they also hint at another topic we’ve also covered recently: but see below for that.

Firstly: what really does lie beneath the word autism? In different studies Dr Conor Liston and Dr Natalie Sauerwold were both able to group people with autism into four reliable categories according to the traits which their subjects presented. Unfortunately, the two classifications that each scientist came up with did not always overlap . But both teams were using different techniques: and of course this work is very new. Intriguingly for LSS readers Dr Liston also found

That brain regions with altered circuitry in autistic people……also showed characteristic changes in gene expression……

But being a good journalist , Michael warns us against over interpretation here. Modifications in neural architecture may not be caused solely by underlying genes: they could also be due to the brain re-wiring itself, to compensate for defects in an entirely different region, whose construction is the responsibility of an entirely different set of genes.

Hardened members LSS community will recall our enthusiastic blogs ( LSS 15 12 25; 29 2 25) wherein we discussed the exciting findings which do indeed hint at a demonstrable link between gene frequencies and reliable patterns of behaviour. Neither those findings, nor these ones on autism, are yet conclusive. But they show which way the wind is blowing: and we think it is in a hopeful direction

[1] https://www.newscientist.com/article/2509117-what-if-the-idea-of-the-autism-spectrum-is-completely-wrong/

#autism #psychiatric disorder #neurological disorder #genetics

Our thoughts for the New Year: a little works better than a lot

The first few days of the year are always filled with a media barrage of advice. You can’t go on the interweb, open a magazine or turn on the telly, without some omniscient panjandrum telling you to do a dozen worthy things. Eat less, until you look like a prisoner in the Soviet Gulag. Run like a marathon athlete. Fill your mind with worthy moral projects and take on so many new tasks that you become a Different Person. All by January 10th. We know none of this ever works, because if it did the experts would not have to repeat themselves every year. And the reason it doesn’t work is because it’s asking too much of people.

It was the late great Dr Michael Mosley who realised this. In his eminently readable work Just One Thing: How simple changes can transform your Life [1] He sets out a whole slew of small ideas which people can achieve rather than big things which they can’t. If you want to discover what they are read the book. But it inspired us to go around the mighty offices of the Learning Science and Society Headquarters here in beautiful Croydon and ask people about their ideas for New Years resolutions which will stick. Here are our findings:

Commuting get off one stop earlier than normal, and walk. OK if your stops are only a quarter of a mile apart But what if you live in Haywards Heath and work in Croydon? You’d have to walk from Gatwick. Our verdict: good if sensibly applied

Dry January which most people interpret as no booze from New Years day until Valentines Day. Feasible and- we have actually done it. But what if your local Toby Carvery is offering a crazy special at £6 a head? Are you really going to sit there and drink water?

Declutter a cupboard Makes space and is exercise of a sort provided you don’t gash your head on an exposed door and have to have the splinters removed in Croydon General Hospital. Plus the local charity shops will just love all those old mini discs, pencils, tatty files , keyboards, adding machines, unused 1997 diaries, abacuses and stone tools which you find. But what if you don’t have a cupboard?

Learn the name of a colleague whose monniker you have forgotten/never knew anyway Ok as far as it goes but could be creepy. Being on the Board, we are used to this all the time and with practice it’s not as tricky as it looks.

Read one page from a book each day Ok slows you down and broadens the mind But what if the book is Mein Kampf or the Croydon Trades Directory for 1989 ? Verdict: choose carefully

Give someone your full intention for 60 seconds Oh come on, these are meant to be achievable!

So here are our conclusions, to sit alongside those of the great Dr Mosley. Da quod jubes et jubes quod da, we say (give what you command and command what you give) A favourite catchphrase which we share with St Augustine of Hippo. On which note we will simply wish you all a successful 2026.

Our thanks to the staff of Croydon General Hospital and apologies for the extra work we caused them

[1]Mosley, Michael. Just One Thing: How Simple Changes Can Transform Your Life. Short Books / Hachette UK, 2022.

#health #diet #New Year

We offer a massive and unconditional apology for Nitrogen

We think we owe you a truly massive overwhelming apology, gentle reader. And this is why.

“Will the world end with a bang or a whimper?” is a question we’ve covered before here. We’ve even mentioned a few possibilities such as magnetic flips ,exploding volcanoes and more insidious effects like pollution and pandemics. (LSS passim)Yet it was while researching another topic entirely that we came across a wholly unexpected and entirely man-made problem that we thought you should know about: Nitrogen, [1] [2]and its derivative compounds which has been unleashed on an unprepared world in uncontrolled quantities for over a century. The reason it’s rising so fast is simple: we are manufacturing and releasing unprecedented quantities of reactive nitrogen—fertilisers, manure emissions, industrial by‑products—far beyond anything the planet’s natural nitrogen cycle ever evolved to handle.

Why so much? Because the Haber–Bosch process unlocked a torrent of synthetic nitrogen, and agriculture embraced it as a miracle. Global production of reactive nitrogen has soared to many times its pre‑industrial level. Locally, this can boost yields, but it comes with a hidden price: soils become chemically dependent, losing the microbial communities that once fixed nitrogen naturally. Excess nitrogen washes into rivers, fuelling algal blooms and dead zones; it volatilises into nitrous oxide, damaging the ozone layer; it accumulates in ecosystems, favouring a few aggressive species while starving others. And things are never so bad that they don’t get worse. Nitrous oxide is the quiet heavyweight of greenhouse gases. molecule for molecule, it traps far more heat than carbon dioxide and lingers in the atmosphere for over a century. It’s also the single largest ozone‑depleting emission humanity still produces. And yet most people barely register it. So what looks like abundance at the farm gate is, at planetary scale, a metabolic overload.

And this is the deeper tragedy: millions of farmers, each trying to solve a local problem—how to feed crops, how to secure a harvest—collectively drive a global destabilisation of the nitrogen cycle. We’ve built a civilisation addicted to excess nitrogen, and the system now expects those inputs just to function. The long‑term risk is that we push soils, waterways, and atmospheric chemistry past thresholds that cannot easily be reversed. What began as a triumph of human ingenuity has become a planetary dependence, and the bill for that dependence is only just beginning to arrive. A silent catastrophe of soil degradation, desertification, wetland collapse (LSS 28 5 24),biodiversity loss from nutrient overload, and fisheries collapse.

And now for our apology, gentle readers. For several years now we have been repeatedly warning you of the dangers posed by antibiotic resistant bacteria and climate change. We had not a single idea about this nitrogen crisis building up all around us. None whatsoever, We profoundly and unreservedly apologise to all of you-readers, contributors researchers and hard working staff, even the ones in HR. And we say this-never will such an oversight happen again in this mighty organisation. But do not be alarmed. From now on we will search the world ceaselessly to bring you news of fresh perils, unexpected lethal dangers which may be lurking ready to wipe us all out Or if not that, at least reduce the handful of survivors to subsistence-level barbarism in a lawless, violent post-apocalyptic world. We think we may even have uncovered a few already. Follow us if you want to know more about what they are.

[1] Anthropogenic-driven perturbations on nitrogen cycles and interactions with climate change (2024)Gong, Kou‑Giesbrecht & Zaehle (2024)
Published in Current Opinion in Green and Sustainable Chemistry. click:Anthropogenic-driven perturbations on nitrogen cycles and interactions with climate changes – ScienceDirect

[2] Alteration in nitrogen cycle and its contribution to climate change: a review (2025)Anand et al. (2025) click:2Alteration in nitrogen cycle and its contribution to climate change: a review | Proceedings of the Indian National Science Academy

#nitogen #agriculture #nitrous oxide #pollution #climate change #disaster