Microplastics: Let’s be cautious with the data

Read not to contradict and confute, nor to believe and take for granted, nor to find talk and discourse, but to weigh and consider

It was Francis Bacon , the founder of the scientific method who recorded those words in his famous work Of Studies. We have always followed them assiduously, as you know well gentle reader. So today we present a diptych of stories on our old bugbear microplastics pollution, because togethe, they illustrate the Baconian approach very well.

All of you share our worries about the dangers of microplastics. We tried to count the blogs we’ve done on it but ran out of patience early on. And today’s first story, from the learned Damian Carrington of the Guardian fits well into the gloomy canon.[1] Damian reports some truly alarming studies which suggest that microplastics are seriously threatening photosynthesis among our most vital food crops, such as wheat and rice. Get this for a killer quote

Asia was hardest hit by estimated crop losses, with reductions in all three of between 54m and 177m tonnes a year,

Although they are hitting food production everywhere and not just crops: seafoods are particularly vulnerable as well. Case proven again: microplastics are hell, right?

But we would not be LSS, we would not be Baconians, if we didn’t then go to this story in Nature Briefings Micoplastics Research Needs Ironing Out

Last month, Briefing readers recoiled from the news that human brains seem to be full of plastic bits — with a recent study of autopsied bodies finding our brains might contain as much as 4.5 bottle caps’ worth of plastic. But some of the most shocking studies about microplastics in human tissues rely on small sample sizes, lack appropriate controls or “are not biologically plausible”, write four health researchers. “Without more rigorous standards, transparency and collaboration — among researchers, policymakers and industrial stakeholders — a cycle of misinformation and ineffective regulation could undermine efforts to protect both human health and the environment,” they argue.Nature | 8 min read
Reference: Nature Medicine paper

And the point? It’s this need for our side to be rigorously scrupulous wherever and whenever we can. When climate scientists offered the slightest room for doubt, Big Oil and its well-funded armies of deniers and manipulators pounced, casting doubt, insinuating, opening the door to denial. We are the smaller, weaker side and must tell the truth if we are to be believed. During the Second World War, Goebbels and the Nazis flooded the media with and endless stream of new claims, false facts, non sequiteurs and fake news. And at first it worked. But the BBC played a different game. Carefully to admit Allied losses and defeats as well as victories they slowly built trust among even their German audiences. In the end, their radio broadcasts were the main source of news for millions of Hitler’s followers.

We will play the long game,. And reality will justify us.

[1]https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/mar/10/microplastics-hinder-plant-photosynthesis-study-finds-threatening-millions-with-starvati

#microplastics #francis bacon #pollution #hunger #food production

Go Back to where you came from: if this isn’t the best TV in ten years, we don’t know what is

“But why do they all come here?” is the agonised cry of Dave Watford and his mates in every pub from Truro to Thurso. Dunno, Dave. The English language? Because of our free market, low regulation economy, where the reward is for taking risks? Because we’re still relatively prosperous? But Dave and the boys are right: Immigration and its discontents are the number one driving force in all our lives here in the third decade of what may prove to be our very last century.

Or are there deeper forces at work? People have always moved from bad conditions to try to find better ones. Such movements are always deeply resented by the native populations in the host lands. It is the achievement of Channel 4‘s Go Back to Where you Came From [1] to cast the question in terms of the way people really are, not the way they ought to be. Six ordinary, but essentially decent British people complete a typical migrant’s journey from the ravaged lands of their origin to their final landing under the White Cliffs of Dover. The producers chose Syria and Sudan as the “GO” points. Wow. We get it.

And we stress: ordinary, decent people. So the producers deliberately chose the reality show format to highlight their odyssey; for no one in 2025 would have watched a documentary. And what an odyssey for the 21st century it is! They run the gauntlet of squalid refugee camps, freezing and burning temperatures, lousy food, unmentionable lavatory facilities, major league armed criminals and deadly waters in the course of their journeys. All the while in dialogue themselves, and with the locals. All six displayed levels of courage and endurance which we could ever endure, we confess.

Like the heroes of any epic road movie, they are transformed, so that they are not the same people they were when they started it. One man in particular stood out: a haulage contractor from Yorkshire who though sheer hard work has built up a small lorry business. It lets him feed his family, of whom he is fiercely protective, with out any help from the state. And get this: if you are fined £10 000 every time an illegal immigrant jumps on your lorry, wouldn’t you be just a little resentful? But it is to the immense credit of this man, and the film makers, that they slowly uncover the causes of his plight. War; ecological collapse; deep inequality and the paid apologists who defend it at every turn. He comes, he sees, he thinks, he changes. His deep reserves of emotional intelligence finally process the better angels of his nature.

Yet we at LSS do not advocate opening England’s doors to every migrant, however desperate their plight. Emotion and pity are bad guides to policy. A Nation state is not the same thing as the Social Services department of a London Borough. But the lesson is clear: a substantial, though not crippling transfer of funds from richer to poorer countries would eliminate most human migration quite quickly.

Go Back to Where you came from at last shows the true causes of this problem, And most people learned the lesson. That is a mighty achievement indeed.

[1]https://www.channel4.com/programmes/go-back-to-where-you-came-from#:~:text=Six%20opinionated%20Brits%20experience%20refugee%20life%20up%20close

#go back to where you came from #immigration #migration #emigration #climate change #war #poverty #inequality

Heroes of Learning: Colin Renfrew

Anyone with the slightest interest in early civilisation must pay tribute to the work of Professor Colin Renfrew. That fascinating period spanning the Neolithic to the early Iron Age witnessed the transformation of humanity from hunter gatherers subsisting barely above the animal level to the first technological civilisations, deploying writing, building, pottery, roads and all the other appurtenances that set us above the beasts. This was Renfrew’s territory. And it encompassed a vast sweep from Cycladic figurines to the immense migrations of the Indo European speakers and the changes they wrought With a few Anatolians thrown in for good measure

So today we throw this blog open to the likes of Nature Briefings (see below) and Wikipedia [1] to tell you about his life and accomplishments. For Renfrew had all the marks of the true scholar. His learning was vast, his methods empirical, his conclusions provisional. He knew the real value of learning to is prompt further investigations, not to provide easy answers. If someone had provided clear and unequivocal evidence that the Indo Europeans had originated in Sutton Coldfield and not the Steppes, he would have been the first to agree. If ever you have travelled the sunny lands of the Mediterranean or Levant, gazed in wonder at the ruins still there, or tried to understand the guide book, remember :you are in Renfrew territory. Tread with respect.

Archaeology’s Closest thing to a household name Colin Renfrew, who helped to transform archaeology as a scientific discipline, died last November, aged 87. In the 1960s, researchers discovered that tree rings from bristlecone pines (Pinus longaeva) — which are among the oldest living things on Earth — could be used to redate artefacts in Europe. Prompted by these developments, Renfrew helped develop a fresh understanding of how European and Near Eastern civilizations developed, alongside new models for how societies change. “Renfrew’s ideas were decades ahead of available computational modelling power,” writes his colleague, archaeologist Cyprian Broodbank.Nature | 5 min read

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colin_Renfrew

#colin renfrew #neolithic #bronze age #iron age #fertile crescent #middle east #indo europeans #archaeology #language

Rookwood Operations: Clearing phosphates AND capturing carbon

Today we have a good news story, brought to us by the ineffable Robin McKie of the Guardian, which brings genuine hope, Because it solves two problems for the price of one.[1]

To begin at the beginning. In the last fifteen years or so, England’s rivers have started to fill with huge, choking blooms of algae, which seize all the oxygen from the water, thus killing everything else before, dying back themselves . To leave a poisonous foul-smelling sewer , like the ones you used to find in old towns in the Industrial revolution. The cause? High levels of phosphates on agricultural lands, which runs off into the waterways, producing sudden spurts in the aforementioned algae-and down we go to death, for the ecosystem that is. Now, it could be argued that without high phosphate levels we could not feed our population ( feed or fatten?-ed) So how to square the circle?

The answer is to trap the run-off phosphates and return them to the land. And a small company called Rookwood Operations[2] is doing just that, down in the leafy county of Somerset. Their new Phosphate Removal Material just sits in the water, soaking up the phosphates until it’s full. Whereupon it is returned to the land ready for the farmers to exploit again. And get this:

For every metric ton of PRM produced, carbon is sequestered, locking CO2 for up to 1000 years.
PRM is made from completely natural circular sourced sustainable components

How’s that for two in one? There’s so much to like here for LSS readers. There’s even a feminist angle, as one of the company founders was up for the prestigious UK Women in Innovation Award.

Thinking new. Thinking differently. Using existing technologies to squeeze progress in a new way. Surely that trumps going round smashing your friends over the head because it makes you feel better?

[1]https://www.theguardian.com/science/2025/feb/02/uk-scientist-wins-prize-for-invention-that-could-help-avert-phosphogeddon

[2]https://rookwoodoperations.co.uk

#Rookwood operations #phosphates #river pollution #capture technologies #agriculture #technology

Heroes of Learning: Peter Ramus

Due to difficulties with the Word press site we are unable to bring you images. We hope to resume this function soon

Remember your first textbook? Your first real textbook, when you’d left school and started to learn something which you really wanted to? It could have been one on Accounting, Zoology, Economics or something altogether more useful like Nursing or Housing Studies. OK, It wasn’t light reading, exactly. But here was real serious learning, laid out by experts, divided into chapters, references, sections, with questions and answers. The very essence of professional: but, sometimes, there was wonder in there too, as it made you think. And how far would you have got without this guidebook, comfort and, above all, friend? RP Littlewood, Living Spanish , that was our personal favourite. They’re still publishing it today, much updated of course.

Well what if we told you that all this was down to one man. He is called Peter Ramus in English, but he was one of those typical polymathic polynational scholars that the Renassance was always throwing up. There were brighter and better scholars at the time. But Peter had one insight which made his contribution to our progress as good as any of theirs . He realised that knowledge had to be organised, systematised and arranged into an orderly manner, enabling students to access it far more quickly, freeing up new time for creative thinking and discussion. And so he invented the Textbook. It was a force multiplier of immense power. Combined with effective use of the new printing technology it allowed learning to spread quickly and effectively in many fields. No single textbook or edition is ever perfect. They must be updated every few years as new discoveries ensue. But the method and layout guarantee a sure design which has lasted, as its easy transference to the internet shows. An so we hail Peter Ramus as a true hero of learning, who helped make us what we are today.

Our link today comes from the BBC , the UK’s publicly funded source of news and information. It is rigorously objective and independent, and as such is hated by private purveyors of news of all sorts . Please support it where you can.

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0026vst

[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petrus_Ramus

#textbook #learning #teaching #renaissance

World Government #2: the end of mass migrations

The world heats, driving waves of refugees in search of survival. Nationalism, religious identitarianism, ethnic exclusion grow. The resulting conflicts throw more waves of refugees onto the shores of societies with neither the psychological nor economic means to cope. Those societies in turn experience fear and destabilisation, as people understandably try to cling to the mental assurances of the past, leading to more nationalism, identity politics………… This spiral downwards will require big thinking indeed if we are to survive at all as a species.[1]

The problems we have identified-(climate change and mass migration) are closely connected. They are rooted in deep inequality. People migrate along economic lines from poor to rich, just like ions in an electric field. They always have done. The solution is a mass transference of sufficient wealth from richer countries to poorer ones to build up their economies. This would not only reduce the incentive to migrate. It would also slow the endless production of status goods like luxury cars and fashionable clothes in the rich countries. The ending of such frivolous production, distribution and consumption would enable an enormous reduction in carbon emissions.

Yet how can a world constructed on hundreds of lines of sovereign and religious identities ever achieve this transfer? There is too much incentive to cheat. To let other nations make the transfers, while guarding local advantage. To allow funds to be hidden in “sovereign” jurisdictions. To allow quick fossil fuel booms to grab short boosts of wealth. To think short term, to think parochially. Perhaps future generations will even decide it was criminally, like the Slave-owning Planters of the US South in the nineteenth century. Whereas a single world Government would cut through all these problems at once. And we haven’t begun to mention the advantages in things like health, space exploration and cleansing pollution, which would follow easily. Once again, the situation is now so desperate, that it’s time to consider something utterly different. We begin to suspect that something to be a World Government, however bizarre that sounds.

In the next post in this series we shall look at the history of the idea of world government, and find it’s not such a new idea after all.

[1] Is the world ready for mass migration due to climate change? – BBC Future

#world government #migration #climate change #pollution #inequality

Torsten Bell’s prescription: but will the British take his medicine?

Here’s a telling statistic about the United Kingdom. Between 1850 and 1992 more than 200 reservoirs were regularly opened across the country, even during World War Two: seven were dug in 1955 alone. Since 1992, not one has been constructed. What goes for reservoirs goes for every other conceivable aspect of infrastructure. Britain is a country living off its past like fallen aristocrats, in deadly hock to nostalgia and expecting a comfort of life way beyond its means.

Such is the thesis of Torsten Bell (Judd School, PPE Oxford, Resolution Foundation and now Labour MP) He presents his thesis in a work of immense detail and careful scholarship called Great Britain? How We Get Our Future Back. He details the consequences of our doleful mismanagement in terms of education, poverty wages, health, and a tax-and-benefits system of Byzantine complexity and contradiction. Yet it is chapter five on investment which diagnoses the root causes of British woes. Compared to other OECD countries, the British are terrible at it, both public and private. This in turn leads to appalling weaknesses in productivity, entailing less investment, and so on etc, etc. Downwards. The consequences of this economic stagnation will be a rise in political extremism as different ethnic and cultural groups fight over the shares of a declining national cake.

His analysis and prescriptions read like the DNA of the present Labour Government. It fits into a long tradition of well-meaning analyses of what’s wrong with Britain. Yet he cautions against the pat solutions of Centre Left bien-pensants (our problems are much deeper than membership or not of the EU) He calls for a new patriotism, based on our undoubted strengths in things like service industries. In this and many other recommendations, he has much good to say. But will the British want his, and his party’s, medicine? Consider this:

Anyone serious about governing Britain should plan on taxes remaining at higher levels than we are used to (p189)

Paying taxes is the litmus test of patriotism: if you won’t put your hand in your pocket, how serious are your protestations of national love? Our fellow countrymen grumble about health and roads: but they hate, viscerally hate, paying taxes, as we know from our lived experience of them. So any new ethos based on shared experience will die stillborn; there are still too many comfortable with the mental furniture of our decline, at least among the English.

Great Britain PLC is a failing company: underinvested , indebted, overdrawn and still overpaid in many grades. A merger was tried between 1973 and 2016, but it failed. Now the only option is a foreign takeover. How hostile shall it be?

We have one criticism of the hardback The graphs are printed in weak grey ink, thereby making comprehension difficult at times, and spoiling the hard work of the author and his researchers

Torsten Bell Great Britain? How We Get Our Future Back The Bodley Head 2024

#great britain #uk #economics #politics #social democracy

hMPV: Shock Horror, or small pandemic, few hurt?

As all journalists know, there are two types of story. One is “HUGE SOMETHING SHOCK HORROR” the other is “small thing happens, Few hurt or injured” Which do you think catches more clicks/sells more papers/hooks more viewers? So it is with a certain caution that we approach the current media froth around the new hMPV virus that is clearly occupying the thoughts of so many members of the Daily Mail newsroom.

hMPV (human metapneumovirus) is a pretty standard seeming single strand RNA virus of the respiratory syncytial group.[1] It is one of many that surge in late winter in the northern hemisphere after people have been living close together for long weeks in the warm, but with regular trips out into the cold. It can be dangerous, there’s no doubt about it, especially to vulnerable groups such as young children the elderly and those with respiratory conditions. As it is not in our interests for any of our readers to die or lose family members, we urge you to take the sensible precautions enjoined by medical authorities.

What is interesting is the way it’s being reported, especially in western media. The two stories our researchers have put up, both from the Mail are actually pretty representative of all western media, regardless of political, social, racial, sartorial and gender affiliation. [2][3] The westerners are anxious for China to share more information and data on the current outbreak. The Chinese, with long memories of western interference, have their own concerns. Everyone recalls the bitter trading of accusations, suspicions and mistrusts during the COVID-19 pandemic, and are all about as calm and rational as a pair of nestling blackbirds in May.

And our thoughts ?Call us naive, but we long for a world where scientific and medical questions are treated as such, and the maximum co-operation is effected. Let the boys with their toys worry about things like who has most battleships later. Unfortunately it seems to be a human cognitive weakness to elide any possible phenomenon into a weapon to bash the enemy. We are not experts, but we suspect their may be bigger existential threats than this virus. Perhaps a more advanced species will one day make better distinctions.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_metapneumovirus

[2]https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-14254567/symptoms-HMPV-mystery-illness-surging-China-UK.html

[3]https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-14258029/china-details-hpmv-outbreak-UK-experts.html

#hmpv #virus #pandemic #china #west

Can you Catch Cancer from a Cut?

Just because something is rare doesn’t mean that it’s insignificant. At least, not if it comes surrounded by well-attested research from trained professionals. Which is why this intriguing article by Alexa Lardieri of the Mail has really got us thinking.[1]

A man in Germany was operated on for a rare type of tumour. During the process, the poor surgeon cut his hand. It was cleansed and bandaged immediately. Six months later a tumour, which was genetically identical to his patient’s cancer, was found to be growing on the surgeon’s hand. This all happened back in 1996; but the case continues to excite speculation to this day.

Much more can be found in Alexa’s cogent article. Riffing on it, it suggests the following questions

1 How does transmission occur? Is it via nuclear DNA? Is there an epigenetic mechanism? Dare we speculate that a protein might be involved?

2 Alexa reports that the poor surgeon’s immune system may not have been quite as strong as it might have been. So…are we being bombarded with unknown carcinogens all the time, and it’s only our immune systems keeping us safe?

3 What do we mean by “cause” anyway? Does buying cigarettes give you cancer? Or is it smoking them? Or is it something in the smoke, like tar? Or could we even speculate that it is not the tar per se, but the molecular changes it induces in the cells of the victim? Where does cause end, and effect begin?

Yet it is in such cracks in logic that the most fruitful discoveries are to be found. This case, and the questions it raises are one such example. Thanks, Alexa, for bringing it back from 1996. Which was a great year for music too.

[1]https://www.msn.com/en-ae/public-safety-and-emergencies/health-and-safety-alerts/surgeon-catches-cancer-from-patient-in-first-of-its-kind-case/ar-AA1wRLpW?ocid=Bin

cancer #dna #epigenetics #immune system #health #medicine

Are the British ceasing to be their own oppressors?

Teaching English in England was always different. You weren’t just instructing in the language; you were delivering a handy survival guide to our ancient, entrenched class system, and what all those words, pronunciations and signifiers meant in the hierarchy. In this land, small cues in voice, dress, hair, clothing and vocabulary mark harsh and zealously-policed lines of demarcation. Crossing them can mean social exclusion at best or serious physical harm at worst.

It is rooted in our aberrant education system.* Which allows anomalies like the output of the top 9 most expensive schools, representing 0.15% of pupils produce 10% of the entries in Who’s Who, our Establishment’s self- regarding house manual. [1] That people who hold our top jobs are five times as likely to have gone to private schools than state ones.[2] We must leave it to you to surf the waves of links which we have provided, gentle readers. They are but the tip of a mighty iceberg.

No nation can survive at the top for long if it continues to fish for talent in a smaller pool. And Britain’s decline since 1900 has been precipitate. Why then do British people in general and English ones in particular, continue to acquiesce in a system which so stultifies their life chances? Nostalgia for the times of lost dominion? Fantasy wish fulfilment? Money worship? An understandable suspicion of the destructive capacities of many “reforms” proposed by Left wing activists who laughably described themselves as “educationalists”?

None of us who care for the future of our island ever wanted to abolish Private education. But we always knew this quasi-apartheid must end one day. The way to achieve that was to make State schools so good that it would be economic madness for a family to choose any other. Signs that this may at last be happening are found in this intriguing article by Joanna Moorhead. She and her husband were solidly Private: but are entirely satisfied with State for their own offspring. You may read why here.[3] For anyone English, this change is seismic: practical economics has started to trump considerations of status, class and tribe. If this continues, it will be welcome.

* Handy note for foreigners Public school=Private school State School= publicly funded school Gottit?

_{thanks to P Seymour}

[1]https://www.asanet.org/news_item/alumni-britains-top-private-schools-are-94-times-more-likely-reach-elite-positions/

[2]https://www.theguardian.com/society/2019/jun/25/britains-top-jobs-still-in-hands-of-private-school-elite-study-finds

[3]https://inews.co.uk/inews-lifestyle/parent-private-school-kids-state-school-differences-3454845

#learning #society #public schools #state schools #life chances