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If you’re anything like me you won’t be showering this morning. No, I don’t believe the skin is healthier when it “washes itself”, thank you very much. But with most of the UK basking in a heat wave today and some places set to reach over 30°C again, I’ll be waiting until this evening before washing away the sweat of the day so I can cool off ready for bed.
The height of summer used to be the one time I’d really relish a cold shower, instead of occasionally attempting to endure one for the suspected health benefits. But it turns out turning the tap all the way to blue if you want to cool down could end up having the opposite effect. And in some people it can even be dangerous. Anatomist Adam Taylor has the splash on the exact temperature scientists think you should shower at.
Here at The Conversation, we’re always on the lookout for surprising new research. So our eyes were caught recently by a report suggesting that, far from becoming nations of non-believers, England and Wales were actually seeing a resurgence in Christianity, with church attendance supposedly increasing by more than half between 2018 and 2024.
We asked David Voas, former head of the UCL Social Research Institute and an expert in what large datasets tell us about religous change in modern societies, to give us his thoughts. He was instantly sceptical, and the more he dug into the data the more he felt there was reason for doubt. Here he contrasts the new survey with what he calls the gold standard in the field – which has produced very different results.
Since the Trump administration took office at the start of this year, Beth Daley, the executive editor of The Conversation US, has been having some unsettling calls from scholars who have written for them. They asked: “Hey, can you take that story down? I don’t want my name attached to that anymore. Hey, can you remove this paragraph from a story?” At first it was perplexing, she said, but then it became clear that researchers were fearful of being targeted by the government. We’ve even had similar calls from UK-based academics who were planning to visit the US, though we’ve been clear we can’t accommodate such requests.
In this week’s editon of the award-winning Conversation Weekly podcast, we hear from Beth about how academics in the US are feeling right now and the actions they feel they have to take to keep their research alive. And Daniel Bar-Tal, an expert in self-censorship at Tel Aviv University in Israel, argues that it’s a very human reaction, but not an innate one – it depends on the society you live in and what you believe is expected of you.
There’s a good chance assisted dying could become legal in England and Wales after MPs passed a much-debated bill yesterday. However, two experts in the matter argue it’s far from a done deal. They talk us through the challenges legalisation is likely to now face in the House of Lords and beyond.
Also this week: why Stalin appears to be getting something of a rehabilitation on – and under – the streets of Russia; why scientists trying to solve the mystery of how pterosaurs learned to fly may have been looking in the wrong place; and the deep American roots of the current Iranian conflict.
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