Latest news with #StAndrewsUniversity
Yahoo
20-07-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
The founder of Deliciously Ella started a blog when suffering from severe chronic pain. Now, her multimillion-dollar snack empire is going global
In 2011, when Ella Mills was 20, chronically ill, and bedridden with fatigue, migraines, and heart palpitations up to 190 beats per minute, she nearly passed out when standing. As a student at St. Andrews University, she had to sleep between 16 and 18 hours a day because the fatigue was unbearable. 'You're so dizzy, it's like your head's disconnected from your body,' Mills recalls, who had to go home to manage the symptoms. Mills, now a mother of two who lives in the UK, saw a dozen doctors and underwent over 40 procedures, including visits to endocrinologists and gastroenterologists. Several months later, she was finally diagnosed with postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS), a disorder involving the autonomic nervous system that causes rapid heartbeat, nausea, brain fog, fainting, and fatigue. There's no official cure for the disorder, which primarily affects women between the ages of 15 and 50—although it has now been tied to post-COVID symptoms. At one point, Mills was on 25 medications a day. None of them worked. 'I very much hit rock bottom, and I think it became really clear that I wasn't doing anything to help myself either,' she says. Like many at a place of hopelessness, Mills turned to the internet. She read stories of countless women who have her disorder, many of whom felt desperate for any way forward and have since turned to medications and a combination of diet and other lifestyle changes. 'I just felt I had nothing to lose but try to kind of overhaul my diet and overhaul my lifestyle, but I couldn't cook and I didn't like vegetables,' she tells Fortune. In 2012, although not a self-proclaimed unhealthy eater, Mills made a change to her diet, opting for natural ingredients and cooking at home. In a desperate plea for help and to keep herself accountable, she posted her cooking trials and tribulations on a blog. Over a decade later, the $20 WordPress blog account named Deliciously Ella transformed into a business that brings in $25 million in revenue yearly, with a cookbook that has sold over 1.5 million copies, and a social media following of over 4 million (a reach far surpassing other plant-based snack competitors in the field). It has become the fastest-growing snack brand in the UK and is now expanding globally with the launch in the U.S. at Whole Foods in May of this year. In 2024, the brand was acquired by Hero Group, a Swiss manufacturer. While the company won't disclose the deal, Mills and her husband share that 'we have had numerous approaches to sell or partner with other food companies over the years, but only this one felt right.' The company is currently valued around $35 million, according to estimates from S&P. 'I taught myself to cook, and I did it on a blog, as I'm a very all-or-nothing person. I was like, I know I need to hold myself accountable,' she says. 'It's taken us a decade of experiments and trials and errors to get to the point where we know how to create genuinely, really good tasting products using only kitchen cupboard ingredients.' The 'accidental founder' Within two years, Mills tells Fortune her site garnered 130 million hits and reached people in about 80 countries. While she was still weaning off medications, Mills's minimalist and home-cooked diet improved her illness. Two years later, she was not on any medications, and her business was growing in step. She began posting more on social media about the recipes she was making and what she was learning. In 2014, she compiled all the recipes into an app, and in 2015, she published a cookbook that sold out before its release, instantly becoming an Amazon and New York Times bestseller. Mills describes herself as an 'accidental founder,' who doesn't have an entrepreneurial brain or the experience scaling a business. 'I'm not trying to pretend to be what I wasn't,' she says. It's no surprise that she wasn't a professional chef or nutritionist, but she marketed herself as a self-proclaimed 'home cook' who wanted to—simply put—feel better. The beginning of the wellness craze A month after the cookbook's release, Mills met her now-husband and business partner, Matt—a finance nerd at heart with the eagerness to scale a brand. Two weeks after she met him, he quit his job to work alongside her, helping her scale her business and build products that aligned with her mission. 'He can't cook. I can't build an Excel spreadsheet,' she says, adding that she never wanted to license the brand to a third party to manufacture products either. 'I put two really obvious skill sets together, and neither of us had any interest in the other person's job.' Deliciously Ella's first product, a cacao and almond energy ball, was released in 2016, followed by a line of other products. As of print, the brand has sold over 100 million products, and the company's membership, available for $2.74 a month, provides access to thousands of recipes, along with meal plans and blog posts. 'It really kind of coincided with this world of wellness starting to form, and the industry taking shape, and people starting to think, 'oh, there's actual commercial value in this,'' she says. 'I felt almost evangelical, just so passionate, about trying to get this to as many people as possible. I didn't really care how many obstacles there were. I didn't care about the fact that it took over my life completely.' Over a decade later, the importance of lifestyle changes, including diet, exercise, and sleep, in impacting both physical and mental health has become much more mainstream. The craze to limit ultra-processed foods has been featured in headlines, opening up a lane for brands promoting the use of minimal ingredients. Limiting ultra-processed foods has been shown to reduce the risk of chronic conditions like heart disease, diabetes, and early mortality. According to the Cleveland Clinic, diet is an integral pillar, albeit not foolproof, in treatment plans for improving those with POTS. And wellness and lifestyle brands have surged. Companies specializing in healthy eating, nutrition, and weight loss account for $1 trillion of the over $6 trillion wellness industry, a marketplace poised to grow to nearly $9 billion by 2028, according to the Global Wellness Institute. 'I think you have that naive optimism when you start a business. It's so critical because you've got to believe you can do the impossible. But we both just felt like, this is going to be a giant experiment,' she says. 'It was like, how do we create something of meaning, of scale, that's genuinely disruptive to the food industry, but keeping that 100% natural, and never using ultra-processed foods?' Building a brand beyond fads Mills recognizes that if you don't iterate and evolve your brand to meet the demand, you can lose relevancy. However, she didn't want to give in to the latest wellness fads as a way to stay ahead. Deliciously Ella was strategically simple in scope. 'We had a moment where turmeric was everything, where Beyonce wore a kale jumper, and the meat minute boom where the whole world was going to eat Impossible burgers,' she says. 'We're just going to stay in our lane. We've never jumped on any of them.' Mills admits there was a lot of luck to being on the lifestyle train at a time when social media wasn't as noisy and brands were less focused on the harm of ultra-processed foods than they are today. But she credits her success to hustling to create a community of loyal followers and being consistent. 'There are 1,000 more trends that we could jump on, but to me, that isn't a long-term way to build the brand, or actually shift the dial on health,' she says. 'If it doesn't taste good or is way too expensive, it's just not going to stay a part of someone's life.' This story was originally featured on
BBC News
14-07-2025
- BBC News
Why do islands around the world compete?
It's not obvious why islanders feel the urge to compete with each other. But they 20th Island Games being held in Orkney brings people together from the smaller isles around Britain and some distant seagirt lands, mostly with links to Britain or What have they got in common? The Island Games Federation offers an answer. "There's just something about islanders," its website declares."Growing up in small communities surrounded and shaped by the sea instils in us an independent spirit, a fierce pride in our culture and heritage — perhaps even a touch of stubbornness. "It's what gives Games competitors the will and determination to train hard, defy the odds and reach for gold". There's certainly truth to the argument that they share cultures long protected by the sea from outside influences. The word "insularity" - literally an island mindset - has been borrowed and distorted to describe a lack of interest in the world many island stories are defined by the numbers who leave, taking their collective voice to centres of power and often remitting their earnings and investments back common heritage also has to do with looking to the oceans for a living from seafood, seafaring and tourism. Among the Island Games competitors, they can also claim to be treated distantly by governments in London, Edinburgh and Copenhagen. The history of art department at St Andrews University is leading a project to hear such island stories across oceans, mainly linking Scottish islands with the year, it brought a group of young people from Barbados to the Isle of to Jamie Allan Brown, a St Andrews researcher, the focus was on passing down generations' "traditional ecological knowledge, especially about local plants and wildlife, language and place names, and living off the land and sea".The University of the Highlands and Islands (UHI) has a master's degree course in island studies, in which you can learn about the intertwined social, cultural, economic and environmental issues that concern Scottish also draws comparisons with others in the Baltic, the Faroes and Canada's Atlantic coast. Around half of the independent members of the United Nations can be considered islands, including the UK and Ireland. Some are classified as small and developing and they form a block of 39 nations within the UN, mostly in the Caribbean, Pacific and Indian what do they have in common? It may seem easier to see the differences - tropical to polar, volcanic or sandy, sovereign or dependent, valued or neglected, rich or poor, and with often complex interactions between the indigenous and the there are growing reasons for islanders to get together to celebrate a common bond of island-ness, and to combine forces in common causes. Climate change The voice of micro-nations has never been heard as loud as it is when they get together at the COP summits. The forums gave prominence to national leaders from the Pacific and Caribbean, highlighting the risk islands face from rising sea levels and the increasing incidence of extreme a sovereign nation that rises out the Pacific Ocean to a height of only five metres, is expected to be mainly under water at high tide within only 25 years. Last month, for that reason, Australia began a ballot scheme to allow some of Tuvalu's citizens to apply for permanent visas. It was vastly over-subscribed as applications came in from more than a third of households. The UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) faces a challenge from the Marshall Islands (which has an average elevation of two metres) on Tuesday this week, calling on member countries to phase out the burning of oil. It brings the prospect of a split from the usual consensus-building of that forum by oil producers in the Persian Gulf, signalling a formal retreat from COP commitments. The USA, under President Donald Trump, has pulled out of the it's not just low-lying island nations that face a threat from climate change. Hurricanes can lay waste a successful island economy within a few days. In Hebridean islands, such as the Uists, storms can devastate sand dunes and machair, breach coastal defences and road links, and buckle wood-framed homes. James Ellsmoor is founder and chief executive of Island Innovation, a consultancy that helps islanders learn from each other. He says the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) goes to COP gatherings with a "collective moral authority, to say they're negligible as emitters, but on the front line as the most impacted". Renewable energy Island Innovation has 16 employees, working with clients around the world. It supports island authorities, often with limited resources to engage with multi-national organisations for funding or influence. Once a year there's a get-together, this autumn in Gran Ellsmoor completed the degree course in island studies at UHI while working in renewable energy in the Caribbean. He graduated at St Magnus Cathedral in Kirkwall and looks to UHI as a model for dispersed learning that could be important to many other island groups. He says Scotland is also setting an example that's being watched in Greece, South Korea and Italy for "island-proofing" he had grown up on the English-Welsh border, his interest in island economies was sparked by the higher cost of power when he went to work in the Caribbean. Power bills per unit can be up to five times higher than those in larger countries, usually due to the lack of scale when installing and running an oil-burning power station. That's changing, he points out. The harnessing of wind, solar and tidal energy can make islands self-sufficient in power, and the falling cost of long sub-sea cables should make it possible for more exporting of islanders know a lot about that, sharing a familiar tale around the world where islanders see wind turbines taking over their horizon but little of the benefit accruing to the island or Orcadians never tire of reminding us, they have the widest range of renewable power sources, including the EMEC marine technology testing centre, but still have higher power bills than other parts of Ellsmoor sees possibilities from island enterprises using their networks to build markets for island-specific answers to net zero questions. He cites the Canadian province of Prince Edward Island, often overlooked across Canada's vastness, but making waves with renewable and waste inventions that can be sold through strengthening links with Scottish and Canary islands as it builds up a portfolio of far-flung the issues they could consider together in future is the dependence on fossil fuels for shipping and air transport, which are vital links for people and goods coming and going out of islands. Orkney offers a pioneering approach to electric inter-island flight. Coming and going One trend that islands have long experienced is of depopulation, as younger people leave, pushed by poverty or pulled by opportunity elsewhere. Seen as an acute problem in the Western Isles of Scotland, those who remain on the islands tend to lack the range of age groups and skills to sustain public Korea is relatively new to this. Extended families on its islands are being broken up by out-migration and it is looking to other islands to learn lessons of supporting the economy and social structures around its has also been a dominant issue for Caribbean islands, bringing demographic problems back home, but also that large network of an island's supporters and investors. However aircraft and ships are not only taking people away. There are a lot of arrivals. The growing problem for many islands is also one of their biggest opportunities - the global growth of thrives on one of the most valuable but intangible resources available to islands - that they appear to offer a destination that gets-away-from-it-all, often with pristine beaches, stunning coastlines and dramatic story-lines, fascinating cultures with rich Shetland is becoming world-renowned for its TV murder mysteries, Orkney offers it all, and that history is opening up with new archaeological finds that show how important the islands were as a crossing point for sea trading routes long before roads were a reliable way of getting around. Aruba offers a lot too. In the southern Caribbean, around 90% of its economy is in tourism. When the pandemic hit, as an extreme example of such tropical islands within easy reach of North American and European markets, the vulnerability of the economy was laid bare. Over-tourism concerns Post-pandemic, tourism has bounced back. Majorca this year expects 100m tourism arrivals. And it no longer takes a big marketing budget these days to promote how special a beach or coastal view can be. Instagram does that for free. The result can be seen on an island such as Skye, where tourism is tipping into concerns about over-tourism, driving some permanent residents to depart. The solitude and pristine environment people want to experience is undermined by having to share it with so many others, also using narrow roads, also in camper along with other short term letting agencies, offers islanders the means to turn any old shed into a bijou and romantic escape. Those used to be the places where young adult islanders would find homes while awaiting something more permanent and where seasonal workers stayed and sustained the summer tourist season. Not any more.A common theme running through island economies is the lack of housing, though it depends on land ownership patterns and on affordability where incomes can be very Spain's Balearic and Canary Islands, the effects of over-tourism, and particularly on housing costs, have become a hot political topic, with protest movements threatening to scare off the tourists on whom islanders continue to depend. One answer is to get tourists to pay for the true economic cost of their visit, through charges and taxes. Scotland's councils are currently sizing up the cases for and against tourist taxes and charges for visiting cruise James Ellsmoor points out, the international tourism businesses which own resorts and cruise liners are also powerful lobbyists against taxes and charges. In the Caribbean, the threat of carving more government income out of tourism is met with a threat to take business to neighbouring islands. Similar arguments are being made in Scotland. New World Order One of the gains of the post-1945 order is that tiny islands could assert their independence and sovereignty, including many breaking colonial that world order lasted, they had rights in international law and a champion in the United Nations. In the era symbolised by Donald Trump, there's a new world order, in which large superpowers are more interested in carving up spheres of influence and setting legal questions to one side in favour of their national makes small islands vulnerable to the interests and whims of those superpowers. A hundred years after the Treaty of Svalbard handed control of these Arctic islands to Norway, the prospect of mineral extraction in the region is a source of tensions with claim on Taiwan is the big threat to peace in East Asia, and small Pacific states such as Samoa, Tonga and Vanuatu have been drawn into China's web of debt finance influence. The US President says he wants to take over Greenland. If that is even possible, it would be easy to do the same with smaller states in strategically helpful law can still protect islanders in some cases. It was because Mauritus had won its legal claim over the Chagos islands in the Indian Ocean that the UK government felt it could not avoid a deal to relinquish ownership while still providing access to US forces on the strategically significant air base at Diego continues to be a big player in shaping the role of the world's islands - former colonies and continuing dependent territories - because it used to be exceptionally effective at taking over islands when its Royal Navy ruled the some islands, the threat from larger countries, including the UK, is to crack down on tax evasion through low-tax havens, which happen to be island territories including the Isle of Man, Channel Islands and the Virgin and Cayman islands around Scotland do not offer such tax benefits. But after the sports competition is over in Orkney this week, they can offer further economic, environmental and social co-operation across the waters that define them.
Telegraph
08-07-2025
- Telegraph
‘My son took his own life after a website showed him how'
David Parfett's son Tom was dying while a group of people from around the world not only did nothing to help him, they egged him on. He was live-blogging his own death on a suicide forum after ingesting a poison fellow users had recommended that he order online. Forty-four people reacted with 'hugs' and 'sad face' emojis to his post saying he had taken the lethal substance. Messages said 'RIP' and 'all the best'. As his profile goes silent, one member concludes: 'I think they are gone'. The 22-year-old, studying philosophy at St Andrews University in Scotland, died alone at a Premier Inn in Surrey in 2021 in, David is sure, 'excruciating pain'. It would be a year before his father saw a photo of the packet that contained the poison – which we are not naming – sold for just $59 (£47). Written on it was the website from which it was purchased. David would later learn the site was run by Kenneth Law, a Canadian chef who is now facing 14 counts of first-degree murder and another 14 of counselling and aiding suicide, in Ontario. He denies the charges. He is also accused of sending more than 1,200 packages of poison to young people across the globe. In the UK, the National Crime Agency is investigating potential offences linked to the deaths of 98 individuals who purchased items online to assist with suicide, including several deaths linked to Law, but no charges have yet been brought. Poisoned, a new two-part Channel 4 documentary, tells how Tom's death sparked an international hunt to unmask Law after David turned to James Beal, an investigative reporter at The Times. He had been despairing at the failure of the police to join the dots between various cases. 'It's very, very limited information available to families,' he says. 'You kind of get patted on the head, and then you're into a very blinkered process. At the end of the day, it's the journalists who stopped it, rather than police.' Neha Raju, 23, another Law customer, died in Guildford six months after Tom but Surrey Police did not appear to link the deaths. The first episode also features heartbreaking testimony from families across the world. Louise Nunn talks about her daughter, Immy, who took her own life in her flat in Brighton aged 25. She had more than 780,000 followers on her TikTok account, Deaf Immy, with humorous videos raising awareness of deafness and mental health. In Arizona, while police thought a young man named Miles had taken an accidental overdose, his sister Malyn, who worked for the cyber unit of the FBI, put her skills to use. She began tracing the links between the suicide forum used by her brother – 'an echo chamber of despair' – and Law's website, which looked like it purveyed specialist foods, selling the poison (though Miles did not buy his substance from Law's sites). The second episode is a powerful call to arms by David as he and other families, along with Beal, piece together the global fallout from the forums and Law's poison-shipping enterprise. David is seen listening to the recording of the phone conversation that an undercover Beal had with Law. The Canadian revealed that Britons were some of his most 'frequent buyers', numbering 'literally in the hundreds', and admitted 'many, many, many, many' had died. So sure was he that he would get away with it, he added with a chuckle: 'They're not going to bring me over to the UK for this. It's too small.' 'That was really hard, to hear the voice of the person that I believe murdered my son,' says David on a video call from his home in Twickenham. 'But also oddly satisfying, having spent so long shouting in the dark about this, trying to get somebody to pay attention. That was the moment that I knew we could at least take one supplier off the streets.' For David, his son will always be the little Manchester United fan who ran around in his David Beckham shirt until he was too big to fit into it; whose perennial honesty saw one teacher praise his 'excellent moral compass'. Tom was open with his father about his suicidal thoughts, triggered by a school friend who had taken his own life at university. But David believes he was 'more vulnerable to being influenced online', as someone who had been diagnosed with autism at 12 and was struggling with extreme anxiety 'around academic achievement, friends, relationships'. Tom had dropped out of university during his Covid-disrupted second year. He restarted the course, but was sectioned for 24 hours after talking about suicide. His father, a 57-year-old data director, had previously appreciated the benefits that an online world brought to Tom, including allowing him to make short films, as he grew up in High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, with his two siblings. 'It really helped him bring out that creative side. He had access to just the wider internet from probably the age of 13, 14. One of the reasons I am delighted that Poisoned has been made is that I don't want other parents in a situation like me, where they know somebody who potentially is considering suicide and are naive enough to not consider the internet to be a danger.' The scales fell from his eyes as he tried to track his son's 'digital footprints to understand what had happened'. Within minutes, David found himself on a suicide forum, not knowing at the time that it was the same one that led to Tom's death. David set up a profile 'pretending to be depressed' and ordered poison from Law. It arrived within 'a few days' – but he only found out a year later that Tom's purchase had come from the same man. Seeing a photo of an identical packet during the inquest process 'was a very hard moment', he tells me, 'understanding how easy it had been to find this poison and how cheap it had been to buy it'. Neither of the Parfetts had to turn to the 'dark web', but simply went through Google. As David says in the film: 'There were no checks. It was like buying a book online, all too easy... like posting a loaded gun to somebody and saying, 'Pull the trigger'.' Just a few weeks after discovering them, David is shown in the film scrolling through the stream of posts his son made as his life was coming to an end. As the real responses pop up menacingly on the screen, he says in the documentary: 'I know Tom would have died in agony. Yet nobody called an ambulance. Nobody tries to find him.' There were more horrors still to uncover. On the forum, David stumbled upon Tom's profile name listed and crossed out by one of the moderators, 'as someone who's been 'successful',' he says. 'It's absolutely callous.' He believes many of those involved in running such sites actually think they are 'doing a service. They seem to passionately believe that it's every individual's right to kill themselves whenever they want to, and they want to support people doing so.' He adds that he suspects, for some, 'there's a dark side, I guess maybe a sexual side to this as well – effectively some kind of kick from knowing that you've influenced someone to die.' Assisting suicide is a crime punishable by up to 14 years in prison in both the UK and Canada. The substance that killed Tom is reportable under the 53-year-old Poisons Act, compelling UK companies to alert the Home Office to buyers they believe are seeking to cause harm to themselves or others. But these rules do not apply to companies abroad. In April, regulator Ofcom opened an investigation into the forum used by Tom over whether it 'has failed/is failing to comply with its duties under the Online Safety Act 2023'. The evening before I speak to David, the Technology Secretary Peter Kyle told the audience of BBC Question Time: 'Suicide platforms, which have led to the death of children, are now no longer available in this country.' It is a bold claim refuted by David, but days later, the same forum announced that it has voluntarily decided to bar access to UK users from July. At the same time, it is publicising a method to get around the block. The trustees of the Thomas William Parfett Foundation, a charity set up in Tom's memory to campaign for suicide prevention, issued a statement to The Telegraph saying: 'We've seen this and other platforms use the tactic of a voluntary block in the UK and in other countries. They are likely to remove the voluntary block in the near future. We call for this site to be blocked in the UK through application of the Online Safety Act to stop the harms that this platform facilitates.' A government spokesperson responded: 'Under the Online Safety Act, services must take action to prevent users from accessing illegal suicide and self-harm content, and ensure children are protected from content that promotes or instructs on these behaviours – otherwise they could face tough enforcement action, including substantial fines. We're already seeing this in practice – Ofcom has launched enforcement action against companies failing to meet their online safety duties, including a suicide forum. Other harmful forums have also since withdrawn access for UK users.' David says he is calling for a 'single minister who's accountable for this and that there's proper training and resources. I guess the analogy would be, for fraud cases you get specialist police officers, specialist processes. People understand fraud.' He says 'the Home Office look at import of poison into the UK through the lens of counter-terrorism. The Department of Health own a suicide prevention policy, but none of these people are joined up at all. And then you've got Peter Kyle's department who look at it from a tech and regulation point of view.' However, even if one set of poisons is rigorously regulated, David fears that another will soon be put on the market, while suicide discussions are taking place 'on most of the major [social media] platforms. It's an ever-moving target and needs constant policing.' He is not seeking damages from anyone, insisting: 'I'm focused on looking forward – on other people avoiding the hell that we've been through as a family.' Having taken time off after Tom's death, and now redundancy, it has become 'a full-time job'. 'I truly believe that Tom would still be here if he hadn't been able to find an internet site that gave him very specific instructions about options on how to kill himself,' he says, advising concerned parents: 'Please don't be naive like I was. Please don't be embarrassed to ask the direct question, 'Are you thinking of self-harming? Are you thinking of taking your own life?'' Law may be behind bars and awaiting trial, but David knows there is so much still to do – and is convinced that purchasing poison online today is 'no harder at all' than when his desperate son turned to the internet four years ago. 'There are other Kenneth Laws out there doing exactly the same thing.' Poisoned: Killer in the Post airs on Channel 4 on Wednesday 9 July and Thursday 10 July. For further information on online safety go to the Thomas William Parfett Foundation and the Molly Rose Foundation; Samaritans operates a 24/7 helpline, which you can call free on 116 123, or email jo@
Scotsman
04-07-2025
- Science
- Scotsman
Why Loch Ness Monster sceptics need to come up with another excuse for sightings
Sign up to our daily newsletter – Regular news stories and round-ups from around Scotland direct to your inbox Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... We all know what the Loch Ness Monster looks like, even if we've never actually seen it ourselves. Clearly, it is a serpentine creature that undulates across water, creating three or so loops above the surface. However, according to 'science', this would be a 'biological impossibility'. Quod erat demonstrandum, Nessie doesn't exist and it's all just made-up nonsense. Case closed. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Or is it? According to new research by St Andrews University, only 1.5 per cent of possible Nessie sightings talk about seeing loops or hoops, suggesting the people making the reports have not been influenced by traditional imagery dating back to the 1500s. A famous photograph of the Loch Ness Monster from 1934, which later turned out to be a hoax (Picture: Keystone) | Getty Images 'This insight supports the contention that the majority of eyewitness reports are actually based on some underlying physical reality,' the researchers wrote before adding, rather disappointingly, 'even if not representing an actual encounter with an unknown species'.
Scotsman
04-07-2025
- Science
- Scotsman
Why Loch Ness Monster sceptics need to come up with another excuse for sightings
Sign up to our daily newsletter – Regular news stories and round-ups from around Scotland direct to your inbox Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... We all know what the Loch Ness Monster looks like, even if we've never actually seen it ourselves. Clearly, it is a serpentine creature that undulates across water, creating three or so loops above the surface. However, according to 'science', this would be a 'biological impossibility'. Quod erat demonstrandum, Nessie doesn't exist and it's all just made-up nonsense. Case closed. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Or is it? According to new research by St Andrews University, only 1.5 per cent of possible Nessie sightings talk about seeing loops or hoops, suggesting the people making the reports have not been influenced by traditional imagery dating back to the 1500s. A famous photograph of the Loch Ness Monster from 1934, which later turned out to be a hoax (Picture: Keystone) | Getty Images 'This insight supports the contention that the majority of eyewitness reports are actually based on some underlying physical reality,' the researchers wrote before adding, rather disappointingly, 'even if not representing an actual encounter with an unknown species'.
