Interest in the manosphere has recently surged yet again, with the recent Louis Theroux documentary catapulting the term “manosphere” back to the forefront of our cultural psyche.

The term has become a catchall for the most inflammatory content and communities in young men’s digital worlds. Alarm bells are ringing, but our understanding of what the manosphere actually is – where it begins and ends – has more questions than answers.

As concern grows, so does the ambiguity around how to define the manosphere and how young men actually experience it. Our policy responses, interventions and public discourse assume it’s one thing, one ideology, populated by one type of young man: a singular algorithmic journey from loneliness to radicalisation. It isn’t, and overlooking the complexity and nuance misses large parts of the problem.

So what is it instead? Our new research answers this question.

Simulations vs reality

Addressing ambiguity matters, whether you’re a researcher trying to measure the full spectrum of harm being experienced, or part of a community trying to talk about it with sons, brothers and friends. You cannot diagnose a problem without truly understanding it, and that means going into these online ecosystems to explore their bounds.

Previous research has included the use of dummy accounts to simulate internet use. These have been criticised by social media companies, who say the simulations don’t reflect the real experiences of users on their apps.

In response, our new research looked at the real TikTok viewing histories of 142 young men across Australia, the United States and the United Kingdom. We watched what they watched, 2,000 videos over the past month, and built a framework to map the full spectrum of masculinity content that young men encounter online.

It’s the first time academic research has used real user data in this space. It means we can respond to what young men and boys are actually seeing, rather than simulations of user experiences and what we think they’re seeing.

Almost half of the videos we analysed (44%) contained masculinity-related themes. Masculinity content fell into three distinct categories. Understanding these categories, how they escalate and who’s watching it makes tailored intervention possible, from policymakers to support services, and even the platforms themselves.

Read more: How boys get sucked into the manosphere

Beginning the journey

The journey can start somewhere ordinary. Three videos. Same young man. Same day. Same algorithm.

In the first video, a young, buff man located in a gym, demonstrating to his audience the correct technique when completing the “perfect lying tricep extension”.

We called this tier “cultural touchpoints”. It includes gym, sport, fashion and dating tips content. It made up 38% of what young men in our study watched, making it the most common type of content.

On the surface, none of it raises alarm. But it quietly sets a norm. One type of male body, one set of male interests, one way of moving through the world.

Travelling deeper

In the second video, a shirtless young man delivers a motivational-style speech about gym and discipline. He argues that physical commitment produces results in other areas of life, such as earning admiration from his girlfriend and becoming a “superhero” to his future children.

We called this tier “masculine status” content. It constituted 6% of the videos we analysed.

Outwardly, it looks like self-improvement, motivational and informative content with messages of discipline, ambition, levelling up as a man.

Underneath, the rigid moulds become clear: muscularity, emotional suppression, financial abundance, the “high-value” male archetype.

Women are framed as rewards to be earned. The content is ideologically hardened, but also easy to miss.

The destination

In the third video, a male creator sarcastically warns his audience against peptides. He then proceeds to list the side-effects of “getting leaner, shredded and getting more bitches”, while showing the vials to the audience.

We called this tier “degrading health” content. It made up less than 1% of content.

Most of it violates TikTok’s own community guidelines prohibiting the promotion of peptide hormones, testosterone boosters, and content that demeans, endangers or advocates for self-harm.

This category includes overt misogyny and graphic depictions of violence against women.

It’s infrequent, but not isolated. This content sits at the end of a journey that began with a tricep extension tutorial.

Three videos. Three very different messages about masculinity and health. This is how the manosphere finds young men: through platforms they’re already on, creators they already follow and in a cultural language they appreciate.

Cultural touchpoints lay the foundation that make messages of misogyny, risk-taking, violence and hate not just palatable, but reasonable. Ideological shifts happen because it feels like much of the same.

Exploiting insecurities

The manosphere doesn’t create these pressures – it finds genuine unmet needs and exploits them for profit and views. Often girls, women and other minority groups are at the receiving end of that harm, as well as the boys and men themselves.

Our broader framework, in which these classifications are a part, gives researchers, regulators, and platforms a tool to identify and intervene across the full spectrum of young men’s digital lives, not just at the extremes.

Current moderation and regulation approaches are reactive. Content is removed once platform guidelines are violated, but often that comes too late, after thousands if not millions of users have already seen it.

This research makes early and tailored intervention possible, disrupting the masculinity content pipeline at different points along the spectrum, before young men reach the most extreme end.

For example, tech companies could embed this classification framework into the design of recommender systems to ensure an age appropriate user experience. Cultural touchpoint content may be appropriate for a 16-year-old, but masculine status and degrading health videos may not be, and thus should not be recommended to them. Our work provides a defensible evidenced standard for appropriate moderation and digital platform design.

Lastly, it helps create a shared language and collective understanding of the manosphere. We can talk about masculinity content in a way that aligns with young men’s actual digital experiences, and to build solutions that fit the problem.

The manosphere has spent years speaking directly to young men’s fears and insecurities, building narratives that are fluent, persuasive and hard to counter. We need to be just as fluent, delivering effective responses and alternative narratives grounded in what young men actually see, watch and feel.

This research is the first attempt to do that. Now we need to use these insights to expand our evidence on the manosphere’s harm, develop tailored solutions, call for platform reform and develop community resources to help protect the men and boys exposed to this content online.

Krista Fisher is affiliated with the Movember Institute of Men's Health. Krista Fisher had support from the Polarization & Extremism Research & Innovation Lab (PERIL) and Diverting Hate when conducting this research.

Emily Lewis is affiliated with the Movember Institute of Men’s Health.

Zac Seidler has been awarded an National Health and Medical Research Council Investigator Grant. He is also the Global Director of Research with the Movember Institute of Men's Health. He advises government on men's suicide, masculinities, violence prevention and social media policy.

Cynthia Miller-Idriss and Ruben Benakovic do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

The first half of 2026 has been a chaotic time for U.S. foreign policy: new tariffs, threats to annex Greenland, the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and the struggle for control of the Strait of Hormuz.

As a researcher focused on the values and rhetoric of American presidents, I study how presidents and their administrations communicate to the public about foreign policy. My primary aim is to understand the values systems and policy priorities that make up a president’s public persona.

I have found the second Trump administration exceptionally difficult to track and assess. Keeping up with Truth Social posts, press conferences and off-the-cuff Oval Office remarks from the president can feel like drinking from a fire hose.

Gone for now are the days when a U.S. president stepped to the lectern and delivered a speech direct from the teleprompter or released a carefully crafted statement that was understood to be official U.S. policy.

In its place is an unpredictable barrage of communication – ranging from traditionally worded executive orders in the mold of previous administrations to an expletive-laden Truth Social post on Easter morning in the midst of Operation Epic Fury, the Pentagon name for the war in Iran.

The president’s rhetorical style, heard most recently on his mid-May trip to China, is explained by political allies as part of Trump’s strategic approach and criticized by his opponents as the dangerous musings of an unstable leader.

In either case – whether it’s Trump’s defenders or detractors – it is increasingly difficult to ascertain whether the language of the president signals actual policy positions from the White House.

If the words of the American president no longer function as reliable indicators of U.S. foreign policy, where can the public, U.S. allies and America’s adversaries look to better understand the administration’s geopolitical priorities?

One answer may be found by examining the words of key Cabinet members.

Vance redefines ‘Western’ values

Trump’s second term has introduced a political paradox: because he is president, his words carry enormous weight. And yet, because of his hyperbolic and often erratic communication style, each statement also carries significant political uncertainty.

Will the next social media post threatening to exit NATO hint at a real policy position? Or will it simply disappear into the digital information ecosystem as another “Trump being Trump” moment?

The rhetoric of Cabinet members increasingly serves as a bridge between Trump’s erratic communication style and actual policy.

Public statements delivered in 2025 by Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth offered, I believe, critical insight into the administration’s foreign policy vision and helped lay the groundwork for major policy actions in 2026.

In February 2025, Vance stood at a lectern at the Munich Security Conference to address a gathering of prominent European political and military leaders. Many analysts expected an aggressive speech from Vance criticizing Europe’s spending on defense in the context of shared American-European security concerns, such as NATO and the war in Ukraine.

Instead, Vance argued that Europe’s political elites had failed to defend “Western” values. Speaking over audible gasps from attendees, Vance declared: “What I worry about is the threat from within, the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values, values shared with the United States of America.”

Using freedom of speech as a shared value, Vance argued that many left-leaning European governments – not authoritarian-led Russia or Hungary – posed the real threat to this cornerstone of Western society.

As the first major foreign policy speech delivered abroad by the second Trump administration, Vance’s remarks signaled a major shift in America’s approach to the trans-Atlantic alliance.

The speech suggested that, in the eyes of the administration, the “values-and-interests” framework that shaped the U.S.-European relationship post-World War II had weakened. In that phrase, “values” are understood as a country’s moral and cultural preferences and its “interests” as the factors that advance its security and prosperity.

Instead, Vance argued that liberal values alone would no longer guarantee cooperation, and the administration made clear it would not avoid public fights over ideological differences with European allies.

The speech also appeared to send a clear signal to right-leaning political leaders in Europe, including then-Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, that their brand of “Western” values had become increasingly attractive to Washington.

It is not difficult to connect Vance’s Munich speech to the administration’s subsequent embrace of right-leaning political leaders and its pullback from postwar liberal foreign policy priorities, such as a commitment to international aid.

Rubio: Trade over humanitarian aid

One of the most tumultuous domestic periods of Trump 2.0 came during the DOGE process of massive budget cutting, which eliminated programs across the government.

One DOGE flash point was the fate of the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, which since 1961 had been the American government’s primary organization delivering humanitarian aid globally.

On July 1, 2025, the administration officially announced that USAID would stop providing foreign assistance, which it had been doing in approximately 130 countries.

That same day, Rubio published an article on the State Department’s Substack account titled Make Foreign Aid Great Again, arguing for a new approach that prioritized “trade over aid, opportunity over dependency, and investment over assistance.”

Like Vance in Munich, Rubio adopted an overtly aggressive tone in criticizing both USAID and America’s broader humanitarian aid model. Rubio argued that the “charity-based model failed.” Rubio’s rhetoric built on and complemented themes from Vance’s speech.

First, it reinforced the administration’s broader free-ride-is-over argument that prioritized quid pro quo relationships over established liberal values-based commitments. While Vance applied this logic to European allies in the context of “Western” values and military support, Rubio applied it to humanitarian aid projects and America’s relationships across the Global South.

Second, Rubio’s remarks made clear that a quid pro quo foreign policy rooted in what he deemed to be U.S. national interests would increasingly shape State Department decision-making – regardless of the humanitarian consequences from cuts to international aid programs or multilateral institutions such as the United Nations.

Hegseth rewrites US rules of war

In September 2025, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth stood in the Oval Office alongside Trump to discuss his department’s renaming to the “Department of War.” Hegseth asserted that the War Department would focus on “maximum lethality, not tepid legality; violent effect, not politically correct.”

Viewed alongside the administration’s actions in late 2025 and into 2026 – from attacks on nonmilitary vessels around Venezuela to the extraction of Maduro, to the scale of destructive force deployed against Iran – the “maximum lethality” statement may prove to be one of the most consequential rhetorical moments from a Trump Cabinet official.

As Operation Epic Fury continues, Hegseth has defiantly reaffirmed the administration’s “maximum lethality” posture. At one point he declared that “we negotiate with bombs,” and at another briefing he called for “no quarter, no mercy for our enemies” – a practice that violates international law.

These remarks and others underscore the administration’s rejection of international law and diplomacy in favor of military force as the preferred tool of American foreign policy.

Beyond the noise

In 2025, Vance, Rubio and Hegseth articulated new visions of America’s role in the world. In their own ways, they deployed rhetoric that sought to reshape U.S. foreign policy by redefining Western values, embracing quid pro quo relationships and prioritizing military force as guiding principles of the Trump administration’s agenda.

Despite the daily frenetic social posts and statements from Trump, members of his Cabinet will surely continue to project their own moral and political visions of America throughout 2026 and beyond.

Kevin Maloney is affiliated with the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs.

People with premenstrual dysphoric disorder – a more serious form of premenstrual syndrome, commonly known as PMS – are more likely to experience suicidal thoughts and behaviors than people without it.

That is a key finding of our recent systematic review, published in the journal Administration and Policy in Mental Health and Mental Health Services Research.

We searched for information on suicidality – meaning the risk of suicide and encompassing a spectrum of thoughts, plans and behaviors intended to end one’s life – in people with this disorder. We found 18 studies, which spanned more than 2 million people who menstruate.

The likelihood of experiencing suicidal thoughts and behaviors in people with the disorder varied depending on the study and the way the participants were identified, but in general these thoughts and behaviors were relatively common.

In a study in adolescents with premenstrual dysphoric disorder, or PMDD, almost one-third of participants reported suicidal thoughts or behaviors. Similarly, in a study in adult women with the condition, a quarter of respondents reported thinking about, considering or planning suicide. Rates were high in women who lived with PMDD alongside other mood disorders, such as depression.

Why it matters

PMDD is a long-term condition, officially recognized in 2013, that may affect up to 6% of people who have periods. It has long been considered a severe form of PMS but differs because it causes serious mood and emotional problems and is a chronic, lifelong condition.

To be diagnosed, a person must meet strict criteria, which can make it harder for some people to get the right diagnosis. A formal diagnosis requires that people track their symptoms and rate them against specific criteria over at least two menstrual cycles. Our new finding – that people with the disorder may have a higher risk of suicidal thoughts and behaviors compared with those without it – shows how important it is to identify and treat this condition without delay.

In the studies we reviewed, we found that reported rates of suicidal thoughts and behaviors varied a lot – from as low as 0.011% in a large group of people with premenstrual disorders to as high as 86% in a worldwide group of patients with confirmed PMDD.

This wide range suggests that the results depend heavily on how the studies were done, who was included and how the disorder was defined and measured. When in the menstrual cycle people were evaluated might also affect this, as research shows that suicidal thoughts and behaviors are strongly linked to hormonal changes during the menstrual cycle.

What still isn’t known

A great deal more research is needed to understand how suicide risk can change during the menstrual cycle.

Though we didn’t find any studies that tested treatments to address suicidal thoughts and behaviors in people with PMDD, there are evidence-based treatments for PMDD that can improve well-being, including antidepressants, hormonal contraceptives, hormone-blocking agents, cognitive behavioral therapy and lifestyle changes, such as dietary changes and exercise.

For people living with PMDD and their caregivers, seeking support is essential. For clinicians, learning to recognize and treat PMDD is a priority.

If you or someone you know is in crisis and are based in the U.S., call the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline to speak with a trained listener, or text HELLO to 741741. Both services are free, available 24/7 and confidential. If you are a reader from outside the U.S., please use a helpline like the one above (for a list of resources in other countries, see here) or speak to a healthcare professional.

The Research Brief is a short take on interesting academic work.

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

When an asteroid struck Earth about 66 million years ago, it ended the age of dinosaurs and transformed life across the planet. The effects of that catastrophe are visible in the fossil record on land, but scientists know far less about what happened to fishes in the seas during the first few million years after the extinction.

Like many people during the pandemic, I suddenly found myself living through long stretches of isolation and uncertainty. In 2020, while alone in my apartment in Ann Arbor, Michigan, I was finishing a study on fossil fishes from Egypt. This question of what happened to fishes immediately after the age of the dinosaurs kept troubling me.

That missing chapter represented a major gap in scientific understanding of how modern marine ecosystems emerged.

A unique opportunity

At the time, I was studying younger fossil fishes, but I kept wondering whether older rocks in Egypt might preserve clues to this critical period. During those long pandemic months, I spent countless hours reading geological reports and searching for mentions of formations with fish fossils of the right age.

Then, Hesham Sallam, my adviser, introduced me to earlier work by paleontologist and geologist Robert Speijer and colleagues who had documented rocks at Qreiya in Egypt that were deposited only about 4 million years after the asteroid impact.

That single detail changed the entirety of my Ph.D. research.

As this research started to point my work in a new direction, the pandemic was simultaneously disrupting my own life. I had been accepted into the Ph.D. program at the University of Michigan and was living in the United States, preparing to begin my studies. But COVID-19 restrictions suddenly forced me to return to Egypt, my home country. What felt like a major setback at the time ultimately became one of the most important turning points in my career.

While waiting for the embassies to reopen and student visas to be issued, I continued discussing the fossil-bearing rocks with my adviser. Those conversations soon became a plan: We would travel to Egypt’s eastern desert and see the site for ourselves.

Discoveries in the desert

In July 2021, our team of five researchers set out for Qreiya 3, a remote fossil locality in upper Egypt. Reaching the site required two days of travel from Mansoura. The terrain was so rough that our vehicles could take us only part of the way, forcing us to hike over sharp rocks carrying equipment, food, water and eventually fossil specimens.

Finding the fossil layer itself was not easy. With limited information about its exact location, we spent hours searching before finally reaching the end of a remote desert valley.

Then came a moment I will never forget. Belal Salem, a member of our team, struck the rock with his hammer. Almost immediately, a fossil moonfish appeared.

Moonfishes already held special significance for me because they were among the fishes I had previously studied from younger Egyptian rocks. Seeing one emerge from rocks that were millions of years older felt almost surreal, as though the site itself was answering the question that I had first asked during those quiet pandemic days.

It was the first sign that Qreiya 3 might be extraordinary.

Later that same field season, I received another unexpected email: My request for an expedited student visa appointment had been approved. We had only a few days to wrap up the expedition and return home so I could prepare for my departure to the U.S.

Returning to Qreiya 3

By the fall of 2021, I had begun my Ph.D. at the University of Michigan, and Qreiya 3 quickly became the center of my dissertation research.

These expeditions had revealed the promise of the site, but it was only the beginning. Over the following field seasons, our team continued returning to Qreiya 3, and I took part in the expeditions that gradually expanded our growing collection of fossils from the site curated at the Mansoura University Vertebrate Paleontology Center.

It became clear that this was not simply another fossil locality. It preserved an unusually rich fish community from a critical moment in Earth’s history, only a few million years after the extinction of the dinosaurs.

The biggest breakthroughs came during a 2023 expedition supported by a National Geographic grant awarded to Hesham Sallam. Once again, we returned in July, working under some of the harshest field conditions I have ever experienced. Temperatures often approached 122 degrees Fahrenheit (50 degrees Celsius), forcing us to organize each day around the heat. We worked early, paused during the most intense hours, drank water constantly and returned to the fossils whenever conditions allowed.

For three weeks, the Sallam Lab team excavated fossils under the intense desert sun. The work was exhausting, but every new specimen brought fresh excitement. By the end of the expedition, we had collected nearly 500 fossil specimens.

Piecing together an ancient ecosystem

Back in the laboratory, a different challenge began. Preparing the fossils was painstakingly slow. Removing the surrounding rock and exposing delicate anatomical details required years of careful work.

One fossil proved especially remarkable: an early relative of seahorses and pipefishes preserved with its body armor still intact.

Identifying the fishes often felt like solving an enormous puzzle. Some specimens were recognizable immediately, while others required months of comparison, CT scanning and detailed study.

I was fortunate to work under the supervision of Matt Friedman, one of the world’s leading experts on fossil fishes.

Gradually, the picture became clearer.

We began recognizing early relatives of tunas, jacks, moonfishes, pipefishes and other groups that today play major roles in marine ecosystems. Some are fast-moving predators and others are prey for these predators. The site provides direct evidence that several modern-looking fish groups were already established surprisingly early – only about 4 million years after the impact.

At the same time, just as revealing as what the site preserves is what it lacks. Many characteristically Cretaceous-era marine fish lineages are absent from the fossil assemblage, meaning they went extinct at or near the end-Cretaceous asteroid impact.

For me, Qreiya 3 is more than a fossil site. It is the place where an idea, an unexpected return home, years of desert fieldwork, and patient scientific investigation came together to reveal one of the clearest windows yet discovered into how modern ocean life began rebuilding itself after one of the greatest mass extinctions in Earth’s history.

Sanaa El-Sayed does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

After another spell of wet weather along Australia’s east coast, with storms, heavy rain and flash flooding across Sydney and parts of New South Wales, it is natural to ask whether our cities are shaping the rainfall that descends upon them.

This matters because most people now live in cities. If urbanisation changes rainfall, even slightly, the effects can reach large populations through flooding, stormwater design, water supply and infrastructure planning.

Satellite data have consistently shown that many cities experience more rain events than the countryside around them. The usual explanation is that cities themselves are involved: urban heat, rougher surfaces, aerosols and changed land cover can all affect how storms develop and where rain falls.

Our new study, published in Environmental Research Letters, asks a related question: how much of this data reflects real changes in rainfall, and how much depends on how we observe it?

Why we need satellites

Understanding rainfall over cities is hard.

Rain gauges accurately measure rainfall at a specific location, but are irregularly distributed and cannot fully capture how rain varies across a large city. Climate models can simulate urban weather in detail, but kilometre-scale simulations across many cities and decades remain computationally expensive.

Satellite observations help fill this gap.

NASA’s Integrated Multi satellite Retrievals for GPM, known as IMERG, provides near-global rainfall estimates at high resolution, and is now widely used for studying rainfall over cities.

What the satellite data shows

We examined IMERG rainfall data across 15 of the world’s largest cities, including Sydney and Melbourne. The cities span different climates and geographic settings, including both coastal and inland regions.

A clear pattern emerged. Rain events occurred more often over urban areas than over nearby rural ones. The strongest signal was not that every storm became stronger, but that satellites counted more hours in which it was raining over cities. Individual events over urban centres often dropped less water than those in surrounding areas.

In other words, the main urban signal in IMERG is more frequent rain, not heavier rain.

Different sensors, different stories

Modern satellite rainfall data combines both infrared and microwave observations.

Infrared sensors estimate rainfall indirectly from the temperature at the top of clouds. They provide broad coverage, but can miss light, shallow or warm rain because these can occur even when the tops of the clouds are not very cold.

Microwave satellites fly in low orbit and detect signals more directly linked to raindrops and ice inside clouds, making them particularly useful for identifying whether rain is actually occurring.

When we separated the IMERG data by observation type, the urban signal mainly came from microwave observations, while infrared estimates showed no urban pattern.

This does not mean the microwave signal is wrong, but it raises a potential problem for long-term studies: microwave observations have changed over time. New satellites have been launched and older ones retired, and across the cities we studied, microwave sampling frequency happened almost twice as often by 2023 as it had in 2001.

This matters because the more often a microwave sensor passes overhead, the more rain events it can detect. A light shower missed in 2002 could now be caught by one of several satellites passing within the hour.

Testing the artefact

To test whether this changing sampling affects observed rainfall trends, we compared the microwave and non-microwave with long-term averages. This meant we could separate out the result of changing satellite sampling from the actual changes in weather.

Changes in microwave sampling explained up to about 20% of the long-term rainfall trends across the 15 cities. For rainfall frequency, cities such as Lagos, London, Melbourne, Beijing, Berlin, Mexico City and Paris showed areas where more than 40% of the apparent trend could be linked to the changing observing system.

The satellites did not create the whole urban rainfall pattern. After accounting for sampling effects, the urban signal remained, but the long-term trend became smaller. So we think it really is raining more often over cities, but perhaps not as much as we thought.

Moving forward

For Sydney, we also compared IMERG with CMORPH, another satellite product, and with Bureau of Meteorology rain gauges. CMORPH showed a similar urban pattern, though the two products are not fully independent because they use overlapping microwave observations.

The gauges are a more independent check, but with too few stations outside the urban core, in Sydney and most cities, the true magnitude cannot yet be confirmed on the ground.

Satellite rainfall data is now used everywhere, in climate science, flood risk, agriculture, insurance and water planning. In many regions it is the only consistent rainfall record over large areas. Our results are a caution: part of an apparent trend can come from the changing observing system rather than real change.

As for why cities get more frequent rain, the likeliest explanations are familiar: urban heat that lifts air, rougher surfaces that nudge winds upward, and aerosols that alter cloud droplets. The signal is real. The task now is measuring it properly.

Shankar Sharma receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

Andy Pitman receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

Jason Evans receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

Europe is once again eyeing international energy markets with unease. The war in Ukraine, geopolitical tensions in the Middle East and the extreme volatility of gas prices are all stark reminders of a painful truth: the continent’s energy security is still at the mercy of external factors.

The standard response to energy crises is to hunt for new suppliers, bolster reserves, or accelerate the roll-out of renewables. While necessary, these strategies often overlook a less visible but equally critical lever: reducing how much energy our buildings actually use in the first place.

But there’s a major roadblock to making this happen, as Europe does not accurately measure thermal and energy properties. Instead, the continent’s energy efficiency ratings rely on generic data, usually derived from averages or regulatory default values of construction materials as opposed to a building’s actual thermal behaviour.

This makes it almost impossible to clearly predict how well energy-saving measures will work. What buildings need is something akin to the nutritional information we find on food packaging, which rigorously lists ingredients and nutrients. Just as we know exactly what we’re buying and eating, we should also know exactly how every building behaves – as opposed to an estimated average.

To achieve true energy resilience and sovereignty, we therefore need more than just new hardware; we also need a fundamental shift in how we handle material data. Precision here is not a magic fix, but the foundation of ensuring that efficiency efforts translate into real-world savings.

Leer más: Want to cut your energy bills? Here’s how five experts are doing it

The mirage of ‘average values’

Buildings account for a massive share of Europe’s energy consumption, and every improvement in insulation or design translates directly into less external dependency for heating or cooling.

Today, tools like Building Energy Modelling (BEM) allow us to simulate performance before construction begins. But these simulations are only as good as the information we feed them. If the data is generic or outdated, the resulting decisions are fundamentally flawed.

In practice, most digital libraries represent materials using average values, creating a precision gap that undermines strategic goals. We should think of materials as the DNA of a structure. Just as personalised medicine uses a patient’s specific genetic map to prevent disease, architecture needs the exact physical and hygrothermal “map” of its materials.

Without this, we are essentially treating buildings blind, relying on generic diagnoses that fail to predict thermal bridges or hidden inefficiencies. If we use generic data, a simulation might promise a high-performance building, but the finished reality often performs as much as 10% or 20% worse.

Put simply, we cannot achieve energy sovereignty if our buildings’ performance is based on approximations.

Leer más: Buildings consume 30% of global energy – digital twins could be the key to cutting their waste

From PDF spec sheets to digital passports

For decades, material data has been trapped in static PDF catalogues, making it useless for modern digital simulation. The solution is digital traceability. The EU is already pushing for the Digital Product Passport (DPP), a tool designed to provide electronically accessible information on products to improve sustainability and circularity throughout their life cycle.

This initiative works alongside the Construction Products Regulation (CPR), the EU’s legal framework that ensures all construction products speak the same technical language through standardised performance declarations, and the newly revised Energy Performance of Buildings Directive (EPBD), which mandates strict efficiency targets to reach zero-emission goals.

Together, these measures mark a clear path from static data derived from averages to machine-readable precision.

Leer más: Why Europe’s ‘open’ economy of innovation is exposed to global trade shifts

Better building means better measuring

When designing a building, one single ill-informed material choice can lock it into excess costs and inefficient energy demand for its entire half-century lifespan. And in a landscape of high energy prices and uncertain supply, design deviations carry even more weight than they did in the past.

What once seemed like minor technical details have been transformed by geopolitical reality into a strategic imperative. Energy security is not just fought over in pipelines or ports, but also in the millions of technical choices made by architects and engineers every year.

Every energy crisis reminds us to secure our supply. But it should also remind us of something equally vital: the most secure, cheapest, cleanest energy is the energy we never have to consume in the first place.

To achieve true energy sovereignty, we must design and retrofit our buildings with greater technical precision. Just as no one would plan a rigorous medical diet using only approximate nutritional values, it makes little sense to project the future of our cities using materials described as mere averages. A truly efficient building does not start on the construction site; it starts with the quality of the data we use to design it.

A weekly e-mail in English featuring expertise from scholars and researchers. It provides an introduction to the diversity of research coming out of the continent and considers some of the key issues facing European countries. Get the newsletter!

Andrés Jonathan Guízar Dena is a researcher at the University of Navarra. He receives funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme under the EXPLOIT4INNOMAT project (Grant Agreement No. 101058514). Within this project, he provides expertise in product characterisation for digital modelling, BIM environments, and energy simulation.