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The National
12-07-2025
- General
- The National
What would this play's cast say about the Scotland we live in today?
What if a group of 2025 creatives set out, like John McGrath and his 7:84 company once did, to dramatise power, land, resources and belonging in Scotland? What would they say now? And how would they say it? It might be worth jumping back and forth between the eras, to see what persists of the Cheviot's original themes to this day. Start with the very title. The structure of the play – dramatised as a wild ceilidh night – maps to three historical periods of dispossession in Scottish history. The Cheviot is the sheep that replaced those human Highlanders cleared from their lands in the 18th century. READ MORE: Man jailed for 'despicable' wildlife crimes after setting dogs on other animals The stag populates the hunting grounds that many of those clearances became, at the hands of aristocratic landowners in the 19th century. And the black, black oil is obviously the 1960s and 70s discovery of fossil fuels in Scotland's coastal waters. The Cheviot today? Still nibbling away. They take up 55% of land dedicated to agriculture in Scotland – around 3.6 million hectares. But the sheep farming sector makes up only 7% of our overall national income from farming. In terms of their destructive impact on the environment, George Monbiot once described rural Scotland as being 'sheep-wrecked'. Vegans, rewilders and methane watchers have sheep-farming on notice, never might the weight of history from the Clearances. The stag's symbolism has hardly diminished as a misuse of the Scottish landscape, the extraction represented by hunting grounds still continuing. The campaign group Revive tell us that 12-18% of Scottish land is currently being used for grouse-shooting – about the size of Wales – while contributing a tiny amount to GDP. Wildlife tourism – which protects the diversity of species in landscapes, rather than blast away at them to keep game numbers up – brings in five times as much revenue as hunting. The case against is as strong now as in the 70s. The black, black oil was in its early potent surge when McGrath did the play's first performance in Aberdeen, April 1973. The following year, the SNP eventually elected 11 MPs on a proprietary slogan, 'It's Scotland's Oil'. But could the legacy of the black stuff be more complex? In the play, with amazing foresight, the American oilman Texas Jim thanks God that the UK Government 'didn't believe in all these pesky godless government controls like they do in Norway'. This anticipates the Norwegian sovereign wealth fund from oil and gas established in 1990, its trillions now invested in 1.5% of the globe's company stocks. Feel the pain. Which can be trebled. Firstly, the loss of such anchoring capital, because a tax-frittering Westminster had full sovereignty over the North Sea fields. Second, we have to admit the contribution that the exploitation of oil and gas has made towards what now looks like irreversible climate worsening. And thirdly, the pressure to leave remaining reserves where they are. Climate scientists urge that every ounce of carbon saved is worth it, if only to prevent an even more calamitous outcome. What a troubling, ethics-bending, dark-and-sticky mess this turned out to be. In 2025, the great theme of McGrath's play – extraction without consent – rolls back round again, with the stampede to develop renewable energy in Scotland. After the black, black oil comes the endless saving wind. READ MORE: I was homeless and using drugs. Now I'm playing at the Edinburgh Fringe But are the enemies as clear as the Cheviot identified them, with all the brutal clarity of seventies Marxists? Lesley Riddoch reported this week on the miasma of political and economic snarl-ups involved in wind-farm applications across the Highlands and Islands. It is, shall we say, a dramatic scene. Ed Miliband rejects zonal pricing, which would lower electricity costs in Scotland. MSPs raise their hands, saying they're legally bound by Westminster climate targets to allow rampant corporate and commercial developers to dominate bids – over that of community owners. Rural communities themselves are divided – between their commitments to the planet (which you'd expect, given their proximity to wildness). And then the despoiling of these conditions under breakneck imperatives – the 'industrialisation of the Highlands', as Gaelic singer Julie Fowlis puts it). They're suffering all the environmental chaos and disruption of next-stage renewable engineering, but on the poorest of terms. Turbines and pylons are on the march, sending clean energy to England. Meanwhile localities endure high domestic energy prices, as well as a structural prejudice against them benefitting directly from wind developments. Great and stormy meetings take place among and between communities. Rural electoral parties are mooted for next May. They look like they're urging a plague on all existing party-political houses. What theatrical drama could encompass such live political and social drama? The 2025 forms that might comprise a follow-up to the Cheviot are a really intriguing question. So many of the reports around its 50th anniversary in 2023 emphasised how much the play answered its audiences' thirst – for themselves and for their history to be represented on stage. The energy of the play seems to parallel Billy Connolly's explosion into the TV and concert mainstream. Both 7:84 and the Big Yin were relentless giggers, adapting themselves to whatever church hall or community centre could house them. However, we are also social media people in 2025, wherever we are strewn across Scotland. The young are on TikTok, but even the oldies are on Facebook and WhatsApp. And Zoom or Teams are the default organisational tools for many. What kind of single dramatic 'representation' could take purchase, when we have so many ways and means to represent ourselves? Creatives worth their salt should rise to such a challenge. Another major difference between these eras may be the acute need to foment less an anti-capitalist critique, more a pro-planet tendency. What's the bigger vision we can land, that makes Nigel Farage and his anti-green populism seem small and petty, in a Scottish context? Between makars and folk, can we co-compose 'cli-fi' – climate fiction – that puts emotional and dramatic flesh on the lives of Scots in this future? We can also be eclectic about the forms this cultural intervention takes. What's the 2025 equivalent – EDM club night, immersive event, game platform, social cosplay: let's explore – of the ceilidh which originally frames the Cheviot? And which often continued onwards, for real, after the final call? READ MORE: TRNSMT main stage act calls out politicians' attempts to cancel Kneecap Many stories from the Cheviot's past cherish the interaction between performer and audience. Again, assuming the presence of digital networks, how could culture and performance click directly into other democratic and self-determining behaviours? Both face-to-face and virtually? Powerful, co-created arts should be one motivating element to help you persist with the planning and deliberation of projects like community energy, civic assemblies, collective envisioning. To defeat the Faragists, we need a dollop of Antoine de Saint-Exupery's advice about projects: 'If you want to build a ship, don't drum up folks to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.' And reflecting on the Cheviot, it may not be that we need a 'theatre of the oppressed', as the Brazilian Augusto Boal once asked for. But what Simon Starkey, one of the founders of the National Theatre of Scotland, calls a 'theatre of opportunity'. Let's push back against yet more 'extraction without consent'. But as many of Scotland's greatest artists would agree, let's raise visions of a desirably complex and alternative Scotland at the same time. That's the kind of new Cheviot I'd yearn to see – and maybe even help shape. Something vast and unruly enough to hold our anger, our grief, our planetary hopes, all at once. So what's your version? Who's your cast? Where's your stage?
The Guardian
10-07-2025
- Health
- The Guardian
Robot surgery on humans could be trialled within decade after success on pig organs
Automated surgery could be trialled on humans within a decade, say researchers, after an AI-trained robot armed with tools to cut, clip and grab soft tissue successfully removed pig gall bladders without human help. The robot surgeons were schooled on video footage of human medics conducting operations using organs taken from dead pigs. In an apparent research breakthrough, eight operations were conducted on pig organs with a 100% success rate by a team led by experts at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore in the US. The Royal College of Surgeons in the UK called it 'an exciting development that shows great promise', while John McGrath, a leading expert on robotic surgery in the UK, called the results 'impressive' and 'novel' and said it 'takes us further into the world of autonomy'. It opens up the possibility of replicating, en masse, the skills of the best surgeons in the world. The technology allowing robots to handle complex soft tissues such as gallbladders, which release bile to aid digestion, is rooted in the same type of computerised neural networks that underpin widely used artificial intelligence tools such as Chat GPT or Google Gemini. The surgical robots were slightly slower than human doctors but they were less jerky and plotted shorter trajectories between tasks. The robots were also able to repeatedly correct mistakes as they went along, asked for different tools and adapted to anatomical variation, according to a peer-reviewed paper published in the journal Science Robotics. The authors from Johns Hopkins, Stanford and Columbia universities called it 'a milestone toward clinical deployment of autonomous surgical systems'. Almost all the 70,000 robotic procedures carried out annually in the NHS in England were fully controlled under human instruction, with only bone-cutting for hip and knee operations semi-autonomous, McGrath said. Last month the health secretary, Wes Streeting, said increasing robotic surgery was at the heart of a 10-year plan to reform the NHS and cut waiting lists. Within a decade, the NHS has said, nine in 10 of all keyhole surgeries will be carried out with robot assistance, up from one in five today. In the Johns Hopkins trial, the robots took just over five minutes to carry out the operation, which required 17 steps including cutting the gallbladder away from its connection to the liver, applying six clips in a specific order and removing the organ. The robots on average corrected course without any human help six times in each operation. 'We were able to perform a surgical procedure with a really high level of autonomy,' said Axel Krieger, assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Johns Hopkins. 'In prior work, we were able to do some surgical tasks like suturing. What we've done here is really a full procedure. We have done this on eight gallbladders, where the robot was able to perform precisely the clipping and cutting step of gallbladder removal without any human intervention. 'So I think it's a really big landmark study that such a difficult soft tissue surgery is possible to do autonomously.' McGrath, who chairs NHS England's robotics steering committee, said autonomous surgery, while still years away, could one day lead to a human surgeon overseeing several autonomous robotic operations at the same time, carrying out simple procedures such as hernia operations or gall bladder removals more rapidly, with greater precision than humans and with less damage to surrounding bodily structures. But he cautioned that autonomous surgery remained a long way from being clinically deployable, because tests on dead pig organs do not test the robots' capacity to react to a patient moving and breathing, blood running in the field of operation, an inadvertent injury, smoke from cauterisation or fluid on the camera lens. Nuha Yassin, who leads on robotic surgery at the Royal College of Surgeons of England, said: 'The next step must involve a careful exploration of the nuances within this rapidly evolving field to assess how these findings can be safely and effectively translated into a human pilot. Only then can this approach move toward, becoming a sustainable model for the future.' She said training, education and patient safety must remain at the forefront.
The Guardian
09-07-2025
- Health
- The Guardian
Robot surgery on humans could be trialled within decade after success on pig organs
Automated surgery could be trialled on humans within a decade, say researchers, after an AI-trained robot armed with tools to cut, clip and grab soft tissue successfully removed gall bladders without human help. The robot surgeons were schooled on video footage of human medics conducting operations using organs taken from dead pigs. In an apparent research breakthrough, eight operations were conducted on pig organs with a 100% success rate by a team led by experts at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore in the US. The Royal College of Surgeons in the UK called it 'an exciting development that shows great promise', while John McGrath, a leading expert on robotic surgery in the UK, called the results 'impressive' and 'novel' and said it 'takes us further into the world of autonomy'. It opens up the possibility of replicating, en masse, the skills of the best surgeons in the world. The technology allowing robots to handle complex soft tissues such as gallbladders, which release bile to aid digestion, is rooted in the same type of computerised neural networks that underpin widely used artificial intelligence tools such as Chat GPT or Google Gemini. The surgical robots were slightly slower than human doctors but they were less jerky and plotted shorter trajectories between tasks. The robots were also able to repeatedly correct mistakes as they went along, asked for different tools and adapted to anatomical variation, according to a peer-reviewed paper published in the journal Science Robotics. The authors from Johns Hopkins, Stanford and Columbia universities called it 'a milestone toward clinical deployment of autonomous surgical systems'. Almost all the 70,000 robotic procedures carried out annually in the NHS in England were fully controlled under human instruction, with only bone-cutting for hip and knee operations semi-autonomous, McGrath said. Last month the health secretary, Wes Streeting, said increasing robotic surgery was at the heart of a 10-year plan to reform the NHS and cut waiting lists. Within a decade, the NHS has said, nine in 10 of all keyhole surgeries will be carried out with robot assistance, up from one in five today. In the Johns Hopkins trial, the robots took just over five minutes to carry out the operation, which required 17 steps including cutting the gallbladder away from its connection to the liver, applying six clips in a specific order and removing the organ. The robots on average corrected course without any human help six times in each operation. 'We were able to perform a surgical procedure with a really high level of autonomy,' said Axel Krieger, assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Johns Hopkins. 'In prior work, we were able to do some surgical tasks like suturing. What we've done here is really a full procedure. We have done this on eight gallbladders, where the robot was able to perform precisely the clipping and cutting step of gallbladder removal without any human intervention. 'So I think it's a really big landmark study that such a difficult soft tissue surgery is possible to do autonomously.' McGrath, who chairs NHS England's robotics steering committee, said autonomous surgery, while still years away, could one day lead to a human surgeon overseeing several autonomous robotic operations at the same time, carrying out simple procedures such as hernia operations or gall bladder removals more rapidly, with greater precision than humans and with less damage to surrounding bodily structures. But he cautioned that autonomous surgery remained a long way from being clinically deployable, because tests on dead pig organs do not test the robots' capacity to react to a patient moving and breathing, blood running in the field of operation, an inadvertent injury, smoke from cauterisation or fluid on the camera lens. Nuha Yassin, who leads on robotic surgery at the Royal College of Surgeons of England, said: 'The next step must involve a careful exploration of the nuances within this rapidly evolving field to assess how these findings can be safely and effectively translated into a human pilot. Only then can this approach move toward, becoming a sustainable model for the future.' She said training, education and patient safety must remain at the forefront.
Yahoo
06-07-2025
- Sport
- Yahoo
'You didn't know what was going to happen'
Tipperary forward John McGrath reacts to Sunday's dramatic win over Kilkenny: On the end of the match: "It's unbelievable. The finish to that game you just didn't know what was going to happen. We got a couple of really good scores to push ahead, they had chances to level it or get ahead. There was some serious defending back there. It was mayhem at the end and it's kind of hard to get your head around at the moment. It's unbelievably satisfying to get through." Advertisement On Oisin O'Donoghue's goal after Tipp were reduced to 14 players: "The youth and the bravery of him, he's still under-20 next year again. I don't even remember him hitting the ball, I just saw the net shake. It was a huge score at the time and it gave us that bit of breathing room. He's been doing that all year. You need those moments and those breaks, especially as we were under pressure near the end." On facing Cork in the final: "The form is with them, I suppose. We've had a couple of tough outings against them already this year, but we've regrouped and found a little more along the way. They are probably a couple more years down the road than us. It took us a little to get into our stride as the season has gone on. There's a huge rivalry there going years back, between the teams and supporters, and a great bit of banter in it as well. It's a quick enough turnaround, so it'll be on you before you know it. It's great to be looking forward to it."
BBC News
06-07-2025
- Sport
- BBC News
'You didn't know what was going to happen'
Tipperary forward John McGrath reacts to Sunday's dramatic win over Kilkenny:On the end of the match: "It's unbelievable. The finish to that game you just didn't know what was going to happen. We got a couple of really good scores to push ahead, they had chances to level it or get ahead. There was some serious defending back there. It was mayhem at the end and it's kind of hard to get your head around at the moment. It's unbelievably satisfying to get through." On Oisin O'Donoghue's goal after Tipp were reduced to 14 players: "The youth and the bravery of him, he's still under-20 next year again. I don't even remember him hitting the ball, I just saw the net shake. It was a huge score at the time and it gave us that bit of breathing room. He's been doing that all year. You need those moments and those breaks, especially as we were under pressure near the end." On facing Cork in the final: "The form is with them, I suppose. We've had a couple of tough outings against them already this year, but we've regrouped and found a little more along the way. They are probably a couple more years down the road than us. It took us a little to get into our stride as the season has gone on. There's a huge rivalry there going years back, between the teams and supporters, and a great bit of banter in it as well. It's a quick enough turnaround, so it'll be on you before you know it. It's great to be looking forward to it."
