South Africa’s farmers aren’t yet replacing chemical fertilisers with sustainable alternatives – this is why
Green bean plants in one of the small-scale farms in Phiring village, South Africa. Mokgadi Hlongwane, CC BY-NC-ND The growing use of toxic agricultural chemicals including fertilisers is also driving a scaling up of sustainable agrochemical alternatives. In South Africa, I’ve been exploring why small-scale farmers resist switching to these more cost-effective and environmentally friendly […]
Five tips to make your memory work more effectively
ImageFlow/Shutterstock As a researcher investigating how electric brain stimulation can improve people’s powers of recollection, I’m often asked how memory works – and what we can do to use it more effectively. Happily, decades of research have given us some clear answers to both questions. Memory essentially operates in three stages, with different brain regions […]
Does marriage prevent cancer? And who benefits the most?
Funda Demirkaya/Shutterstock.com Marriage, it turns out, may come with a side‑effect no one puts in the vows: people who have been married seem less likely to develop cancer than those who have never married at all. That is the provocative finding from a large new study that has raised interesting questions about what really keeps […]
In The Stranger François Ozon captures the many ambiguities of Albert Camus’s novel
Director François Ozon’s new film adaptation of Albert Camus’s novel L’Étranger (The Outsider, 1942) confronts a considerable task: turning a brief, philosophical novel into a cinematic experience. Though the book is short, it is dense and readers often discover it requires multiple readings. Camus’s spare prose conceals profound questions about morality, society and human existence. […]
A surrealist fashionista, a Nazi fantasist and the return of Atwood’s Handmaids – what to see, read and watch this week
In the bustling Aberdeenshire town of Braemar, close to the late Queen’s beloved Balmoral, there’s a rather chi-chi hotel called the Fife Arms. Originally a stout stone Victorian building for tweedy country types, it is now a fabulous art-filled mecca of maximalism, attracting celebrities and wealthy Londoners looking for a bit of Highland bling. There’s […]
Bait sheds light on British-Pakistani mental health struggles rarely seen on screen
Riz Ahmed’s Bait is an exceptional piece of television. Not only for its satirical exploration of the entertainment industry, but for the psychological narrative running underneath it. At its heart, the Prime Video series is a quietly devastating study of the pressures placed upon British‑Pakistani men. What appears to be an eccentric comedy about a […]
What can governments do when petrol prices rocket?
LSP EM/Shutterstock The price of oil has changed a lot in the last few weeks. There have been dips as well as peaks, but generally, since the the start of the US-Israeli attacks on Iran at the end of February, the black stuff has been getting more expensive. As a direct result, petrol and diesel […]
Undertone: this creepy sound horror is utterly terrifying
Undertone is the terrifying feature film debut from Canadian director Ian Tuason, which promises to be the “scariest movie you will ever hear”. Evy (Nina Kiri) is a podcast host caring for her dying mother (Michèle Duquet) at home. Told only from Evy’s perspective, the film moves from initially creepy to utterly horrifying over a […]
Hands off my hat! The hidden power of headwear and ‘hatiquette’ in early modern England – new study
Roundhead and cavalier soldiers, wearing partisan hats, face each other and urge their dogs to attack each other (1643). State Library Victoria, Melbourne , CC BY-SA Around 8pm on a cold February evening in 1733, a gentleman named Francis Peters was returning to his home near Knightsbridge, London, in a hackney cab, when someone knocked […]
I was in Georgia in the late 1980s: I observed how tradition survived harsh Sovietisation and rapid transformation
Begos’ Friends by Georgian painter Niko Pirosmani, painted in the 1910s. At a keipi or festive supra, the tamada holds a kantsi (horn) and introduces a toast. Wikiuka/Wikimedia When Soviet president and Communist party secretary Mikhail Gorbachev introduced the policies of perestroika (reconstruction) and glasnost (openness) in the mid-1980s, it marked the beginning of cautious […]