School protests focus attention on the chequered history of public order policing in France
A placard held by a young man as school protests continued across France appeared to capture the mood on the streets. Young people, it said: “want the Bac (high school diploma), not the BAC”. The Brigade Anti-Criminalité (BAC) is a police unit widely known for its aggressive tactics in tackling street crime. The protests, which […]
Wildlife populations have declined 73% since 1970 – but many of the world’s animals still aren’t being counted
fogcatcher / shutterstock Wildlife populations around the world have declined by an average of 73% since 1970. That’s according to the WWF’s new 2026 Living Planet Index – a major estimate, updated every two years, of the changing state of nature. This does not mean that 73% of the world’s animals have disappeared. Rather, it […]
The Social Reckoning is a true American horror story
In 2010, screenwriter Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Network charted the birth of social media. Sixteen years later his sequel, The Social Reckoning, is tracing the mutation of Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg (played by Jesse Eisenberg in the first film and Jeremy Strong in this sequel) from an awkward nerd into a sinister billionaire. It’s a […]
Nobel laureate Karl Deisseroth on how light is changing what we know about the brain
When Karl Deisseroth was studying to be a doctor in the 1990s, he took a rotation working with psychiatric patients. It would start him down a path of discovery about how the brain works that would eventually lead him to become a Nobel laureate. The brain is billions of fragile, extremely vulnerable, transparent, very fast-acting […]
Three of the UK’s four nations are led by parties advocating a split. Which is most likely to go?
For the first time in its history three of the four nations of the UK are led by parties that advocate holding referendums on breaking away from the UK. Recently, the first ministers of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland signed an agreement to work together on this agenda. Prime Minister Andy Burnham has made devolution […]
What’s your apocalypse skill? Finding a future-proof hobby can bring fulfilment today
PV productions/Shutterstock In online “prepper” communities – where people discuss ways to prepare for potential emergencies and disruptions – members often jokingly refer to their “zombie apocalypse” skills. These are the capabilities they would bring to catastrophic or post-apocalyptic worlds, where the demands of today’s job market suddenly matter less. Participants ask questions and exchange […]
Florence Buchanan: the pioneering physiologist whose face was lost to history
An undated photographic portrait captioned ‘Florence Buchanan’ in Lilian Adam Smith’s privately printed 1941 Buchanan family memoir. A Memoir of the Buchanan Family, National Library of Scotland, Acc.9446/400., CC BY-NC-SA For more than a century, we could see Florence Buchanan’s science but not Florence Buchanan. Her papers and electrical traces survived, and her work placed […]
‘Airport malaria’ is rare, but can be deadly when doctors don’t expect it
A few days after landing at Frankfurt Airport, several people who had never left Germany developed a fever. None had travelled anywhere near a malaria zone – but the mosquitoes that infected them had. That’s the theory behind a small but serious cluster of malaria cases now linked to the airport – three of them […]
A biologist queries whether AI ‘borrowed’ his work to make major discovery – an expert explains the rules
AI company Anthropic recently announced that its popular system Claude had identified an unusual family of biological molecules. These molecules were enzymes, a type of protein that speeds up chemical reactions in living organisms. The new group of enzymes were discovered in bacteriophages – viruses that infect bacteria. Anthropic named them array-associated reverse transcriptases (ARTs). […]
Anne Carson wins Nobel prize in literature – how she discovered new possibilities within language
Anne Carson in 2024. Princeton Legacy Library/Penguin/New Directions Publishing Corporation/Jay Dixit, CC BY-ND For over four decades, Anne Carson has been quietly redrawing the map of contemporary literature. Poet, translator, classicist, essayist, performer and visual artist, she has produced a body of work that refuses easy categorisation. Yet what is most striking about Carson, the […]