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Russia bets on ballistic missiles to combat the success of Ukraine’s drone warfare

Since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Russia has regularly targeted civilians and civilian infrastructure with missile attacks. The strategy adopted by the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, and his generals is two-fold: to increase the cost of continuing to resist and to erode civilian morale. The attacks have aimed to disrupt and destroy […]

A-level results: key takeaways for language learning

Drazen Zigic/Shutterstock Exam-entry statistics in the summer tend to prompt debates about the future of language learning in the UK. These are often framed around languages being in crisis: fewer young people study languages than two decades ago, and concerns persist about the UK’s linguistic capacity in an interconnected world. The emerging figures for 2026 […]

Don’t know what to do after your exams? Six ways to find your next step

shutterstock New Africa/Shutterstock “What are you going to do next?” For teenagers receiving their GCSE or A-level results, it can be one of the most daunting questions to answer. There’s often an expectation that, by the time they leave school, young people should know what they want to do with their working lives. But careers […]

Why has Britain’s grass turned yellow? A plant scientist explains what happens next

Fields, parks and lawns across Europe have turned to straw this summer. Landscapes thousands of years old have been revealed as green outlines against yellow backgrounds, where ancient underground walls and ditches retain enough water to sustain pockets of grass above them. Lawns and parklands have been especially affected because what water is available is […]

Five foods that can help keep children hydrated during a heatwave

Volodymyr TVERDOKHLIB/Shutterstock “Have another drink.” It can become a familiar refrain for parents during a heatwave, particularly when a child is busy playing and has little interest in stopping for a glass of water. Keeping up fluid intake becomes more important as temperatures rise because heat increases water loss, particularly through sweating. But a child’s […]

How warfare has been ‘gamified’ in Ukraine

Ukrainian military personnel operate a drone from an undisclosed location in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine. lev radin / Shutterstock Where can you score 12 points for killing a Russian soldier in a drone attack, 20 for damaging a tank and up to 50 for destroying a mobile rocket system? Not on the latest […]

Why an 120-year-old warning about reading feels uncomfortably familiar

Girl Reading by Vera Alabaster. Harbour Cottage Trust, CC BY-NC In 1906, the journalist W.T. Stead warned in A Plea for the Revival of Reading that Britain faced a reading crisis. People, he complained, no longer read books. Instead, they skimmed newspapers on trains, forgot what they had read by lunchtime and increasingly preferred distraction […]

Too hot to think? Why extreme heat can affect how well our brain works

Stock-Asso/ Shutterstock Ever feel that the arrival of summer sun makes you feel a bit dopey? You wouldn’t be the only one. Soaring temperatures are known for their ability to slow our thought processes, making even everyday tasks seem like a baffling ordeal. But what is actually happening inside our heads when the heat is […]

AI-designed viruses are a test of whether biosecurity can keep pace

TSViPhoto/Shutterstock Scientists have crossed an important line in biological engineering. In a recent study, researchers used artificial intelligence to design complete sets of genetic instructions for bacteriophages, viruses that infect bacteria. Some of those computer-generated designs produced working viruses when they were built and tested in the laboratory. These viruses were designed to infect bacteria […]