Codeine: why one person’s painkiller can be another person’s problem
Jack_the_sparow/Shutterstock For a medicine so commonly found in bathroom cabinets and high street pharmacies, codeine has a surprisingly complicated story. It sits at the intersection of pain relief, genetics, public health and regulation. As the UK continues to tighten rules around opioid use, codeine offers a useful case study in how a drug can be […]
How Antarctica warmed by 28°C in the depths of winter – and what it signals for the decades ahead
Ivan Hoermann / shutterstock In the middle of the Antarctic winter, during months of darkness when temperatures often dip below −30°C, the continent warmed dramatically. In July and August 2024, temperatures in parts of East Antarctica rose by up to 28°C above average and stayed high for more than two weeks. To put that in […]
Palantir and the NHS – 10 things you need to know
Who has access? DC Studio/Shutterstock.com Palantir, a US data analytics company backed in its early years by In-Q-Tel, now plays a central role in the NHS’s £330 million Federated Data Platform. Supporters say it could improve planning and efficiency, while critics have raised questions about governance, transparency and trust. Here’s what you need to know. […]
Needlecraft: this hobby has a long history as a subversive form of protest
Fotopogledi/Shutterstock To pass the time while filming, before her eyesight deteriorated, actor Judi Dench could often be found sewing. The picture of submissive femininity, she sat bent over her needlework. The finished work however, which she gave as gifts, were actually expletive-filled insults worked in ornate embroidery. There has been a resurgence of people taking […]
Pets, plants and a ‘coming-of-old-age’ story – what to see and watch this week
This curation of The Conversation UK’s arts and culture coverage was first published in our fortnightly newsletter, Something Good. Hollywood still has an aversion to telling older women’s stories. Research has found that older women are frequently relegated to supporting roles, or portrayed as grumpy, frumpy or senile. So when I saw the Brazilian film […]
Why Italy’s Giorgia Meloni broke with Donald Trump
The Italian prime minister and leader of the far-right Brothers of Italy party, Giorgia Meloni, has made fostering ties with foreign leaders a central part of her political strategy. A few years before winning Italy’s 2022 general elections, she started cultivating ties with the US and European conservative world as part of a broader political […]
Could warming seas bring great white sharks back to the North Sea? A 5-million-year-old shark tooth may provide clues
As the Earth shifts to climates not seen for several hundred thousand years, we may need to look at ancient environments for clues about what could happen next. Our new study of two whale fossils, with preserved fragments of shark teeth, suggests the modern descendants of these animals could once again roam the southern region […]
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens is an early exploration of ‘romance fraud’
Shrinking into her yellowing wedding gown with the decay of her wedding breakfast around her, Miss Havisham, from Charles Dickens’s 1861 novel, Great Expectations, is one of the best-known characters in English literature. Jilted on her wedding day by her unscrupulous fiancé, Havisham can be understood by modern readers as a victim of “romance fraud”, […]
The many literary lives of Mary Wollstonecraft – author of novels, travel writing and children’s books
In his biography of Mary Wollstonecraft, written after her death, her husband William Godwin remarked of her travel writing: “If ever there was a book calculated to make a man fall in love with its author, this appears to me to be the book.” Today, however, Wollstonecraft is best known for a different work: A […]
Why delaying climate action now means higher seas by 2100 – new research
Imagine your favourite sunny beach. Anywhere will do. You look out and see the ocean stretching to the horizon. To a glaciologist, that view is not just water; it’s melted ice. Our new study shows that the best case sea-level rise scenarios may now be out of reach. Around 20,000 years ago, during the most […]