Almost 300,000 people now live in flood-prone areas in the Nepalese Himalayas – new research
AP Tolang / Shutterstock On August 26, a rock and ice avalanche triggered a huge flood that swept through a steep valley in Nepal, leaving thousands dead and missing. It was an extreme example of a growing problem across the Himalayas. As glaciers melt, glacial lakes expand, and mountain permafrost thaws, the risks from floods, […]
Robert Ryman: The Real Thing at the Barbican – these mesmerising paintings must be seen in person
Robert Ryman: The Real Thing is the American artist’s first major retrospective in the UK for over 30 years. The show, at London’s Barbican Centre, brings 68 works together from the mid-1950s to the early 2010s. It is arranged thematically, without traditional wall text. There are no labels, even to identify the paintings. The exhibition […]
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 […]