By Martin Siegert, Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Cornwall), University of Exeter
A 30-minute stroll across New York’s Central Park separates Trump Tower from the American Museum of Natural History. If the US president ever found himself inside the museum he could see the Cape York meteorite: a 58-tonne mass of iron taken from northwest Greenland and sold in 1897 by the explorer Robert Peary, with the help of local Inuit guides.
For centuries before Danish colonisation, the people of Greenland had used fragments of the meteorite to make tools and hunting equipment. Peary removed that…
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By Candice Stewart
The name “Melissa” is of Greek origin and translates to “honeybee” in English, but [the] fallout felt personal, as if we troubled the hive and threatened the queen.
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By Amnesty International
Following an internet and telecommunications blackout imposed by Iranian authorities on 8 January 2026, as nationwide protests intensified since erupting on 28 December 2025, Rebecca White, researcher at Amnesty International’s Security Lab, said: “The Iranian authorities have once again deliberately blocked internet access inside Iran to hide the true extent of the grave human rights violations and crimes under international law they are carrying out to crush the largest nationwide protests since the Woman Life […] The post Iran: Internet shutdown hides violations in escalating deadly crackdown…
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By Julia Thomas, Professor of English Literature, Cardiff University
When film adaptations disappoint, it’s not bad filmmaking necessarily but a clash with the private images we create when we read.
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By Abigail Harrison Moore, Professor of Art History and Museum Studies, School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies, University of Leeds
Teaching art at HMP Wakefield changed my life. This series includes the most accurate description of prison teaching I have seen.
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By Dominik Piehlmaier, Visiting Fellow, Cambridge Judge Business School
Understanding finance isn’t enough – it’s vital to be able to apply that knowledge when there is pressure on your wallet.
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By Ian Manners, Professor, Department of Political Science, Lund University
European countries, and Denmark in particular, are scrambling to respond to threats from US officials over the future of Greenland.
Having successfully taken out the leadership of Venezuela in a raid on January 3, an emboldened US government is talking about simply taking Greenland for itself.
Various European leaders have expressed their concern but haven’t been able to formulate…
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By Maurizio Valsania, Professor of American History, Università di Torino
For the nation’s first president, friendliness was strategy, not concession: the republic would treat other nations with civility in order to remain independent of their appetites and quarrels.
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By Nishant Kumar, India Alliance Fellow, National Centre for Biological Science, Bangalore & Department of Biology, University of Oxford
Growing up in rural India, my grandmother would feed the village dog half a chapati and a bowl of milk each afternoon, surely insufficient for its needs. The dog survived by scavenging from nearby homes. Years later, living in Delhi, I encountered street dogs refusing biscuits, overfed by households competing to care for them.
India’s unique mix of religious and cultural values creates a deep tolerance for non-humans and wildlife among rich and poor alike, often rooted in millennia of coexistence. People consciously endure…
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By Carole Haswell, Professor of Astrophysics, The Open University
We live in a very exciting time: answers to some of the oldest questions humanity has conceived are within our grasp. One of these is whether Earth is the only place that harbours life.
In the last 30 years, the question of whether the Sun is unique in hosting a planetary system has been resoundingly answered: we now know of thousands of exoplanets orbiting other stars.
But can we use telescopes to detect whether any of these distant worlds also harbour life? A promising method is to analyse the gases present in the atmospheres of these planets.
We now know…
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