By Daniel Carey, Chair Professor School of English, Media and Creative Arts, University of Galway
On Gulliver’s third travel he meets the Projectors who have come up with a device that is surprisingly similar to our modern large language models.
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By Martin Waehlisch, Associate Professor, University of Birmingham
Stefan Wolff, Professor of International Security, University of Birmingham
The dream of a Canada-EU “middle-power bloc” has hit its first serious obstacle. At the Montreal summit, Brussels failed to deliver on the promise of associate membership for Canada, despite the enthusiastic backing of European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen.
Instead, the EU offered the hollow consolation of “an ever-closer association”, raising an uncomfortable question about whether the middle powers can overcome their own divisions to become a serious geopolitical force.
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By Kaisa Pankakoski, Research Associate in Sociolinguistics, Cardiff University
Research with Welsh-speaking families reveals a generational shift, while experiences in Finland show the problem is not unique to Wales.
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By Martin Lundsteen, Investigador Ramón y Cajal en Antropología Social, Universitat de Barcelona
Housing shortages and soaring rents are central to Spain’s upcoming general election. As each party presents voters with ways of addressing the crisis, far right party Vox is backing a simple solution: the principle of prioridad nacional, or “national priority”, which would put Spaniards first in line to receive government benefits.
The policy is central to Vox’s programme. It proposes expanding social housing with priority for Spanish nationals, alongside deregulation and tax reductions.
It is presented as a common sense solution, but national priority does not…
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By Peter Stenvinkel, Professor of Nephrology, Karolinska Institutet
The 2026 Lancet Countdown reveals the growing health toll of extreme heat, while references to climate and health in UN speeches have declined.
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By Nadiya N. Ali, Assistant Professor, Sociology, Trent University
Ayesha Mian Akram, Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology, University of Calgary
Nour Hammami, Assistant Professor, Trent University
Decades of research on peer-to-peer maltreatment in childhood and adolescence, together with anti-bullying advocacy, have established bullying as a serious public health, educational and mental health issue.
Looking at the long-term harms of bullying, psychologist Dieter Wolke and his colleagues found that “victims of childhood bullying, including those that bullied others (bully-victims), were at increased risk of poor health, wealth and social-relationship…
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By Anna Hargreaves, Professor of Conservation Ecology & Evolution, McGill University
Jennifer Sunday, Canada Research Chair, Global Change BIology, McGill University
Jory Griffith, Doctoral Student, Environmental Policy, ETH Zurich
Tropical ecosystems are famous for their teeming, exuberant diversity. In fact, the dramatic increase in biodiversity from the poles to the tropics — known as the latitudinal diversity gradient — is pervasive across branches of the tree of life, and fossil evidence suggests it has existed for millennia.
It might seem that if anything could be immune to human disruption, it would be the latitudinal diversity gradient. But human impacts on nature are also global, pervasive…
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By Gabriella Santini, Post-doctoral Researcher in Anthropology, UCL
Emily Woodhouse, Associate Professor in Interdisciplinary Environmental Anthropology, UCL
Simon Chin-Yee, Lecturer in International Development, UCL
The UN’s main biodiversity summit, held every two years, wrapped up in Yerevan, Armenia, on October 31.
Biodiversity summits don’t attract the same fanfare as their climate change equivalents, yet loss of nature threatens food systems, water security, health, livelihoods and cultural traditions. Forests, soils, wetlands and oceans absorb around half the carbon dioxide humans emit, while climate change is itself one of the main drivers of biodiversity loss.
This summit, technically the 17th
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By Amnesty International
Responding to the news that the French War Crimes Unit has opened a judicial investigation into a deadly November 2024 Israeli strike on a civilian building in central Beirut, following a legal complaint filed by French-Lebanese artist and filmmaker Ali Cherri and the International Federation for Human Rights, Amnesty International’s Regional Director Heba Morayef said: […] The post France/Lebanon: Opening of war crimes investigation into deadly Israeli strike is a critical step towards justice, truth and reparation appeared first on Amnesty International. ]]>
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By Virginia Iglesias, Earth Lab Director, University of Colorado Boulder
Dry land and little snow helped fuel a destructive 2026 fire season. New research shows active fire seasons are becoming the norm, and communities need to prepare.
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