By Chris Hilson, Professor of Law, Director of the Centre for Climate and Justice, University of Reading
The River Wye used to be full of wild salmon. Today it is full of algae.
And the meandering waterway which has long attracted anglers, hikers and poets is now the subject of a major pollution lawsuit.
The case – against a British water company and two chicken producers, who all deny responsibility – has been launched on behalf of almost 4,000 people who say their lives are being negatively affected by river pollution.…
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By Alison Stenning, Professor of Social & Economic Geography, Newcastle University
In July 2025, a letter from an English city council neighbourhood services officer circulated on social media.
It read: “We have received complaints about young children playing ball games on the main road and streets. This can cause damage to vehicles and property. If your child is playing ball games on the road, please speak with them and prevent them from doing this. It’s unsafe for children to be playing in the roads. It is also causing a disturbance for other residents on the street. There are plenty of local parks where children can be taken to play safely … Please utilise these.”
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By Nicola Bowring, Senior Lecturer, School of Social Sciences, Nottingham Trent University
Sources as old as Pliny the Younger, the ancient Roman lawyer and writer, tell stories of houses that are haunted.
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By Michael J. Benton, Professor of Vertebrate Palaeontology, University of Bristol
Imaging technology has revolutionised palaeontology, allowing scientists to study fossils that are buried deep in the rock or too small to handle. Two recent studies I was involved with show some of the technology’s potential, including one that discovered a new dinosaur species that loomed over other carnivores it lived alongside hundreds of millions of years ago.
In the first study, my colleagues and I investigated an impression of a fossil jawbone that had been described in 1899 only…
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By Human Rights Watch
Click to expand Image Marchers carry a banner in support of intersex rights in Amsterdam, Netherlands. © 2023 Ana Fernandez/SOPA Images/Sipa USA via AP Photo Intersex Awareness Week is marked annually to recall a small group of protesters who picketed the American Academy of Pediatrics in 1996 for ignoring the rights of children born with sex variations. While the academy has not budged, medical institutions and governments around the world are increasingly recognizing that people born with intersex variations deserve bodily autonomy.Intersex children are born with chromosomes, gonads,…
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By Sebastian van Baalen, Associate Senior Lecturer, Uppsala University
Jesper Bjarnesen, Senior researcher, The Nordic Africa Institute
Regardless of the legal reasoning and outcomes, President Alassane Ouattara’s fourth-term bid is a loss for democracy in Côte d'Ivoire.
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By Yurou Wang, Associate Professor of Educational Psychology, University of Alabama
A meta-analysis of AI chatbots’ impact on student learning finds benefits when used properly, but risks of diminishing student motivation and confidence.
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By Chip Colwell, Associate Research Professor of Anthropology, University of Colorado Denver
From grave robbing to road construction, a cemetery in Richmond, Va., reveals the long pattern of Black Americans burying their dead in spaces that received few protections.
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By Michael Liemohn, Professor of Climate and Space Sciences and Engineering, University of Michigan
When I imagine the future of space commerce, the first image that comes to mind is a farmer’s market on the International Space Station. This doesn’t exist yet, but space commerce is a growing industry. The Space Foundation, a nonprofit organization for education and advocacy of space, estimates that the global space economy rose to US$613 billion in 2024, up nearly 8% from 2023, and 250 times larger than all business…
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By Jackson Trager, Ph.D. Candidate in Psychology, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences
People who highly value equality and purity are most likely to see excessive wealth as wrong, a new study suggests.
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