By Kerstin Zander, Professor of Environmental Economics, Charles Darwin University
Stephen Garnett, Professor of Conservation and Sustainable Livelihoods, Charles Darwin University
Before booking a holiday, it pays to check the weather.
Rain can turn a joyful trip into a glum stretch of days. Soaring temperatures are making sunny summers less appealing. And destructive fires, floods…
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By Maggie Nolan, Director of AustLit, Associate Professor in Digital Cultural Heritage, The University of Queensland
Robert Clarke, Senior Lecturer in English, University of Tasmania
It’s increasingly rare for us to respectfully disagree these days. Book clubs invite us to do just that – while making time for a good read.
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By Mark Freeman, School of Social Sciences, Media, Film and Education, Swinburne University of Technology
You may have never consciously noticed a match cut before, yet this simple editing technique completely transforms how we experience a film.
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By Ian Towle, Research Fellow in Biological Anthropology, Monash University
Humanity’s family tree is long and tangled. Scientists sort our ancient relatives into three familiar groups: Homo, Australopithecus and Paranthropus.
Each of these is a “genus”, the rank just above a species. (In Homo sapiens, Homo is the genus and sapiens is the species.)
These names dominate how we talk about human origins. But new fossils, advances in genetic analysis, and more rigorous methods for figuring out who’s related to whom show these groupings don’t really reflect the true shape of our family tree.
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Tuesday, August 18, 2026
Independent UN Human Rights Council-appointed experts on Tuesday condemned the execution of at least 16 people in Singapore for drug-related offences this year and urged the country to end its “continued and unlawful use of capital punishment.”
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By Sonya Pastran, PhD Candidate, Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries, University of British Columbia
Facing pressures in both marine and terrestrial environments, the marbled murrelet is listed as threatened under Canada’s Species at Risk Act.
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By Ifedapo Francis Awolowo, Senior Lecturer in Accounting, Sheffield Hallam University
The death of Professor Jason Arday has left many of us with a profound sense of sadness. For Black academics in particular, his loss feels deeply personal. Jason represented possibility – a reminder of what could be achieved despite the barriers that continue to shape Black people’s experiences in education.
I had the privilege of knowing Jason and welcoming him to speak to scholars on the Accomplished Study Programme in Research Excellence (Aspire), which was set up to address the underrepresentation of Black students progressing…
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By Jorge Gracia Ibáñez, Profesor e Investigador Grado en Criminología y Grado en Derecho., Universidad San Jorge
This summer, Laureano Oubiña, a major Galician drug trafficker, launched a “drug trafficking tour” through the Arousa estuary. He offered his clients a boat ride through the places that defined an era and promised the story told firsthand – with lunch included. The initiative has since been banned by Galicia’s regional government for infringing on tourism laws.
This is an example of “dark tourism”…
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By Michael Arntfield, Full Professor of Criminology & English Literature, Western University
A couple of weeks ago, Netflix released The Idaho Murders: College Nightmare, a documentary revisiting the 2022 killings of four University of Idaho students — Ethan Chapin (20 years old), Kaylee Goncalves (21), Xana Kernodle (20) and Madison Mogen (21).
The case, which seemed closed when Bryan Kohberger pleaded guilty in 2025 and…
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By Angela van der Berg, Director of the Global Environmental Law Centre; Associate Professor Department of Public Law & Jurisprudence, University of the Western Cape
South Africa’s first climate case at the Constitutional Court has blocked Shell’s oil and gas exploration off the Wild Coast, protecting coastal communities.
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