By Samantha Ward, Professor of Zoo Animal Welfare & Legislation, Nottingham Trent University
Imagine sipping a latte while stroking an owl or watching an otter play at your feet. This is the promise of exotic animal cafes, a trend that blends coffee culture with wildlife encounters. But behind the Instagram-worthy photos lies a troubling reality – the welfare of the animals themselves.
Since the mid-2000s, animal cafes have increased in popularity with customers paying low-cost entrance fees, ranging from £8 to around £15, depending on the location and animals housed there. The concept seemed to have started with cat cafes but…
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By Robin Bailey, Assistant professor, University of Cambridge
Picture a busy A&E department on a winter evening. Among the emergencies – heart attacks, broken bones, severe injuries – sits someone with a sore throat. Another with an ingrown toenail. Last winter in England, over 200,000 people turned up to emergency departments with complaints like these, leading many to ask: are people misusing A&E – or is something else going on?
A perspective not always considered in this discussion is that the sore throat (or other seemingly minor ailment) isn’t really the problem. The problem is the terror that it might be something worse. Unfortunately, the…
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By Caroline Brophy, Professor in Statistics, Trinity College Dublin
Farmers have increasingly sown a single type of grass in their fields over the past 100 years, and then added chemical fertiliser to increase their harvest. But new research suggests that there are alternatives that are cheaper and can increase the potential of these grasslands to feed livestock.
My research team and I were particularly interested in the potential of mixing up the species of plants grown in agricultural grasslands and what the benefits might be.
This meant the sowing of two grasses, two legumes (for instance, red clover and white clover) and two herbs…
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By Steven Daniels, Lecturer in Politics, Edge Hill University
The UK’s employment rights bill will usher in major changes for workers from April 2026. But beyond promising improved rights for employees over unfair dismissal and sick pay, one of the most controversial aspects of the bill concerns the rights of trade unions.
Millions of UK workers belong to a trade union. They are found in virtually every key industry in the UK, including healthcare, education and transport. This new legislation promises to strengthen their rights – notably by forcing employers to…
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By Yaz Iyabo Osho, Director of Academic Professional Development, University of Westminster
Naomi Alormele, Senior Lecturer in Social Care, University of Northampton
Black women are underrepresented in senior roles in British academia. As of May 2024, there were only 70 Black women professors.
This is less than 1% of all female professors in the UK. Black women are also more likely to be employed on fixed-term…
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By Jake Phillips, Associate professor, University of Cambridge
Hannah Gilman, Lecturer, Arden University
In England and Wales, whole-life imprisonment is the harshest sanction available to the courts, emerging in the decades after the abolition of the death penalty. The whole-life order requires people to spend their whole lives in prison with no prospect of release, except on exceptional compassionate grounds.
From 1988, whole-life sentences (called “whole-life tariffs”) could be imposed by the home secretary and were used for handful of criminals. However, a number of legal challenges in the 1990s chipped away at the home secretary’s power to do so. In 2003, the Criminal Justice Act…
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By Anthony Smith, Lecturer in Television Theory, University of Salford
Laura Minor, Lecturer in Television Studies, University of Salford
Though Netflix has always cultivated an image as television’s great disruptor, the company has persistently adopted, adapted and copied the conventions of legacy television.
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By David Toews, Associate Professor of Biology, Penn State
People typically think about evolution as a linear process where, within a species, the classic adage of “survival of the fittest” is constantly at play. New DNA mutations arise and get passed from parents to offspring. If any genetic changes prove to be beneficial, they might give those young a survival edge.
Over the great span of time – through the slow closing of a land bridge here or the rise of a mountain range there – species eventually split. They go on evolving slowly along their own trajectories with their own unique mutations. That’s the process that over the past 3.5 billion…
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By Hassan Vally, Associate Professor, Epidemiology, Deakin University
The CDC website used to state, clearly and correctly, that the evidence shows no link between vaccines and the development of autism.
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By Peter Draper, Professor, and Executive Director: Institute for International Trade, and Director of the Jean Monnet Centre of Trade and Environment, University of Adelaide
Nathan Howard Gray, Senior Research Fellow, Institute for International Trade, University of Adelaide
This week, US President Donald Trump approved previously banned exports of Nvidia’s powerful H200 artificial intelligence (AI) chips to China.
In return, the US government will receive 25% of the sales revenue, in what has become a hallmark of this administration to take a sales cut of a private company’s revenues.
The H200 is Nvidia’s second-most powerful AI processor. It’s roughly…
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