By Robert Colls, Professor Emeritus of History, De Montfort University
In October 1945, George Orwell responded to a letter from Mr J. Stewart Cook in the leftwing weekly newspaper Tribune calling for more science education.
The call can hardly have come as a surprise. War had brought science and engineering to the fore – from the Spitfire fighter plane and radar to Bletchley Park’s codebreakers – and now that war was over, many thought it was time to build a brave new world. Science had won the war; the view was that it should build the peace.
Only the week before, in the same newspaper, Orwell had warned of the dangers…
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By David Grecic, Professor of Sport and Physical Education, University of Lancashire
Alan Thomson, Senior Lecturer in Sport and Physical Education, University of Lancashire
Andrew Sprake, Lecturer in Physical Education & Sport / Course Leader MA in Physical Education and School Sport, University of Lancashire
Children could be empowered to choose activities that enable them to learn the knowledge and skills to make healthy life choices.
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By Louis Bayman, Associate Professor in Department of Film Studies, University of Southampton
The friendship here depicts something that our culture usually finds very difficult to imagine: an image of straight masculinity that is actually lovely.
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By Elizabeth Schafer, Professor of Drama and Theatre Studies, Royal Holloway, University of London
For Shakespeare’s Hamlet “the world is out of joint”. In screen writer Michael Lesslie’s collage of Shakespeare’s play, directed by Aneil Karia, Riz Ahmed’s intense, grief-wrecked Hamlet pays a high price as he tries to “set it right” in a corrupt corporate world.
This Hamlet is a radical adaptation that mostly uses Shakespeare’s words but relocates to contemporary, uber-wealthy south-Asian London. Hamlet has had a south-Asian makeover before now, most famously in Haider;…
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By Matthew Mokhefi-Ashton, Lecturer in Politics and International Relations, Nottingham Trent University
The US government has to balance the need to know with the right to privacy. It’s a delicate balancing act.
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By Rhiannon Tudor Edwards, Professor of Health Economics, Bangor University
For nearly three decades, decisions about which medicines the NHS pays for have not been made by ministers, but by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, known as Nice. Its job has been powerful: to act as a check on the pharmaceutical industry by demanding evidence that new drugs are clinically effective and worth the price, protecting NHS budgets from spiralling costs.
That independence has helped to shape how NHS money is spent in England and Wales, and, just as importantly, what it is not spent on. Nice does not exist to block new medicines, but to make sure limited…
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By Belinda Zakrzewska, Assistant Professor of Marketing, University of Birmingham
Flavia Cardoso, Associate Professor in Business and Economics
Jannsen Santana, Assistant Professor in Marketing, TBS Education
Bad Bunny’s rise is inseparable from his activism, which is woven into his artistic choices, television appearances and live performances.
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By Ivan Kourtchev, Associate Professor, Centre for Agroecology, Water and Resilience, Coventry University
The UK government has published its first national plan to deal with per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, better known as Pfas or “forever chemicals”. These chemicals have been used for decades in products such as firefighting foams, non-stick cookware, clothing, electronics and many industrial processes. Because many Pfas do not break down easily, they are now widely detected in the environment and in human blood and tissues.
The policy document, Pfas Plan: Building…
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By Vikram Niranjan, Assistant Professor in Public Health, School of Medicine, Health Research Institute, University of Limerick
Opening windows clears germs and stale air –but timing matters. You don’t want to swap indoor pollution for outdoor exhaust.
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By Andy Miah, Chair in Science Communication & Future Media, University of Salford
The 2026 Winter Olympics have come at a turning point in sport in terms of how Olympians are allowed to monetise their performances. In December, the governing body the International Olympic Committee (IOC) announced that, for the first time, Olympians would have access to footage from their competitions to use for their personal branding and promotion.
In this pilot phase, the material will not be from these Milan Cortina Winter Olympics, but from the previous Games in Beijing in 2022. According to…
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