During conversation, our brains are constantly predicting which word comes next. That ability helps us understand speech in a noisy café, or anticipate a friend’s next sentence. This skill for prediction is also linked closely to our enjoyment of music. For Professor Shihab Shamma, an auditory neuroscientist at the École Normale Supérieure in
With around 3 000 hours of sunshine a year, Malta is ideally placed to harness the sun’s energy. But its scorching summers, salty sea air and occasional Saharan dust storms also make it one of Europe’s toughest environments for solar panels. For Dr Brian Azzopardi, a renewable energy researcher from Malta, those challenging conditions present
Zdenka Sokolickova, University of Groningen; Christy Hehir, University of Surrey, and Elizabeth Cooper, University of Groningen “You’d see massive glacier calvings, and you’d just want to cry. But all the guests would be cheering. And you’d be like … ‘can you not put two and two together?’” Those are the words of a
Marco Chan, Kingston University On Good Friday, April 11 1952, a Pan American Douglas DC-4 named Clipper Endeavor took off from San Juan in Puerto Rico, bound for New York. On board were 64 passengers including six infants, plus five crew. The flight lasted less than nine minutes before two engines lost power.
Ph. People try to stay cool on the sweltering streets of Manhattan during a heat wave in July 2025. Spencer Platt/Getty Images Kevin T. Smiley, Louisiana State University ; Deepti Singh, Washington State University; Jennifer Marlon, Yale University, and Jim Hurrell, Colorado State University When a devastating heat wave, hurricane, flood or wildfire
Jan Hugo, University of Pretoria; Chrisna du Plessis, University of Pretoria, and Karina Landman Climate change is affecting cities more and more. This creates major challenges, but it also gives fast-growing cities, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, the chance to adapt to global warming in new and better ways. Cities rely on roads, pipes
Ronnie Das, The University of Western Australia; Audencia and Sara Louise Walker, University of Birmingham In 2018, when the United States, Canada and Mexico bid to host the World Cup, their pitch included a climate promise: the bid committee said it would strive to deliver a carbon-neutral event. The bid’s environmental assessment, a
Ph. New World screwworm flies lay their eggs in the living tissue of warm-blooded animals. Ramdan Fatoni/iStock via Getty Images Sarah Tomlinson, Colorado State University New World screwworm, a concerning pest that mainly impacts livestock and wildlife, was detected in South Texas in June 2026. It has since expanded northward in Texas, and
Saheed Balogun Amusa, Obafemi Awolowo University The Nigerian Senate passed a bill on 24 June 2026 establishing state police in the 36 states of the country. The passage of the executive bill, sent to the National Assembly by President Bola Tinubu, officially opens the way to dismantle the decades-old structure of the Nigeria
Sarah Whitmore, Oxford Brookes University and Bettina Renz, University of Nottingham The Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, has dismissed the country’s commander-in-chief Oleksandr Syrskyi after a turbulent week in which he also removed his defence minister, Mykhailo Fedorov. The dismissal of the popular defence minister, who is credited by many as the brains behind