The history of childbirth and midwifery has seen some dramatic changes, not only in new medical discoveries that vastly improved the safety of both mother and baby but also in social trends and the way…
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There is something of a sensory dissonance in modern cities. Glamorous as they are, the breath of contemporary cities stinks. A recent study published in the journal Environmental Research Letters found…
According to a new Ipsos report, piracy in Norway has declined markedly over the past few years. In 2008 they estimated there were 1.2 billion illegal downloads of songs, but by 2012 this had dropped to…
The amount of plastic debris accumulating in the open ocean has doubled in 40 years. This has been is a topic of increasing public concern and scientific interest since it was first reported in the 1970s…
The Ashes juggernaut moves on to Lord’s, the so-called spiritual home of cricket. And what of the “spirit of cricket”? How has it coped over the first few weeks of back-to-back tours between two bitter…
Dementia has been described as a ticking time bomb, with the number of those affected predicted to double in the next two decades. But a new study suggests that the prevalence of people with dementia in…
The presence of foreign objects, like viruses, in our bloodstream is usually a bad thing. Evolution has created some extremely efficient immune cells that patrol the blood, seeking out material that should…
Vladimir Putin gets a bad press outside Russia. From the cases of Alexander Litvinenko, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, or Pussy Riot to the sponsoring of laws against gay “propaganda”, he is usually cast in a dark…
Across the world, the damage caused by invasive alien species is second only to habitat destruction by humans in reducing the planet’s biodiversity. Their effect is especially potent on islands. Cats…
An alien watching The Apprentice might be forgiven for thinking all that was needed to be a successful entrepreneur was a sharp suit, a few snappy lines and an ability to blame your colleagues for everything…
I lost my job in 2010 after raising concerns about staff shortages and patient safety in the NHS. But despite the NHS Chief Executive’s promise to intervene for whistleblowers and a tribunal in my favour…
After years of declarations, warnings and internal bickering, the European Union has finally done it. On Friday, Brussels is expected to announce that future agreements between the EU (or any of its member…
Foundation essay: This article on the indignant generation by Simon Hallsworth, head of the School of Applied Social Sciences at University Campus Suffolk, is part of a series marking the launch of The…
Mammals display an incredible diversity in size. The largest mammal, the blue whale, can grow up to 30m long and weigh up to 200 tonnes. Now compare that to the Bumblebee bat, which is 3cm long and weighs…
The words “environmentalism” and “military” are not typically found in the same sentence. Yet ideas about our vulnerability to environmental change are directly linked to military plans for a third world…
The football clubs of Western Europe are off to Asia this summer in the hope of engaging fans and building relationships with some of their target customers. For example, China plays host to the Barclays…
Injecting fluids into the Earth, whether to recover natural gas or to obtain thermal energy from the planet, can cause earthquakes. New reports that look at American fracking, deep waste-water injection…
The capture of Miguel Ángel Treviño Morales, the leader of the notorious drug cartel Los Zetas - one of the world’s most dangerous criminal organisations, will provide Enrique Peña Nieto’s Mexican government…
One of Britain’s largest independent cheese producers, Wyke Farms in Somerset, picked up a commendation in the BusinessGreen Leaders awards this month for its efforts to become completely energy self-sufficient…
Typhoon Soulik struck Taiwan at the beginning of the weekend, killing two people before moving on into Guangdong in southern China, where 300,000 people have already been evacuated. Classed as a category…
When you stand in the 27km-long Large Hadron Collider tunnel deep under Switzerland and France it looks as if the chain of blue magnets simply stretches off to infinity. So when people talk about putting…
Last week the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) asked the Vatican to disclose details of child sexual abuse cases involving Catholic clergy for the period November 1995 to January 2014. According…
Union opposition to the Royal Mail sell-off comes as no surprise to any of us. Postmen and women are well known within the public sector for their militancy. But their response must be careful; both the…
Violence against female protesters was a terrifying hallmark of the unrest that led to the fall of the Morsi government. Local NGOs documented more than 100 reports of sexual violence, including rape…
A frequent claim heard is that the UK is Europe’s windiest country. This is a partial truth; Scotland is the windiest country, whereas England is far from the windiest. To see the truth of this one need…