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Dr Marta Shahbazi was travelling to a conference to receive award for scientific excellence in developmental biology An “inspiring” Cambridge scientist died in the Spanish train collision on Wednesday that killed at least 69 people. Dr Marta Shahbazi, 41, an affiliate associate professor at the Cambridge Stem Cell Institute and a group leader at the city’s Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB), was travelling on one of the trains involved in the crash near Urda in Toledo province. Continue reading...

Aitana Bonmatí has been voted the best female player on the planet by our panel of 127 experts ahead of Mariona Caldentey and Alessia Russo 2024 list | 2023 | 2022 | 2021 | 2020 | 2019 | 2018 Meet the judges | See how every judge voted Subscribe to Moving the Goalposts, our free newsletter Continue reading...

iOS 27.2 adds an invisible SynthID watermark to Image Playground images and some AI-edited photos. Here’s how it works and how to check. (via Cult of Mac - Your source for the latest Apple news, rumors, analysis, reviews, how-tos and deals.)

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen recently confirmed that Canada is joining Europe's network of supercomputers, which is run by the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking. Canada will become an active part of the public-private network of high-performance computing (HPC) systems, and both sides should gain something from the arrangement, at... Read Entire Article

Investors are preparing for a blue wave in the midterm election on Tuesday that will determine who controls Congress for the remainder of President Trump's term.

Her unsparing fiction and true crime writing have made her one of Australia’s most controversial and celebrated authors. The author discusses relationships, resilience – and finding global recognition five decades into her career A few years ago, when Helen Garner had an idea to write a book about Australian rules football, her heart soared then immediately sank. The impetus was Ambrose, her teenage grandson, who played for a local team. Garner enjoyed watching them and wanted to put this into writing. Then the dreary thought: “I’ll have to swot, read the rulebook.” People to whom she mentioned the idea assumed she’d be writing a polemic, “like what it means in society and how terrible it is and what violence means. And I’m going: ‘What a bore.’” As anyone familiar with Garner’s almost 50-year writing career will know, there is nothing more igniting to the 83-year-old than the invitation to outrun boredom by going off in an unauthorised direction. Garner, who is speaking to me via video call from her home in Melbourne, occupies that tiny category of writers famous enough to be recognised in public. Stopped by strangers in the street, she’s often treated to their strong views about her work. As a result, perhaps, she has perfected a very Garnerian obstinacy, enabling her to resist other people’s bossy opinions which, in the case of The Season, meant no tedious explainers about the rules, history or sociology of Aussie rules football. Instead, says Garner, she envisaged following a single season of Ambrose’s U16s team, the Flemington Colts, as “a nanna’s book”. During publicity, she’d turn up to an event at a library to find “the first five rows packed with nannas; all these white-haired women with hankies in their hands. And I feel nobody writes about nannas. I mean, sentimentally, yes; but I want to say what they’re really like.” Continue reading...

As one of the world’s leading forensic anthropologists, Dame Sue Black has acted as an expert witness in a myriad of high-profile criminal cases. Her work has taken her from the lab to active war zones and the aftermath of natural disasters to identify victims’ bodies. Speaking to Ian Sample, the professor explains why standing up in front of a judge and jury has been one of the more terrifying parts of her career, the reputational risk of presenting evidence in court and what the future of forensic science could look like Order An Expert Witness from the Guardian bookshop Support the Guardian: theguardian.com/sciencepod Continue reading...

The rapper lends the NFL a veneer of credibility but is unlikely to push back on the establishment figures who run the league On Monday the NFL named Jay-Z as the headliner for this season’s Super Bowl half-time show. His company, Roc Nation, produces the show under a 2019 deal reportedly worth $5m a year, and the agreement was extended for another five years in 2024. NFL commissioner Roger Goodell said his one request when the partnership began was that Jay-Z “take the stage himself one day“. Goodell’s wish makes total sense: Jay-Z is the perfect choice for the half-time show, and that’s not a compliment. The NFL wants a shill who can still pass for a rebel, and nobody in American music plays that part better than Jay-Z. Continue reading...

Perimenopause has become a hot topic, with celebrities sharing their experiences and doctors offering tips and advice online. But despite the benefits of growing awareness, a rising number of women are now encountering misinformation about treatments such as HRT. Madeleine Finlay hears from Dr Paula Briggs, a consultant in sexual and reproductive health, about why experts have raised the alarm. Science correspondent Nicola Davis gives the facts on symptoms, tests and treatments Read Nicola’s article about perimenopause misinformation here Support the Guardian: theguardian.com/sciencepod Continue reading...

Every autumn, Corvo Island in the Azores turns off its public lighting for a few key days to help fledgling Cory’s shearwaters as they attempt to fly to the ocean guided by the stars Once a year, Corvo, the smallest and most northerly island of Portugal’s Azores archipelago, goes dark. Since 2019, the island’s 450 or so inhabitants have chosen to switch off the lights every autumn for five nights to tackle the disastrous effects of artificial light on Cory’s shearwaters, a seabird endemic to the Atlantic Ocean. It began in 1991 when the community noticed huge numbers of deaths among young shearwaters. A newborn Cory’s shearwater chick Continue reading...

The Canadian prime minister’s reckoning with Trumpism in Davos clashes with his attacks on environmental, Indigenous and labour rights The Canadian prime minister is a hero around the world for his Davos speech that reckoned with a reconfiguration of power in the shadow of Donald Trump. But at home, Mark Carney is mirroring the US president by radically centralizing power within his office and cabinet and taking a hatchet to dozens of laws protecting environmental, Indigenous and labour rights, all in order to enact his economic agenda. Shiri Pasternak is an associate professor in criminology at Toronto Metropolitan University and a member of the Infrastructure Beyond Extractivism research team, a collaboration between critical scholars and Indigenous land defenders across North America Continue reading...

When a seven-eared stem emerged from the ground, it seemed like a miracle. What Claudio Grossi had unearthed was an ancient grain that proved to be an answer to some modern problems

After his longtime spokesperson, Kelly Bush Novak, formally announced his passing, tributes poured in from around the world. Fans and former colleagues recalled his iconic roles and marveled at how easily he moved between commercial cinema and classical Shakespearean theater. Read Entire Article

Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is set to meet with U.S. special envoys on Tuesday after President Donald Trump aimed fresh criticism at the wartime leader.

Investors expect the Fed to pause rate hikes in October, but Kevin Warsh's rejection of traditional communications practices and continued concern about inflation leave the decision uncertain.

Judges hail Sofia Demetriades’s performance of Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto as full of insights, poetry and maturity A teenage violinist has won the BBC Young Musician competition 2026, in the first all-female final in the competition’s 48-year history. The judges, Joanna MacGregor, Ben Gernon and Errollyn Wallen, hailed Sofia Demetriades’s performance of Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto as full of insights, poetry and maturity. Continue reading...

When Patrick Stewart, who died on Wednesday, first stepped onto the bridge of the Enterprise in 1987 in his defining role as Captain Jean-Luc Picard, the Berlin Wall still stood. The Soviet Union would not fall until the fourth season of that show, Star Trek: The Next Generation, had already begun. Yet Picard’s generation of […]

It’s funny, tense, stunningly forceful – the excellence of this franchise’s return is a bright flash of hopeful defiance We settle down in front of a fresh Blue Planet, trying to escape a weary sadness that stalks us from several angles. It is a new natural history show narrated by the 100-year-old David Attenborough, so there cannot be many more of those to enjoy. It is a Sunday-night showcase on BBC One, which is nothing like as significant a shared cultural event as it once was. The film-making can’t possibly be as revelatory as the original Blue Planet in 2001, and even the impact Blue Planet II had on conservation in 2017 feels unrepeatable: the attention it brought to plastic pollution in the ocean turned out to be a minor blow struck in a battle against environmental catastrophe that we have, since then, continued to lose. But if we stop requiring it to be another landmark and appreciate it as just another wildlife series, Blue Planet III is a corker. Its excellence is a bright flash of hopeful defiance, and if it often falls into familiar patterns, that familiarity is a comfort. Continue reading...

US artist known as Model 500 and as one half of the duo Cybotron had huge influence on dance music worldwide Juan Atkins, one of the pioneers of Detroit techno and a huge influence on dance music more widely, has died aged 64. His agency, Greensmith Artists, confirmed the news to the dance music website Resident Advisor, saying Atkins had been found unresponsive in a hotel room in Mexico City prior to a performance there, and was pronounced dead after being taken to hospital. Continue reading...

Experts say symptoms such as dark circles under the eyes, grey skin, cracked lips and hair loss can be a warning sign – but there are other factors too TikTok is rife with influencers warning of “ferritin face”, a term they use to describe the pallor, dark circles, dry skin, and hair loss claimed to indicate low iron stores. But is this based on fact or fiction, and when is it time to head to the GP? Continue reading...

When it comes to fertility, testosterone and reproductive fitness, manosphere misinformation is rife - which can lead to a lot of heartache. Meet the man who wants to change all that “I think you can tell it’s for a lay audience,” says Michael Carroll, holding up his book, Your Nuts, its cover illustrated with two walnuts in a string bag. The book has arrived in tandem with worldwide concerns about falling birth rates. “Spermaggedon” is a chunky piece of this puzzle, part of a wider debate about whether and why we’re heading for species-icide. Are people deciding not to have kids because of climate anxiety and economic precarity? Or is this an unchosen fertility cliff edge, created by forever chemicals and our lifestyles? This is not a drill, says Carroll, a biologist and reproductive scientist at Manchester Metropolitan University. “There’s compelling evidence to support a historical decline in sperm count and sperm concentration over the last number of decades.” However, it’s just not that simple. First, it’s not a uniform picture and in some populations sperm counts are going up. The Danish Young Men Study, for instance, showed no drop between 1996 and 2022. In Ireland, a study of 15,000 men between 2008 and 2023 showed a 23% increase in sperm concentration. Continue reading...

What happens when a forest loses its birdsong? Following clues hidden in the sounds birds make while asleep, Argentinian physicist Gabriel Mindlin uncovers a hidden extinction – not of species, but of memory – and sets out to revive vanished melodies before they disappear forever. Part detective story, part cutting-edge science, Mindlin’s mission leads him to the dusty 1960s archives of Buenos Aires naturalist, confirming that some songs no longer echo in the biosphere. So he deploys “robot tutors” to see whether young birds can learn and spread the old songs once again. Read more on this topic: Trill seekers: can scientists use AI and tutors to help birds remember lost songs? Continue reading...

Voters are turning against the Republicans. But the clearest possible message is needed to safeguard democracy The psychologist Jennifer Freyd identified a pattern often used by perpetrators: deny, accuse, and reverse victim and offender. More than one observer has noted that Donald Trump employs that pattern politically. With polls suggesting Republicans are likely to lose the House and perhaps the Senate too in the midterms, the man who refused to accept Americans’ democratic verdict in 2020 is hawking a narrative of cheating Democrats who will steal seats via illegitimate votes. The January 6 insurrection showed how acute the peril to American democracy had become. It is more so now. This time, Republican efforts to undermine the results began well in advance. In 2020, Mr Trump’s vice-president, Mike Pence, the attorney general, William Barr, and others refused his most outrageous demands; now the justice department is supine. And the supreme court’s gutting of the Voting Rights Act, which safeguarded against the worst kinds of racial discrimination, means that states no longer require pre-approval for decisions that could well tilt a race. Districts have already been redrawn. Continue reading...

Ahead of Jio's listing, Mukesh Ambani teared up as his three children shared the journey of building Jio and vowed to create value for investors over the next 50 years.

The British transfer record was equalled and one club signed no fewer than 18 players in another hectic summer Bringing in Christos Tzolis, Bruno Guimarães and Ezri Konsa was a strong start to the window but could Arsenal’s failure to sign a marquee attacker cost them in the long run? They began targeting Morgan Rogers before pivoting to Vinícius Júnior when the England forward went to Chelsea, only to end up disappointed when Vinícius signed a new deal with Real Madrid. Julián Alvarez made clear he had no intention of joining from Atlético Madrid in the final days of the window and Arsenal kept their powder dry despite sanctioning the exits of Gabriel Jesus to Barcelona and Ethan Nwaneri to Borussia Dortmund. Should Gabriel Martinelli complete his move to Al-Hilal as expected in the coming days – the Saudi Pro League window remains open – a few injuries could leave Arteta short. Ed Aarons Continue reading...

Rubio’s decision not to meet Narendra Modi last week was seen by some as a snub – but by focusing on business leaders and oil, the secretary of state made American priorities clear. Plus: the artist bringing a female perspective to men’s clothing • Don’t get This is India delivered to your inbox? Sign up here When the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, visited India for the second time this year, headlines concentrated on who he met and where he went. The fact that Rubio bypassed New Delhi and did not meet the prime minister, Narendra Modi, during his trip last week, and instead traveled to the financial capital, Mumbai, where he met India’s foreign minister, Subrahmanyam Jaishankar (pictured top with Rubio), and business leaders, did not go unnoticed. Nor did his decision to travel to Jamnagar, the small Gujarati town that is home to Reliance Industries’ colossal oil refinery complex. Continue reading...