John Frederick Wilson, York St John University Grief is a universal emotion. It’s something we all feel, no matter where we come from or what we’ve been through. Grief comes for us all and as humans who form close relationships with other people, it’s hard to avoid. Studies of grieving brains – be it scans of the brain regions which …

Sennacherib – his face deliberately damaged in antiquity – presides over captives from the Levantine city of Lachish. British Museum, CC BY-NC-SA Martin Worthington, Trinity College Dublin Archaeologists in northern Iraq, working on the Mashki and Adad gate sites in Mosul that were destroyed by Islamic State in 2016, recently uncovered 2,700-year-old Assyrian reliefs. Featuring war scenes and trees, these …

Kateryna Kon/Shutterstock Manal Mohammed, University of Westminster Since the COVID variant omicron emerged in late 2021, it has rapidly evolved into multiple subvariants. One subvariant, BF.7, has recently been identified as the main variant spreading in Beijing, and is contributing to a wider surge of COVID infections in China. But what is this new variant, and should we be worried? …

Studio Romantic/Shutterstock Alessandro Siani, University of Portsmouth It’s been nearly two years since Margaret Keenan became the first person in the world to receive an approved COVID vaccine at a clinic in Coventry on December 8, 2020. Since then, almost 13 billion doses of various COVID vaccines have been administered globally. And they are estimated to have prevented millions of …

The Grand Egyptian Museum in Giza. Ashy Cat Inc, CC BY-NC-SA Claire Gilmour, University of Bristol With the Arab spring of 2011, a downturn in tourism and the devastation of COVID, the odds have been stacked against the opening of Giza’s Grand Egyptian Museum, work on which began in 2005 and is due to complete 2023. Nevertheless, it will house …

Mark Maslin, UCL; Priti Parikh, UCL; Richard Taylor, UCL, and Simon Chin-Yee, UCL Billed as “Africa’s COP”, the 27th UN climate change summit (otherwise known as COP27) in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, was expected to promote climate justice, as this is the continent most affected but least responsible for the climate crisis. Negotiations for a fund that would compensate developing countries …

Doha. All clean? Shutterstock/HasanZaidi Argyro Elisavet Manoli, Loughborough University Fifa’s choice of Qatar as host of the 2022 men’s football World Cup has been controversial since day one. Questions continue to be raised about the nation’s attitude to human rights, and its treatment of migrant workers. To some, the entire event exemplifies the concept of “sportswashing” – using sport as …

Christoph Bluth, University of Bradford Since the invasion of Ukraine in February, the threat that weapons of mass destruction would be used has been a constant concern. Discussion of this threat has tended to focus on the possibility that Russia might resort to using its nuclear arsenal – something hinted at several times by the Russian president Vladimir Putin and …

Shutterstock/Jorm S Ruth Itzhaki, University of Oxford This article is part of the Insights Uncharted Brain series. There are many competing theories about what causes Alzheimer’s disease. Here, Ruth Itzhaki reflects on a career dedicated to one of the more controversial lines of research. Life is not easy for any of us. But what of that? We must have perseverance …

Butter boards are sort of like a charcuterie board featuring artisanal butters. zarzamora/ Shutterstock Duane Mellor, Aston University In an unexpected twist, butter seems to be back on the menu. After years of being a maligned ingredient that many people shied away from, butter has now become the latest food trend on social media, thanks to the recent popularity of …