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The threat posed by climate change in the Arctic and the problems faced by Canada’s Inuit people A Unusual incidents are being reported across the Arctic. Inuit families going off on snowmobiles to prepare their summer hunting camps have found themselves cut off from home by a… Read More »Climate Change and the Inuit

The vast expansion in international trade owes much to a revolution in the business of moving freight  A International trade is growing at a startling pace. While the global economy has been expanding at a bit over 3% a year, the volume of trade has been… Read More »Delivering the Goods

A They play hard, they play often, and they play to win. Australian sports teams win more than their fair share of titles, demolishing rivals with seeming ease. How do they do it? A big part of the secret is an extensive and expensive network of… Read More »Australia’s sporting success

In general, it is plausible to suppose that we should prefer peace and quiet to noise. And yet most of us have had the experience of having to adjust to sleeping in the mountains or the countryside because it was initially ‘too quiet’, an experience that suggests… Read More »EFFECTS OF NOISE

More than two hundred years ago, Russian explorers and fur hunters landed on the Aleutian Islands, a volcanic archipelago in the North Pacific, and learned of a land mass that lay farther to the north. ‘The islands’ native inhabitants called this land mass Aleyska, the ‘Great Land’; today, we… Read More »Endless Harvest

No one knows exactly how the pyramids were built. Marcus Chown reckons the answer could be ‘hanging in the air’. The pyramids of Egypt were built more than three thousand years ago, and no one knows how. The conventional picture is that tens of thousands of slaves dragged stones… Read More »Pulling strings to build pyramids

Forests are one of the main elements of our natural heritage. The decline of Europe’s forests over the last decade and a half has led to an increasing awareness and understanding of the serious imbalances which threaten them. European countries are becoming increasingly concerned by major threats to European… Read More »Plans to protect the forests of Europe

A Study of the origins and distribution of human populations used to be based on archaeological and fossil evidence. A number of techniques developed since the 1950s, however, have placed the study of these subjects on a sounder and more objective footing. The best information on early population movements is now being obtained… Read More »Population movements and genetics

When we think of intelligent members of the animal kingdom, the creatures that spring immediately to mind are apes and monkeys. But in fact the social lives of some members of the insect kingdom are sufficiently complex to suggest more than a hint of intelligence. Among these, the world of the ant has… Read More »Ant Intelligence