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Stacy Parker, Kyiv (2025)

06/09/2023

On Aug. 20, Puerto Rico-based photographer Frankie Lucena was taking pictures of a passing storm system that would soon evolve into the ongoing Hurricane Franklin, when a rare phenomenon of nature flashed before his eyes: Several enormous bolts of lightning, blasting straight upward out of a storm cloud and stopping just below the edge of space.

Upward-moving lightning bolts like these are known as gigantic jets. They are the rarest and most powerful type of lightning, occurring as few as 1,000 times a year and packing more than 50 times the power of a typical lightning bolt. The upside-down bolts can climb more than 50 miles (80 kilometers) above Earth's surface, touching the bottom of the ionosphere, the vast layer of electrically charged particles where the top of Earth's atmosphere meets the bottom of outer space. (Space technically begins at 62 miles, or 100 km, above sea level, while the ionosphere stretches from roughly 50 to 400 miles, or 80 to 640 km, above sea level.)

23/08/2023

Located in the centre of New Zealand's North Island, the town of Taupo sits sublimely in the shadow of the snow-capped peaks of Tongariro National Park. Fittingly, this 40,000-person lakeside town has recently become one of New Zealand's most popular tourist destinations, as hikers, trout fishers, water sports enthusiasts and adrenaline junkies have started descending upon it.

The namesake of this tidy town is the Singapore-sized lake that kisses its western border. Stretching 623sq km wide and 160m deep with several magma chambers submerged at its base, Lake Taupo isn't only Australasia’s largest lake; it's also an incredibly active geothermal hotspot. Every summer, tourists flock to bathe in its bubbling hot springs and sail through its emerald-green waters. Yet, the lake is the crater of a giant super volcano, and within its depths lies the unsettling history of this picturesque marvel.

21/07/2023

To combat this, Palau needed a way to educate travellers and have them earn the privilege of being a trusted friend, said resident Laura Clarke, who co-founded the Palau Legacy Project in 2020 with Palauan Jennifer Koskelin-Gibbons to spearhead these preservation initiatives. With Clarke's background in marketing and advertising, and Koskelin-Gibbons' work in national preservation efforts, Ol'au Palau was born.

"Ol'au is an informal way for us to call out to someone we know such as a friend or family to grab their attention," explained Koskelin-Gibbons. "We may use it to call you to join in on a barbecue, or if we're on a beach and you are coming by on your boat, I can call out to invite you over to join in on our family fun."

12/07/2023

Some employers look to hire and continually turn over junior employees – sometimes harming young workers’ careers before they’ve even begun.

Sarah had always dreamed of working in the fashion industry. Aged 21, she decided to follow her dream, move to London and find a career she loved. “Like many young people, my passion was fashion,” she says. “But the reality wasn’t quite so glamorous.”

After working for less than a year in fashion retail, Sarah secured an e-commerce assistant role in the head office of a global luxury brand. In both jobs, she was surrounded by like-minded twenty-somethings, all of whom wanted to succeed in the fashion world. “It’s like any creative industry: young people always see it as cool to work in,” she says. “And the perks are great, even in sales: we’d get heavily discounted items all the time.”

However, Sarah adds that there was always a high office turnover – particularly among low-level staff. “Young employees would quit all the time: an 18-year-old intern only lasted a week after realising her job was essentially unpaid manual labour, and long hours just carrying and packing away clothing returned from shoots. The interns who lasted months would eventually quit from burnout. There was just a steady churn of young, impressionable workers and nothing was ever done about it – it just became a test of who had the thickest skin.”

While Sarah lasted in her job for two years, the excitement of working in fashion soon gave way to frustration and tedium: “Admin tasks with long hours and bad pay.” Without management offering her a clear career trajectory or a sense of progress, she says her job eventually ground her down – she quit. “Both management and employees knew it was a competitive workplace to be at – that your job would always be in high demand. If you left, you’d be replaced with another young worker excited to be there.”

Experts say there are many employers that specifically hire new graduates looking to pursue their passions – often in competitive, even ‘glamourous’ careers. In some cases, this can be great for these workers, who are looking for a way into an industry of their dreams. Sometimes, however, young employees can get ground down in low-paying, demanding roles, as employers know that vacancies will always be hotly desired. These situations can leave early-career workers, hoping to establish themselves, making them vulnerable to burnout or disillusionment right at the start of their careers.

07/07/2023

Five simple steps helped Australia bring down high skin cancer rates – and could help others stay safe in the sun.

When it comes to lowering the risk of developing skin cancer, childhood and adolescence are critical periods. The amount of sun exposure a person has in the first 20 years of their life determines to a substantial degree the likelihood of developing skin cancer, research shows. Just one case of blistering sunburn as a child or teenager has been found to double the risk of developing melanoma, which is the most serious form of skin cancer, later in life.

Australia has one of the highest rates of skin cancer in the world, with a prevalence roughly double that of the UK and United States, due to its intense sun. In fact, melanoma is the most common cancer for Australians aged 20 to 39, and is so common that it has come to be known as Australia's "national cancer" (in the US, it is the third most common cancer in that age group). But in response to that threat, the country has also developed some of the world's most effective measures for skin cancer prevention – which hold powerful lessons for other countries dealing with ever-hotter summers.

Since early sun protection can make such a big difference, one key message from Australian experts is for families to be aware of the danger of ultraviolet (UV) radiation from the Sun, and take a few simple protective steps.

"The UV sort of 'zaps' the DNA in healthy cells," says Justine Osborne, programme manager at Cancer Council Victoria in southeastern Australia. "The cells will repair themselves when the UV exposure disappears, but if you're constantly hitting them with UV there's no chance for them to repair. That is when skin cancer develops." Globally, skin cancer was diagnosed in 6.7 million people in 2019, and it killed 118,000.

04/07/2023

Despite being the world's best-known and most architecturally sophisticated ancient stone circle, archaeologists still don't know who built Stonehenge or what it was used for. Some theories suggest it was used as a burial site, a place of healing or even a celestial calendar, given that the gaps in the outer stone ring are in perfect alignment with the summer and winter solstice. Yet as the decades pass, this massive monument built on a grassy hill in the Wiltshire countryside remains a mystery.

"We're gradually finding out more and more about it, but some things we just don't think we'll ever be able to find out. We have no way of understanding why people started to build it, and the reason that they continued to work on it may well have changed over the hundreds of years it took to complete," said Susan Martindale, volunteer manager for English Heritage, the charitable trust that manages Stonehenge.

Thanks to Cox's recent studies, however, we now know a fascinating detail about one of the world's most enigmatic sites: it once acted as a giant echo chamber, amplifying sounds made inside the circle to those standing within, but shielding noise from those standing outside the circle. This finding has led some to ponder whether the monument was actually constructed as a ritual site for a small and elite group.

This breakthrough is a decade in the making. While researching "the sonic wonders of the world" 10 years ago, Cox began to ponder whether studying the acoustical properties of Stonehenge may help uncover some of its secrets. "I realised there was a technique in acoustics that had never been applied to prehistoric sites before, and that was acoustic scale modelling," he said. "I'm the first to make a scale model of Stonehenge or any prehistoric stone site."

29/06/2023

Why did technologies come first, and then total bipedalism? What is the cause and what is the consequence? Remembering of course that the bipedal gait costs us all of those expensive imperfections listed above, it must have been worth it right from the start, as otherwise our more arboreal counterparts would have prevailed.

Other experts in human evolution maintain that the initial push toward bipedalism was linked to thermoregulation. When species that live in zones bordering between forest and grassland explore open sunny areas with no shade, they have a serious problem regarding the maintenance of body temperature within certain physiological limits, and this applies particularly to the brain, which does not tolerate overheating well. Savanna quadrupeds have developed appropriate countermeasures that are lacking in hominins like us. The solution adopted by our tribe appears to have been the reduction of surface area exposed to the sun to ensure that our body temperature was kept under control. At the same time, our ancestors may have gradually lost their fur and developed sweat glands. If this is the case, a thermoregulatory adaptation could then have triggered the cascade of advantageous uses (flexible locomotion and the liberation of the upper limbs, for example) that made bipedalism a good strategy despite its costs.

It is also likely that, due to these compromises, and despite its undoubted merits, bipedalism evolved slowly and timidly over a period of four million years, following several failed attempts and unsuccessful experiments.

One such example is Ardipithecus, which was a forest biped that walked along branches. For two-thirds of the natural history of hominins (six to two million years ago), our ancestors, cousins, and relatives rightly preferred a hybrid solution: an arboreal life so they could protect themselves from predators (with persistent ancient traits such as curved fingers and long arms) and the prudent bipedal exploration of open glades in search of food. Lucy lived in this way, and died when she fell out of a tree. This was by far the most intelligent strategy at the time for those that were yet to become brave hunters, but were delicious prey for felines and giant eagles. Today, baboons and many other primates do the same. So let us forget the story of human evolution that begins with the heroic "descent from the trees" to conquer the savanna on foot. Only in the early days of the genus Homo did we become complete bipeds.

28/06/2023

A new international treaty aims to support protection of the high seas – what will this mean for deep-sea mining?

On 5 March, the world reached what could well be a turning point for protection of the world's oceans.

With almost one in 10 species at risk of extinction, and the growing pressure from climate change, the treaty provides a framework for setting up protected areas in the high seas, sometimes known as international waters. It's been seen as crucial for supporting the aim to protect 30% of the oceans by the year 2030. At the moment, we protect just a little more than 1% of the high seas.

The treaty, known as the BBNJ (Marine Biodiversity of Areas Beyond National Jurisdiction), had been some 40 years in the making, culminating in fraught marathon negotiations that ran through the night. But now, "the ship has reached the shore", as Rena Lee, president of the Intergovernmental Conference on Marine Biodiversity of Areas Beyond National Jurisdiction, put it in her emotional conclusion to the talks.

The treaty extends not just to the water column but, at depths of more than 200m (656ft), to the seafloor itself. The treaty could help to protect the oceans from potential environmental damage caused by mining the seabed for metals such as cobalt, manganese and nickel.

So what do these momentous developments for the ocean mean for the seafloor?

Stacy Parker

06/09/2023

23/08/2023

21/07/2023

12/07/2023

07/07/2023

04/07/2023

29/06/2023

28/06/2023

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