HUGH LANNING says there is no path to peace without dismantling Israel’s control over Palestinian land, lives and resources

TODAY, we know Antarctica as a snow-dominated landscape, a continent covered with a permanent glacial ice-sheet. However, 41 million years ago, Antarctica looked very different: it was carpeted with lush forests that rang with birdsong with distant snow-capped mountains. That began to change 31 million years ago, as global temperatures dropped.
The transition is described by the palaeobiologist Thomas Halliday in his book Otherlands (2022). Soon (in geological terms, that is) the ice descended from Antarctica’s mountaintops, “spreading across the entire continent and forcing out almost all plants and animals.” Of Antarctica’s range of animals, only the emperor penguins were able to adapt at the right pace and retain their habitat on what became Earth’s most forbidding continent.
Antarctica’s northernmost point is the Antarctic Peninsula. Unlike the rest of Antarctica it is not completely icebound: only 80 per cent is currently covered by ice. But the remaining 20 per cent is usually rocky. Now, new research published this week in Nature Geoscience confirms that climate change is affecting Antarctica’s plant life.

High pressures squeeze and crush, but low pressures damage too. Losing the atom-level buzz that keeps us held safe in the balance of internal and external pressure releases dangerous storms, disorientation and pain, write ROX MIDDLETON, LIAM SHAW and MIRIAM GAUNTLETT

What’s behind the stubborn gender gap in Stem disciplines ask ROX MIDDLETON, LIAM SHAW and MIRIAM GAUNTLETT in their column Science and Society

While politicians condemned fascist bombing of Spanish civilians in 1937, they ignored identical RAF tactics across the colonies. Today’s aerial warfare continues this pattern of applying different moral standards based on geography and race, write ROX MIDDLETON, LIAM SHAW and MIRIAM GAUNTLETT

The distinction between domestic and military drones is more theoretical than practical, write ROX MIDDLETON, LIAM SHAW and MIRIAM GAUNTLETT