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Australia’s black wattle tree (Acacia mearnsii) has spread across South Africa, taking over millions of hectares of land and pushing indigenous plants aside. Economist Saul Ngarava researches agriculture and the connection between water, energy, food, social justice and land reform. He was part of a team who surveyed 1,184 homes…

How do you build 1.5 million new homes in five years without destroying nature? Housing is unaffordable for most people, so the UK government plans to build as many homes as possible, as soon as possible. Assuming this brings house prices down (which isn’t a given), how can it be…

Chemistry in the first 50 million to 100 million years after the Big Bang may have been more active than we expected.

Could an ocean – likely needed to sustain life – even survive on a planet orbiting close to a dead star?

“We are going to get all our oil and gas out of the North Sea”, Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch said recently. Her promise to “maximise extraction” sets up a clash between political ambitions, economic reality and geological limits.

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Summer 2025 was the UK’s hottest on record, the Met Office announced this week. The news somehow felt both inevitable and surprising. There may have been four separate heatwaves, but for many this summer felt pretty normal.

Standing before the Inquisition in Lisbon, Portugal in 1556, Mónica Fernandes, a woman from the coast of modern-day Ghana, was accused of casting malevolent spells and making pacts with demons. Her crime? Seeking a traditional Akan remedy for a simple cat bite.

After 85 years of continuous publication, Meanjin, Australia’s second-oldest literary journal, is closing. Editor Esther Anatolitis and deputy editor Eli McLean have been made redundant and the final issue will appear in December. Melbourne University Publishing (MUP), which has housed the magazine since 2007, has cited “purely financial grounds” for…

Today, NASA recovers over 90% of the water used in space.

NASA plans to prioritize the fission reactor as power necessary to extract and refine lunar resources.