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From the discovery of gravity to the first mission to defend Earth from an asteroid, here are the most important physics experiments that changed the world.

Today the perilous state of the environment is often in the news. Many stories describe how Earth is being damaged by human beings and discuss ways to prevent this.

Political operatives on the far right have long spoken about their ambition to shift the “Overton window”. The aim is to “mainstream” ideas long considered unthinkable, through gradual, step-by-step radicalisation and repetition – especially on hot-button issues such as immigration, sexuality, race and identity.

The UK government has announced that it will transfer sovereignty of a remote cluster of islands in the Indian Ocean to Mauritius. The final treaty outlining the transfer of the Chagos Islands, where there is a significant US military base, is expected to be announced in the coming months.

Twenty years ago, the television show “The O.C.” invented the word “Chrismukkah.” Main character Seth Cohen, played by Adam Brody, described his interfaith family’s December tradition of “eight days of presents followed by one day of lots of presents.”

Across the United States, the second Monday of October is increasingly becoming known as Indigenous Peoples Day. In the push to rename Columbus Day, Christopher Columbus himself has become a metaphor for the evils of early colonial empires, and rightly so.

Out of 225 people awarded the Nobel Prize in physics, only five have been women. This is a very small number, and certainly smaller than 50% – the percent of women in the human population.

And we're still not sure why it happens.

Why would early 20th-century Australian women travel across the Pacific to the United States? And if they left, why wouldn’t they go to England, the “mother country”, where there was a proper cup of tea? The US was no feminist utopia. It did not give federal voting rights to women…