How Saint Augustine shaped the Pope's worldview

The Conversation|Published

Saint Augustine, the African thinker who inspired Pope Leo XIV

The overlooked trade in Africa’s wild birds

The Conversation|Published

Global trade in wild birds is poorly monitored – the risks to wildlife, ecosystems and human health

Cities as living memory: the struggle between old and new

The Conversation|Published

Designing cities: should we build from scratch or keep history alive?

African research exposes genetic risks in kidney disease crisis

The Conversation|Published

African scientists identify new genetic links in kidney disease breakthrough

Five tips to make your memory work more effectively

The Conversation|Published

The three stages of memory and how to use them better

Fake QR codes used in scams

The Conversation|Published

Fake QR codes make for easy scams – be careful what you scan out there

Should wildlife parks be fenced?

The Conversation|Published

Fencing the wild: Impacts on animals, people, and landscapes

AI fruit dramas take over TikTok

The Conversation|Published

Unethical brain rot: why are millions watching AI fruits have affairs on TikTok?

Does AI mean more uni students are plagiarising their work?

The Conversation|Published

Study examines whether plagiarism rates are truly climbing because of AI

Ants now the target of wildlife smugglers

The Conversation|Published

Illegal trade expands beyond big game to insects and ants

Trump risks falling in to the ‘asymmetric resolve’ trap in Iran − just as presidents before him did elsewhere

The Conversation|Published

This occurs when a stronger power with less determination to fight starts a military conflict with a far weaker state that has near boundless determination to prevail. ...

Iraq war’s aftermath was a disaster for the US – the Iran war is headed in the same direction

The Conversation|Published

The country the US spent $2 trillion and 4,488 American lives to remake is, by any reasonable measure, within the sphere of Iran’s influence.

Cuba has survived years of US embargoes. Will Trump break it now?

The Conversation|Published

Cuba is quickly running out of oil, creating a dire political and economic crisis for the island’s 11 million residents.

Why are new tea towels worse at drying dishes than older ones?

The Conversation|Published

There’s a peculiar ritual in many kitchens: reaching past the crisp, pristine tea towel hanging on the oven door to grab the threadbare, slightly greying one shoved ...

Winter Olympic security tightens as US-European tensions grow

The Conversation|Published

The 2024 Paris games set new benchmarks for security at a mega-event, and now the presence of American security officials in Milan Cortina threatens to darken this ...

China’s new condom tax will prove no effective barrier to country’s declining fertility rate

The Conversation|Published

China is now among the many Asian countries struggling with anemic fertility rates. In an attempt to double the country’s rate of 1.0 children per woman, Beijing ...

Getting into university is only the first hurdle for students from rural South Africa. Here’s what comes next

The Conversation|Published

A substantial proportion of these new students come from economically disadvantaged backgrounds. The National Student Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS) is often the only ...

The mad artistic genius doesn’t stand up to scientific scrutiny

The Conversation|Published

Vincent van Gogh sliced off his ear with a knife during a psychotic episode. Ballet dancer Vaslav Nijinsky developed schizophrenia and spent the last 30 years of ...

Iran can’t afford to shut down the internet forever

The Conversation|Published

Global internet monitor Netblocks estimates internet shutdowns cost the Iranian economy more than $37 million a day.

Military force will backfire for Washington

The Conversation|Published

These protests are civic and rooted in social grievances. US military strikes would allow the Iranian state to recast a diverse domestic movement as a foreign-backed ...

Can Venezuela’s civil-military alliance hold? If it breaks, armed groups will be drawn into messy split

The Conversation|Published

In Venezuela the situation is far from stable. Rodríguez represents just one of multiple and competing interests within a Venezuela elite composed of a precarious ...

The price of going home: Christmas boxes and the final return from South Africa to Zimbabwe

The Conversation|Published

Amid the festive return lies a quieter and more solemn south-north movement – that of Zimbabwean migrants who have passed away and are taking their final journey ...

Hustle, muscle and grift: how the manosphere has grown into a money-making machine

The Conversation|Published

The manosphere is big business today. Once a niche network lurking on the margins of the internet, this diverse community of male supremacist cultures has grown ...

From violence to sexism, the manosphere is doing real-world harm

The Conversation|Published

Broadly, the manosphere is centred on anti-feminist, misogynistic and anti-gender equity ideas and beliefs.

Do you speak cat? Take the quiz

The Conversation|Published

While often miscast as mysterious or hard to understand, cats are actually excellent communicators.