Stephen Downes, Royal Holloway University of London
American composer Burt Bacharach, who has died at the age of 94, is arguably one the greatest songwriters of all time. With hits going back to the 1950s, Bacharach continued working until the age of 92.
Primrose Freestone, University of Leicester
For many centuries we have bathed in communal waters. Sometimes for cleanliness but more often for pleasure. Indeed, in ancient Greece, baths were taken in freshwater, or sometimes the sea – which was thought of as a sacred place dedicated to local gods and so was considered an act of worship.
Today, if you want to find a good moving company, you might ask your favourite search engine – Google, Bing, or DuckDuckGo perhaps – for some advice.
After wading past half a page of adverts, you get a load of links to articles on moving companies. You click on one of the links and finally read about how to pick a good ’un. But not for much longer.
Jenny Jenkins, Durham University
An extremely large earthquake has occurred in the southeast of Turkey, near the border with Syria. Data from seismometers which measure shaking of the ground caused by earthquake waves suggest this this event, in the early morning of February 6, was a magnitude 7.8 out of 10 on the moment magnitude scale. Seismic waves were picked up by sensors around the world (you can watch them ripple through Europe) including places as far away as the UK.
Rachael Medhurst, University of South Wales
You can tell a lot about someone from the car they drive. The data that many vehicles now collect can reveal the patterns of our daily lives and provide insights into our behaviour, actions and even our state of mind.
Howard Manly, The Conversation
As the father of Black history, Carter G. Woodson had a simple goal – to legitimize the study of African American history and culture.
To that end, in 1912, shortly after becoming the second African American after W.E.B. Du Bois to earn a Ph.D. at Harvard, Woodson founded the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History in 1915.
Blayne Haggart, Brock University
Of all the reactions elicited by ChatGPT, the chatbot from the American for-profit company OpenAI that produces grammatically correct responses to natural-language queries, few have matched those of educators and academics.
Jennifer Mathers, Aberystwyth University and Anna Kvit, UCL
Thousands of women have voluntarily joined Ukraine’s armed forces since 2014, when Russia’s occupation of Crimea and territories in eastern Ukraine began. Over the past nine years, the number of women serving in the Ukrainian military has more than doubled, with another wave of women joining after Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022.
Emma Beckett, University of Newcastle
Many of us want (or should I say need?) our morning coffee to give us our “get up and go”. Altogether, the people of the world drink more than two billion cups of coffee each day.
You might think coffee gives you the energy to get through the morning or the day – but coffee might not be giving you as much as you think.
Dominic Lees, University of Reading
ITVX’s Deep Fake Neighbour Wars is the breakthrough in television’s use of artificial intelligence that experts in the cultural use of deepfakes like myself have been waiting for.
