If you’re in Britain and you’ve found this summer uncomfortably hot and dry, imagine how an oak tree feels. They’re supposed to use hundreds of litres of water a day. How about the insects that can’t reproduce because there are no puddles? Or the birds that have less to eat because there are fewer insects. And so on.
With much of the UK enduring its driest ever summer, we asked botanist Paul Ashton of Edge Hill University how the wildlife is faring. Some species are remarkably good at coping with conditions they never evolved in, he says, while others are struggling. And the worst effects may not even become apparent until next year.
A Salmonella outbreak in the UK has infected at least 200 people and killed one. Medical microbiologist Manal Mohammed explains why some become seriously ill while others don’t.
I knew that our depictions of many dinosaur species are essentially educated guesses based on very few fossils. I didn’t realise that was the case for early human relatives too. Sally Christine Reynolds, a hominin paleoecologist at Bournemouth University, looks at why we should be sceptical of reports of a super-tall human subspecies.
