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If you regularly wake at 3am and immediately start wondering what’s wrong with you, the answer is probably: not very much. Waking in the night is actually a normal part of sleep.
As sleep expert Talar Moukhtarian explains, the real problem is often what happens next because at 3am, even fairly ordinary worries can suddenly feel enormous, mainly because there is nothing else around to drown them out.
Caffeine, alcohol, screens, irregular routines and an overheated bedroom can all make night waking more likely. But a few small changes can help.
Elsewhere, medical microbiologist Manal Mohammed explores how climate-driven drought may be helping antibiotic resistance spread in soil, opening up a worrying environmental front in a crisis usually blamed on medicine and farming.
And Matthew Mokhefi-Ashton revisits All the President’s Men 50 years on. He argues that this classic political thriller now looks less like a portrait of modern journalism than an elegy for a slower, more trusted press culture that was already beginning to disappear.
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Katie Edwards
Commissioning Editor, Health + Medicine
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tigercat_lpg/Shutterstock
Talar Moukhtarian, University of Warwick
Brief awakenings are a normal part of sleep, but stress, alcohol, caffeine and irregular routines can make them harder to recover from.
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Piyaset/Shutterstock.com
Manal Mohammed, University of Westminster
New research suggests drought-parched soil turbocharges antibiotic resistance in nature, and with UK summers getting drier, that’s a growing problem.
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Dustin Hoffman as Carl Bernstein and Robert Redford as Bob Woodward in All The President’s Men.
ScreenProd / Alamy
Matthew Mokhefi-Ashton, Nottingham Trent University
In sharp contrast to today, the film reveals a time when the majority of Americans trusted what they read in the press.
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World
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Bamo Nouri, City St George's, University of London; Inderjeet Parmar, City St George's, University of London
For decades, the US has been unequivocal in its support for Israel.
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Tom Harper, University of East London
An episode where a China-linked vessel appeared to challenge the blockade shows how explosive this situation could be.
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Matt Barlow, University of Glasgow; Benjamin Hunter, University of Glasgow
What about the moral case for helping poorer countries with their development?
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Politics + Society
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Robert Lawson, Birmingham City University
‘Manosphere’ influencers claim to be able to increase their followers’ value – for a fee.
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Arts + Culture
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Tamara Friedrich, Warwick Business School, University of Warwick
One of the biggest myths of creativity is that constraints limit our imagination.
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Andrew Mycock, University of Leeds
Having my surname is a daily trial, eliciting a range of responses from suppressed to open laughter and unsolicited comments.
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Environment
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Neil Reid, Queen's University Belfast
When sediment is stirred up, the effects ripple through the ecosystem.
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Juan Diego Rodriguez-Blanco, Trinity College Dublin
Under the right conditions, 1g of oyster shells can capture and lock away up to around 1.5g of the rare earth elements present dissolved in the surrounding water.
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Science + Technology
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Jacqueline Boyd, Nottingham Trent University
Animals won’t always express pain in the way we expect.
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Christopher R. Hill, University of South Wales; Jonathan Hogg, University of Liverpool
Communities and servicemen have long argued they were harmed by fallout from above-ground nuclear weapons tests – but the UK government has always denied this.
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Salma Al Arefi, University of Leeds
Switching to solar power could help save money, but it is not just about installing panels.
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2 March - 30 September 2026
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3 March - 15 May 2026
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Glasgow
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14 - 30 April 2026
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Colchester, Essex
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