The Conversation Weekly

At dawn on October 28, residents of Rio de Janeiro woke to the sound of gunfire. Battles continued throughout the day in the favelas of Alemão and Penha, as police mounted a huge operation targeting the Commando Vermelho, or the Red Command, one of Brazil’s largest organised criminal gangs. In the days that followed, a

In the 16th century, witches and demons weren’t just for Halloween. People were terrified and preoccupied with them – even kings. In 1590, James VI of Scotland – who was later also crowned James I of England – travelled by sea to Denmark to wed a Danish princess, Anne. On the return journey, the fleet was hit by a terr

One American company called Strategy owns more than 3% of all bitcoin in existence. In August 2020, its executive chairman, Michael Saylor, pioneered a new business model where publicly listed companies buy cryptocurrency assets to hold on their balance sheet. More than 100 other public companies have since followed Sa

As one of the birthplaces of the industrial revolution, the River Mersey in northern England is no stranger to pollution flowing into its waters. Now it's got a new problem: monitoring shows the amount of forever chemicals, also known as PFAS, entering the Mersey catchment area is among some of the highest in the world

Back in the 1980s, when Shimon Sakaguchi was a young researcher in immunology, he found it difficult to get his research funded. Now, his pioneering work which explains how our immune system knows when and what to attack, has won him a Nobel prize. Sakaguchi, along with American researchers Mary Brunkow and Fred Ramsde

As Donald Trump gives oxygen to unproven theories about what might be behind a recent rise in autism cases, experts repeatedly point to the changing nature of how autism is diagnosed and viewed. A key moment in the history of autism diagnosis was the publication in 1994 of a new version of the Diagnostic and Statistica