Around 13,000 years ago, the world suddenly plunged into a cold snap. Some places cooled by up to 10°C in just a few decades. Our ancestors must have wondered what was going on.

Now, researchers from Southampton, Royal Holloway and UCL have found evidence that this abrupt climate change pushed the Gulf Stream further north, away from Europe. This matters because scientists were already worried that melting ice sheets could cause key Atlantic currents to collapse this century. It’s one of climate science’s scariest scenarios, and these new findings suggest it has happened before.

The war in Ukraine has now gone on for longer than the first world war. Frank Ledwidge, a military strategy lecturer at the University of Portsmouth, says there are many parallels: trench warfare, artillery dominance, and broadly comparable losses on each side. Above all, he argues, the two conflicts show wars of attrition are decided by industrial capacity and sheer manpower.

And after a lot of hype and build-up, the Fifa men’s World Cup has finally kicked off. We have a podcast with a US football historian who explains how America finally fell in love with soccer, and we look at why the tournament’s expensive ticket prices are a spectacular own goal.

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