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The promise to protect more of the natural world has become one of the defining environmental goals of this decade. But recent reporting suggests that turning that ambition into reality remains far more difficult than the slogan implies. Across oceans, islands and national park systems, the politics of conservation is now colliding with familiar obstacles: weak funding, competing industries and the sheer speed of ecological decline. The result is a growing gap between what governments promise for nature and what they are prepared to enforce. In Australia, that tension is visible at sea. The Guardian reported on 17 March that…

For years, robotics has swung between overpromise and disappointment. Humanoid machines made headlines, warehouse automation advanced in narrow ways, and investors repeatedly chased the dream of general-purpose robots without proving where the real business would be. That pattern may be starting to change. Recent reporting suggests innovation in robotics is becoming more practical, more specialised and more closely tied to specific industrial settings rather than futuristic demonstrations. Reuters reported on 13 March that Travis Kalanick has launched Atoms, a new robotics venture focused on specialised industrial tasks in food, mining and transport. Kalanick argued that task-specific systems are more likely…

For much of the clean-energy transition, batteries were treated as a supporting technology — useful for electric cars, useful for short-term storage, but still too limited or too expensive to transform the energy system on their own. That view is beginning to change. Recent reporting suggests the battery industry is moving into a more ambitious phase, one focused not only on vehicles but on reshaping how electricity is generated, stored and delivered. China’s growing push into sodium batteries is one sign of that shift, while the expanding market for grid-scale storage is another. Reuters reported on 16 March that Chinese…

One of the most persistent promises of technological progress has been that smarter tools would free people from drudgery and create more time for life beyond labour. That promise is returning in the age of artificial intelligence, but in a far more contested form. Recent reporting suggests AI is indeed transforming work, though less as a clean liberation from repetitive tasks than as a struggle over who benefits from rising productivity and who absorbs the disruption. The tension is increasingly visible in the labour market. The Guardian argued this week that AI-related layoffs are no longer hypothetical and that the…

For years, public debate about misinformation focused on false headlines, manipulated claims and bad actors spreading propaganda online. That now feels like an older, simpler problem. The deeper challenge emerging in 2026 is not just that falsehood travels quickly, but that the very boundary between authentic and artificial material is becoming harder for ordinary people to recognise. Recent reporting and analysis suggest the crisis of truth is shifting from one of content moderation to one of shared perception. The change is being driven in part by the spread of AI-generated imagery during moments of conflict and political tension. The Guardian…

History is not only being discovered in new excavations. It is also being argued over — in museums, heritage policy and the treatment of human remains. Recent debate in Britain has shown how the historical record is increasingly shaped not just by what survives from the past, but by who gets to care for it, display it and interpret it in the present. A letter published by The Guardian on 13 March brought renewed attention to the ethics of holding and exhibiting human remains in museums, especially remains taken from overseas during earlier eras of empire and collecting. The authors…

History often survives in grand ruins, imperial inscriptions and celebrated monuments. But sometimes it reappears in a far stranger form. A recent archaeological discovery in Turkey has offered exactly that: a small Roman-era glass vial containing traces of human excrement, which researchers say may be the first physical evidence for a medical practice previously known only from ancient texts. Reuters reported on 13 March that the 1,900-year-old vial was found in Bergama, the site of ancient Pergamon, one of the Roman world’s major centres of medicine. Archaeologists believe it may have held perfume or an elixir, but laboratory analysis detected…

Antimicrobial resistance has long been described as a slow-burning health threat. That description is becoming harder to sustain. Recent reporting suggests the issue is escalating from a technical concern for specialists into a broader political and environmental emergency, shaped by weak investment, pollution and the lack of a coordinated global response. The clearest problem is economic. The Guardian reported on 12 March that experts are calling for coordinated G7 investment in new antibiotics because the market does not reward their development properly. Antibiotics are meant to be used sparingly to slow resistance, but that very restraint makes them less commercially…

Public-health officials are facing a problem that many had hoped belonged to the past: the return of vaccine-preventable disease as immunisation rates weaken and public trust becomes more fragile. Recent reporting suggests the issue is no longer abstract. It is now visible in local outbreaks, anxious health systems and sharper political arguments over what vaccination policy should look like. Reuters reported on 18 March that childhood vaccination rates in Michigan fell sharply during the first year of the Trump administration, which it linked to the influence of vaccine-sceptic Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The data was presented as an…

For years, the city of the future was imagined as a cleaner, smarter and more connected place — full of sensors, electric transport and seamless digital services. That vision is beginning to change. Increasingly, the real city of the future is being shaped by a harsher question: how can urban life function in a hotter, more volatile climate? Europe offers one of the clearest warnings. Reuters reported in February that the European Union is ill-prepared for worsening climate change, with independent advisers warning that the bloc needs to invest urgently to protect people and infrastructure from floods, wildfires, storms and…