This
week you’ll notice a few changes to our email as we’ve adopted
a style that is more like the main newsletters of our other
editions. We hope you keep enjoying our European-focused
content as we cover more and more European research.
As
we prepared this email, news was breaking of far-right leader
Geert Wilders apparent win in the Dutch election. Is this
another sign of the power of nostalgia in European politics?
Stefan Müller of University College Dublin and Sven-Oliver
Proksch of the University of Cologne have
been studying how parties appeal to the past.
Speaking
of the past, British director Ridley Scott is no stranger to
historical films. More than two decades ago he released
Gladiator, which won the Oscar for best picture. But just
because Scott has a preference for stories from the past
doesn’t mean he clings rigidly to historical evidence. His new
film, which opens this week in much of Europe, aims for a
monumental feat: to cover the life and work of Napoleon
Bonaparte in two and a half hours. Critics have already jumped
on the film, pointing out its historical errors. Scott’s
response? To tell them to get lost.
We
wanted to find out which of the details Scott has chosen to
include might not be entirely true. Joan Tumblety, from the
University of Southampton in the UK, sorts
fact from fiction – and explains the sources of the
stories we’ve been told about Napoleon.
Misinformation
is not only found in films, which after all have a licence to
fictionalise. Today, social media is full of fake news. New
research by Carlos Diaz Ruiz, of the Hanken School of
Economics, shows that the
presence of misleading information is now essentially a
feature of the business model rather than a bug.
In
a recent newsletter, we talked about fewer insects ending up
squashed on our car windscreens these days as a sign of
troubling species loss. Today we focus specifically on the
declining bee population and how to solve it. A
group of scientists wants to arm bees with robots. In one
of their projects, they will turn a beehive into a smart home.
Another will be devoted to pampering the queen bee. Both
demonstrate the surprising and exciting directions science can
take when faced with an urgent and vexing problem.
Please,
feel free to browse around our other articles, including
research in politics looking at why the radical
left hasn't been able to replicate the successes of
Wilders and the rest of the radical right in Europe ... and
Russian rap. |