Do you combine passion with action to create concrete results in nature conservation? Future For Nature are looking to fund a standout young conservationist who can demonstrate passion, commitment, vision and integrity in impactful conservation work they have led so they can continue to fund their individual conservation work. If that sounds like you, apply now for your opportunity to win funding to grow your conservation career.
Good and bizarre news stories from around the world
If you miss the days when the news told you what had happened in the world, before it became an instrument of unending panic, you'll enjoy these good news stories from around the world of the wonderful, the hopeful, and the optimistic, and my absolute favourite - the downright bizarre.
Deafness, silence, and communication before modern education
For centuries, Deaf people were misunderstood by hearing society. The Socratic tradition became seen as proof of intelligence, reason, morality, and even humanity; those without hearing, and therefore without speech, itself. Those who could not hear or speak were frequently excluded from education, religion, legal rights, and public life. Yet Deaf people were never silent. Long before formal Deaf schools existed, Deaf communities developed sophisticated ways of communicating through gesture, visual language, fingerspelling, facial expression, and shared sign systems. For centuries, these manual languages were systematically suppressed by a speaking society intolerant of difference, but were maintained in secret until the Deaf resistance won the right to sign and communicate freely again.
Since the successful cyberattack on the British Library in 2023, there has been no easy way to search for UK doctoral theses. Until now. The British Library has been working hard to restore access to its collections, including procuring a secure new platform and uploading the descriptions of UK theses into it. While the new platform does not offer digital copies of theses for download as the old platform did, it does host descriptions for 640,000 theses to date and provides links from many of these records to the institutional repositories of their awarding universities, from which you may be able to obtain copies of the full text.
Better browsing - getting the most from Edge and Chrome
The default browsing experience offered by modern browsers isn't for everyone. Bright, cluttered screens with unnecessary images and adverts can make web content unreadable for many people. Happily, for many websites, you can customise the look and feel with a couple of mouse clicks in modern browsers.
Both Microsoft Edge and Google Chrome come bundled with features and free downloadable extensions that can turn your web browser into a screen reader, strip visually cluttered webpages back to simple text in your preferred font and colour scheme, and help you navigate and speed read pages with ease, and that's without using their built-in AI to translate, summarise or simplify page content.
