If someone had told me five years ago that a cancer treatment could not only attack tumours but make them less painful at the same time, I would have raised an eyebrow so high it might’ve reached my hairline.
Yet here we are – that’s exactly the exciting twist scientists are reporting in the latest bone cancer research.
“It’s not just me that’s saying it, the fact is that Sykes-Picot has failed, it’s over,” declared Massoud Barzani in a 2016 BBC interview. As president of Iraq’s Kurdistan Region and a leader of the world’s largest stateless nation, Barzani’s condemnation reflects more than Kurdish grievance. Signed in 1916 by Britain and France, the Sykes-Picot Agreement symbolises the imperial imposition of borders that divided previously fluid populations and produced states with weak national identity and legitimacy. While only one of several wartime agreements, it has come to represent a broader dissatisfaction with externally imposed statehood in the Middle East and the enduring instability those borders helped create.
It always happens at the worst possible moment. A silent exam hall. A quiet bedroom at night. A library so still it feels like noise would be illegal. And then – out of nowhere – a high-pitched ringing appears, as if the brain has decided to test a fire alarm that no one installed. The question is simple, slightly annoying, and surprisingly fascinating: why do our ears ring when everything is quiet?
The bowel – more formally known as the gastrointestinal (GI) tract is one of the modest heroes of human biology. Its job is deceptively simple: extract nutrients and minerals from the food we eat, then efficiently dispose of the leftovers. But in reality, it’s a finely tuned system of muscular tubes working around the clock to keep us alive, energised, and (mostly) comfortable.
You might wonder why Greenland, a territory with a population of less than 60,000, has suddenly dominated news headlines. And it is not an environmental call for help despite the fact that ice sheets are shrinking. Rather, its geographical positioning and large mineral reserves have garnered much attention from influential political leaders worldwide, and in particular from US President Donald Trump.
