Pelicans have resided in St James’s Park, London for 360 years. But the current flock have been a summer sensation due to the first hatching of chicks in the park’s history.

Pelican breeding in zoos is demanding for these birds, because the right environmental and social conditions need to come together. Rather than simply being comfortable, the birds need to encounter and respond to cues that stimulate courtship, nesting and reproduction.

This unusual nesting at St James’s Park provides an interesting example of how responding to biologically relevant stressors is a positive part of an animal’s life. Multiple factors are likely to have contributed to the pelican nesting. The heatwave, the flock’s dynamics and the compatibility of the individual birds seem to have created the right conditions for the first time in centuries.

In my recent research, I evaluated the importance of positive stress to zoo and aquarium animal welfare and found it is crucial for the wellbeing of captive animals.

Researchers call the beneficial response to a stressor, “eustress” – eu being the Greek prefix for good.

Courtship, reproduction and chick-rearing are all natural stressors. Priorities change, energetic and physical needs alter, and adults spend more time on offspring. This stress, however, is not necessarily bad. For example it can provide learning opportunities and enhance the animals’ behavioural repertoire.

As we learn more about what good animal welfare is, it is becoming clear that meaningful challenges which reflect an animal’s natural ecology help them have more autonomy over how they live. Eustress also helps animals cope better with averse situations.

Zoos do not need dramatic changes to provide these experiences. Small challenges can be built into everyday care: food can be hidden in different locations, or new scents and natural materials introduced. Animals can encounter new ground materials and surfaces (such as soil, bark and sand), changes to ropes or branches, or vegetation that naturally changes with the seasons. Enrichment can also encourage animals to explore different parts of their existing enclosure or use familiar resources in new ways.

Variation is key. If food always appears in the same place, at the same time and in the same way, there is little need for an animal to make decisions or adapt.

Many zoos already provide these opportunities. The next step is to think more deliberately about the challenge itself: is it meaningful, does the animal have a choice about engaging, and can it successfully overcome it? The aim is not to make life unnecessarily difficult but for animals encounter novelty or problems they can solve.

Rather than simply giving an animal what it needs to survive, we should provide opportunities for the animal to use their skills and make decisions.

What might this look like at your local zoo then? Meerkats (Suricata suricatta) are one example. Wild meerkats do not encounter their food neatly presented in a bowl. They need to sniff, dig and investigate their surroundings, while members of the mob keeps watch for danger.

Finding food is also a social challenge for these animals. Young meerkats learn about unfamiliar foods by observing and interacting with more experienced adults. Older meerkats help youngsters acquire important food handling skills.

Zoos can recreate elements of these challenges by scattering or hiding food, providing a sandy floor that encourages digging and creating elevated lookout points. Likewise, zoos can encourage social opportunities by providing complex feeding experiences where animals forage together. A 2021 study found that zoo meerkats retain the sentinel behaviour seen in their wild counterparts, suggesting that opportunities to perform these sort of activity remains important even when predators are absent.

The same principles apply underwater. Common clownfish (Amphiprion ocellaris) also encounter environmental and social challenges. On coral reefs, clownfish forage in a complex three-dimensional environment and depend on a host anemone for protection. They live in a strict social hierarchy. The largest fish is the dominant female, followed by the breeding male and then smaller, non-breeding fish. This social group is known as as a “queue”, as subordinate fish can move up through the hierarchy. In the aquarium, recreating this social group by housing a shoal of clownfish around the correct host anemone species allows for more choice and for fish to express a richer behavioural repertoire.

This brings us back to St James’s Park’s pelicans. Successful breeding has introduced perhaps the most natural challenge of all. Finding a partner and rearing young to maturity requires animals to change how they spend their time and respond to altered demands. When animals work for a reward, scientists call this contrafreeloading.

However, zoo animals can experience negative stress when a stressor is prolonged, overwhelming, unnatural or beyond their control. Examples can be excessive noise, incorrect climate conditions or being unable to retreat from something they find threatening.

The lesson for zoos is a good life should not necessarily be an entirely effortless one. Welfare is enhanced when animals can express behaviour their evolutionary history has equipped them to perform. Eustress is not giving every zoo animal the same kind of “challenging enrichment”. The challenge needs to make biological sense for that particular species.

Paul Rose works for WWT.

At the recent World Humanoid Robot Games 2026 in Beijing, robots sprinted, boxed, played football and tackled tasks inspired by factories, restaurants and emergency situations. The robot Tiangong Ultra even completed the 100 metres in 8.64 seconds, quicker than Usain Bolt’s 9.58-second world record.

But if we really want to know whether humanoid robots are ready for everyday life, a far less glamorous challenge may tell us more: doing the laundry. Can a robot take a crumpled T-shirt from a laundry basket, work out which way round it is, fold it neatly and recover when the sleeve slips from its hand?

No robot system can yet reliably handle the whole laundry process, from carrying a basket to the washing machine and sorting clothes for different programmes to taking them out, hanging them to dry, folding and ironing them. Even folding remains a challenge: robots need to cope with clothes of different shapes, sizes, materials and levels of creasing.

Running fast is difficult, of course. A humanoid has to coordinate many joints, keep its balance and generate powerful movements without falling over. The task itself, however, is fairly clear. The robot knows where to go, the track is predictable and the finish line does not suddenly change shape.

Laundry is a very different problem. A shirt may be inside out. One sleeve may be hidden underneath another garment. A pair of trousers may be twisted around a towel. Fabric is also soft and constantly changing shape. Pick up one corner of a T-shirt and the rest of it moves.

Humans deal with this without giving it much thought. We shake a shirt out, notice where the sleeves are, feel when the fabric slips and adjust our grip almost automatically. For a robot, every one of those little actions is a problem to solve. This is why an everyday chore can reveal more about robot intelligence than a spectacular athletic feat.

A useful household robot cannot simply replay the same movement again and again. It has to notice when reality is different from what it expected and adapt. That’s important to consider because humanoid robots are increasingly discussed as future helpers in homes and care settings, as well as factories and warehouses.

A factory production line can often be arranged so that parts arrive in predictable positions. A family home is not like that: clothes, toys and furniture move around constantly, while people, children and pets make the environment even less predictable.

Why one robot cannot simply copy another

There is another difficulty. Once one robot learns how to fold a shirt, it might seem obvious that we should simply transfer that skill to every other robot. Unfortunately, physical skills do not work like an app that can be installed on any machine.

Imagine a specialist laundry robot with rigid arms, overhead cameras and grippers designed specifically for fabric. A humanoid may have cameras in its head, five-fingered hands and different joints and balance constraints. The same movement could therefore produce a very different result.

A fixed robot arm can reach forward without worrying about falling over. A humanoid may have to move its hips, legs and feet just to keep itself stable while reaching across a table.

Sensors are important too. One robot may have sensitive touch sensors in its fingers. Another may rely mainly on cameras.

Some knowledge can still transfer. One robot can teach another something about what a shirt looks like, where its shoulders are likely to be, what a good fold looks like or how to recognise when a sleeve is trapped underneath. The receiving robot still has to work out how to carry out those ideas with its own hands, joints, cameras and body.

Research projects such as Open X-Embodiment are exploring exactly this problem by pooling experience from many different robots. The project has brought together more than one million real robot trajectories from 22 different robot types. The hope is that robots can learn useful patterns from one another rather than starting from zero every time.

What should count as progress?

The Humanoid Robot Games are valuable because they make robotics visible and show how quickly the technology is moving.

We should simply be careful about what those demonstrations prove. For robots intended to live and work alongside us, better questions might be: can the robot deal with an unfamiliar object? Can it notice that it has made a mistake and recover without human intervention? How long can it keep working before someone has to step in?

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Read more: Could robots help tackle loneliness? BBC’s Ann Droid raises questions about the future of care

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These measures are unlikely to produce viral videos. They are, however, much closer to the abilities that will determine whether humanoid robots become genuinely useful.

A robot that can run 100 metres faster than the human world record time is impressive. A robot that can take a messy basket of laundry, sort it, fold it and recognise when things have gone wrong may tell us far more about whether general purpose robot intelligence has really arrived.

The most important race for humanoid robots may not be against the clock. It may be against the laundry pile.

Wai-keung Fung does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

This summer you may have wondered why you are seeing so few insects squished on your car’s windscreen, compared to a road trip several years ago.

This is because insects are declining globally at an alarming rate.

One extensive citizen science survey looked at insects numbers over several years by looking at insect deaths on car number plates. They asked people to clean their number plates before a journey and then photograph it afterwards, and count the number of bugs killed.

The survey was conducted from 2021 to 2025. It found the number of flying insects sampled on vehicle number plates across the UK had fallen by 60% in five years. Analysis of records from more than 25,000 journeys showed an annual average decline in bug splats of 19% since the survey began in 2021.

Some people may look at these statistics and wonder why they should care. But the decline of insect life is a significant cause for concern. It’s also not just in the UK where we are seeing declines, but also across Europe and in our tropical rainforests, including some of the most biodiverse spots on the planet. Agricultural land is seeing some of the worst effects.

There’s an estimated 10 quintillion (10,000,000,000,000,000,000) insects alive on this planet, over a million described species, and estimates of millions more yet to be discovered. But we are losing insects far faster than other animals, and at an unprecedented rate.

A review in 2019 suggested 40% of insect species are thought to be threatened with extinction. Ants, bees and wasps (Hymenoptera) the butterflies and moths (Lepidoptera) and dung beetles are thought to be the most affected. More recent reviews show similar declining trends on a global scale.

Why are insects disappearing?

The reasons for losing our insects range from habitat loss, disease pollution and pesticides. Agriculture is a major concern as land is turned over to farming as it may remove existing habitats – essentially removing some insects homes – but agrichemicals such as pesticides, designed to kill agricultural pest outbreaks, are also negatively affecting those non target insects that we want.

Climate change is as a major concern, and one that potentially exacerbates other factors. When it’s hotter water availability becomes harder, plants become more stressed and food availability becomes tricky for insects. In the same way that humans struggle in the heat, this is the same case for other animals. Insects can try to cope with extremes in temperature by using water to cool, fanning their wings or simply going somewhere where it is less warm.

The summer of 2026 saw record temperatures and is expected to be the hottest year on record for the UK. Coupled with intense droughts, wildfires and a changing landscape, this is a tricky world for insects to navigate.

This changing climate is affecting whole communities of insects, where they live and what they do.

With places like the UK seeing a shift from its typical cooler climate to a more Mediterranean one, we are seeing species move from southern Europe to northern Europe. We also see insects changing their seasonal life-cycles, with effects on other species that are dependent upon them. They are even carrying diseases to new populations of humans or animals as climates become more amenable to certain species that may carry diseases or other pathogens .

This loss of biodiversity is often referred to as the sixth mass extinction, or the sixth time in history that we know of that we have lost such a vast number of species in rapid succession.

Why should we care?

Insects have evolved in large numbers because of the extent of what they do in the natural world.

They keep pests under control, they pollinate our plants by transporting pollen from one flower to another, recycle our waste by feeding on and shredding material and generally keep our planet in a good state.

American naturalist E.O Wilson said: “If insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos.”

However, insect populations can recover. Appreciating how fundamental they are is the first step in conserving and restoring what we are losing.

Alex Dittrich does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

I’ll admit it, I’m a Trekkie. I blame my mother.

It was on her insistence that my brother and I watched endless re-runs of the original Star Trek series, which is now celebrating its 60th anniversary. She took us further into the unknown with The Next Generation – and I’ve stayed loyal to the franchise ever since.

I’m also a chemist. Was my career choice inspired by Star Trek? Indubitably. What other television series has put the “central science” at the heart of so many episodes? These are four of my favourite storylines.

1. Crude chemistry

Arena (first screened in January 1967) was a formative episode from the original series, based on a 1944 short story by US science fiction writer Fredric Brown.

When Captain James T. Kirk is forced to battle the captain of a Gorn spacecraft on a rocky asteroid, he mixes up a crude form of gunpowder – having remembered a rough recipe and conveniently found piles of sulfur, potassium nitrate and coal to hand.

Despite the flaws in Kirk’s manufacturing process (and my disappointment as a child when I looked in vain for similar mineral deposits in the local park), this episode gave me my first taste of the possibilities offered by chemistry. Kirk uses the gunpowder to shoot tennis-ball sized diamonds at his reptilian-humanoid opponent, severely wounding it.

With the chemistry knowledge I have now, I’d warn the captain that his approach will most likely result in him losing a limb or two. But in the episode, Kirk prevails – and his subsequent decision to show mercy to his defeated opponent is rewarded by god-like Metron observers telling him: “You are still half-savage, but there is hope.”

2. Polywater puzzle

A curious substance known as “polywater” has featured in three different series of Star Trek. It is based on a compound proposed by Soviet scientists Nikolai Fedyakin and Boris Deryagin in the 1960s, with water molecules linked together to form repeating six-sided rings and a higher boiling point than regular water.

Any chemists reading this will hear alarm bells ringing. These properties would imply that polywater is more stable than the regular water in our rivers, oceans and blood, contradicting the laws of thermodynamics.

Even Richard Feynman, who won the 1965 Nobel prize in physics, waded into the theoretical polywaters to discredit its possible existence. Thankfully, the research was eventually debunked: polywater was shown to be nothing more than contaminated regular water.

Nevertheless, it remains immortalised on the small screen, having first appeared in episode four of the original Star Trek series, entitled The Naked Time (September 1966). Polywater causes both hilarity and more than a whiff of danger when the Enterprise crew are accidentally exposed to it during a mission.

The reason is its propensity to remove someone’s inhibitions after reaching their central nervous system. Its most significant achievement? Making the legendarily unemotional Mr Spock cry (after which, actor Leonard Nimoy’s fan mail is reported to have increased dramatically).

3. Heartfelt hydrocarbons

Season four of the franchise’s most recent incarnation, Star Trek: Discovery (2017-24), featured a new alien species, 10-C, with a novel method of communication: a combination of light patterns for context, and a puff of complex hydrocarbons to convey detailed information about their emotional state.

While wincing at the risk that Starfleet captain Michael Burnham took in plunging her hand into an unknown bowl of dust (no chemist would, hopefully, ever do this), I even was more surprised by the premise that the crew of Discovery all share the same receptors as 10-C, and experience the same emotions.

To throw more petrol on this storyline, the fact that the hydrocarbons are depicted as a dust rather than a gas brings into question how easy it would be for the giant jellyfish-esque 10-C (who float amid the dense layers of their gas-giant homeworld) to actually communicate before these hydrocarbons simply drifted away or sank.

There again, chemical communication does exist in a simple form on Earth. The humble fruit fly, for example, is coated in a complex hydrocarbon wax which acts either as an aphrodisiac or deterrent to other fruit flies that come into contact with it.

4. Hellfire and hatred

The chemistry lesson flame test is a right of passage for many schoolchildren – and also, it seems, students at Star Trek: Starfleet Academy taking the “exochemistry” class (which focuses on chemical compounds and properties beyond Earth).

The principle of the flame test is the same as that of modern fireworks. A metal salt is heated, generating an unstable gas radical that may then adopt an excited state due to the heat, before dropping back down to its ground state and releasing energy in the form of light.

The colour of this light depends on the difference in energy between the two states. For strontium salts, this is relatively small, resulting in a red colour. Sadly for the first season’s recurring villain, space pirate Nus Braka, this piece of chemical trivia has passed him by.

If he had known the “red hellfire” that destroyed his mining colony when he was a child was actually caused by strontium burning, rather than Federation weaponry, then a lifetime of hatred of Starfleet and eventual humiliation by Starfleet cadet Caleb Mir in the episode Rubincon (March 2026) might never have happened.

Over the 60 years this groundbreaking franchise has been on our screens, Star Trek has helped to inspire chemistry-related breakthroughs with technology such as handheld tricorder scanners, metamaterials that mimic cloaking devices, and the needle-free hypospray medical device. Writing as both a committed Trekkie and chemist, long may Star Trek fiction continue to become fact.

Gemma Shearman does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Since Star Trek began sending its crews out to explore strange new worlds 60 years ago, the franchise has both imagined and inspired new concepts for travel across the vast distances of space.

Among the most intriguing are “wormholes”: mysterious tunnels through spacetime that connect otherwise distant places.

Star Trek always has a difficult balance to strike in making its portrayals both accessible and scientifically accurate. With wormholes, it generally favoured the former on their occasional appearances.

On screen, one end of the wormhole will often appear as a swirling vortex or tunnel. In fact, computer simulations of these theoretical space shortcuts suggest that the opening would look more like soap bubbles or crystal balls, with their surfaces showing distorted and multiplied images of whatever lies on the other side.

You could fly all around this opening and enter it from any direction, and rather than reaching the centre of the bubble, you would emerge from another similar bubble (the other end of the wormhole) somewhere totally different.

Of course, the most important question for both Starfleet captains and theoretical physicists is: should you fly into a wormhole? The job of a starship captain may be to boldly go, but as a very risk-averse physicist, I’m not so sure.

The first Star Trek wormhole

“Wormhole distortion has overloaded the main power systems!” These words, spoken by Commander Willard Decker in Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979), marked the first appearance of a wormhole in Star Trek.

A warp drive malfunction leads to the creation of a distorted region of spacetime that sucks in the Starship Enterprise, leading to a breakdown of the ship’s systems and a potentially deadly collision with a random asteroid.

It is a typically pioneering reference to what was, at the time, a niche research topic. John Wheeler, professor of gravitational physics at Princeton University, had first coined the term with Charles Misner in their 1957 paper Classical Physics as Geometry, which aimed to describe electric charges like electrons as the ends of tunnels in space.

The first descriptions of traversable wormholes that satisfied Einstein’s equations of general relativity – configurations of matter that balance the spacetime curvature of the tunnel – were then independently published by H.G. Ellis and K. A. Bronnikov in 1973, although they didn’t use Wheeler’s moniker.

Six years later, the first Star Trek wormhole wasn’t an accurate depiction of what scientists and science fiction enthusiasts now understand by the term. For one thing, the wormhole doesn’t appear to lead anywhere, and it dissipates once the crew regain control of the ship and drop out of warp speed.

Nevertheless, as a researcher studying black holes and the early universe, I am rather fond of this scene – in part because it is actually possible to imagine warp drives (engines that bend spacetime to move the ship at faster-than-light speeds) distorting spacetime in this way.

If you put exotic matter (one with a negative pressure) into a small region of spacetime, Einstein’s equations of general relativity tell us that region can expand exponentially fast. And if the space around it is not expanding in the same way, where can all that new space go?

The answer, at least in this hypothetical scenario, is that it must balloon out into an entirely new universe, creating a wormhole in the process – a narrow passage that links the two regions.

If you’re thinking this sounds implausible, Einstein’s theory of general relativity is actually perfectly ok with things being larger on the inside. Indeed, such scenarios may (speculatively) have arisen from rare fluctuations in the early universe.

No slow-mo

Star Trek’s first depiction of a wormhole gets one aspect precisely wrong, though. In the film, the wormhole’s “temporal distortion” makes the crew move and speak in slow motion, struggling to fire the photon torpedoes that will save them from asteroid-impact obliteration.

While the gravitational time dilation predicted by Einstein could be a feature of wormhole spacetimes, it would not be experienced as slow motion by those who fly in. For them, time would pass completely normally, with their watch ticking at one second per second.

They might, however, emerge to find that their friends had aged far more than they had. But these friends wouldn’t have experienced time in fast-forward either. Both sides think time has passed normally, they just disagree about the amount.

Again, this seems like it shouldn’t really be allowed – but the same effect is experienced by clocks on GPS satellites put into orbit around the Earth. When brought back to Earth again, they are found to have experienced more time than an equivalent clock left on the Earth’s surface, due to having spent time in a weaker gravitational field.

Next Generation wormholes

By the late 1980s, Star Trek wormholes had achieved the ultimate sign of technological maturity – somebody was trying to sell one.

This depiction, in the series Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987-94), more closely resembled the traversable wormhole framework co-developed by Kip Thorne in 1988. The US astrophysicist and future Nobel laureate had begun exploring the theoretical requirements for the existence of wormholes as portals connecting distant regions of space in the same universe.

Thorne showed that for a wormhole to be held open in a way that makes it traversable would require an exotic form of matter, violating certain energy conditions that physicists think ought to be respected at large scales.

As the Next Generation crew find out, you don’t just want to buy any old traversable wormhole – you need it to be a stable one. The original Ellis-Bronnikov wormhole uses the right kind of exotic matter as scaffolding to hold it open. But even tiny disturbances will cause it to rapidly collapse – as has been demonstrated in many numerical simulations.

A spinning version of the Ellis-Bronnikov wormhole appears potentially more robust, but its so-called “nonlinear stability” is yet to be established. Flying a starship through one of these would be a useful, if rather risky, test.

The space between what is mathematically possible and physically realistic has always been a key part of the magic of Star Trek, inspiring several generations of scientists to explore strange new spacetimes. But if a soap-bubble wormhole ever appears in front of my spacecraft, I would always let Starfleet go first.

Katy Clough receives funding from the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) and the Simons Foundation. She will be speaking at the Star Trek Lates event at the Science Museum in London on Tuesday, September 8.

In recent years, archaeologists from around the world have marked the centenaries of some of Iraq’s most influential archaeological discoveries.

The excavation of the ancient city of Ur, for example, transformed understanding of early urban life, long-distance trade, royal tombs and burial customs. There has also been a century of research into the Jemdet Nasr period – pivotal in the development of some of the world’s earliest administrative systems and forms of writing.

These milestones are reminders of the profound influence of the archaeology of ancient Mesopotamia. It continues to inspire generations of researchers around the world, including recent work led by the University of Glasgow at the archaeological site of Shakhi Kora in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq.

This has brought new insights into the nature of the first public institutions, their development and demise. Other surveys in southern Iraq seek to understand long-term human relationships with Iraq’s rapidly disappearing marshlands.

But these milestone celebrations and fresh discoveries also invite reflection about the role of Iraq’s scientists and institutions in this developing story of human civilisation.

Changing the narrative of loss and rescue

International discussions of Iraqi heritage have long been dominated by stories of catastrophe. These range from looting after the 2003 US-led invasion and the destruction wrought by Islamic State, to endangered archaeological sites and emergency efforts to save what remains.

Many of these represent genuine crises. But they also frame Iraqi archaeology as a narrative of loss and rescue, with international institutions as providers of expertise. Local archaeologists are often portrayed as recipients of support, rather than equal partners in shaping future research.

Today, Iraqi archaeologists are still underrepresented in the bodies that decide research priorities and interpretations. Many institutions generating archaeological knowledge about Iraq are disproportionately directed from outside the country.

So, when 20 archaeologists and heritage professionals from Iraq and the Kurdistan Region of Iraq gathered in Glasgow alongside international colleagues in May 2025, they seized the opportunity to shift this narrative. Their discussions ranged from social media misinformation to women’s participation in archaeological fieldwork and the challenges that climate change poses, both to heritage and local communities.

Such conversations often came back to one key question: who gets to decide what archaeology in Iraq should focus on today?

Attempts to decolonise archaeology

Discussions about the future of archaeology often focus on participation: who receives funding, who directs projects, and who is included as a collaborator or author. These questions are important.

But meaningful attempts to decolonise this field of study also need to address how archaeological problems are defined, whose expertise is recognised, and who gets to shape research priorities.

At the Glasgow workshop, Iraqi and Kurdish archaeologists, heritage professionals, government officials and university leaders were asked to identify the issues they regarded as most urgent. Creating space for them to articulate priorities marked an important shift away from externally imposed agendas.

The discussion on gender highlighted a striking contradiction in Iraq. At the University of Al-Qadisiyah in the city of Al Diwaniyah, women account for around 70% of archaeology students – yet only around 2% of Iraqi excavation team members and approximately 15% of academic leaders are women.

This raised the question: is increasing women’s participation just a demographic goal – or will it influence the breadth of knowledge produced through archaeology? For example, a wider range of participants may encourage more archaeological attention to labour, care, social relationships and community life in the ancient past, complementing the traditional focus on kings, temples and powerful states.

Redefining what heritage means

Iraq is among the countries most vulnerable to environmental change. The workshop also highlighted rising temperatures, extreme dust storms, water scarcity, soil salination and environmental degradation, stressing their impact on archaeological sites and the communities who depend on wetlands, springs and marshlands.

It became clear that “heritage” meant more than just preservation. Traditional relationships between communities and landscapes offer valuable lessons for adapting to environmental uncertainty. Archaeology becomes less about recovering the past, more about helping to imagine sustainable futures.

According to Rozhen Mohammed-Amin, president of the Cultural Heritage Organisation in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, one of the most significant achievements was bringing together people who are often “disconnected due to political and institutional divisions”.

Within months of the event, two women were promoted to senior positions at the University of Al-Qadisiyah. Participants also reported stronger engagement between Iraqi universities and the country’s State Board of Antiquities and Heritage.

These changes may seem modest – such developments rarely attract headlines in the way of a spectacular discovery or heritage emergency. But they may prove just as important to the future of archaeology – for Iraq and the wider world.

Claudia Glatz received funding from the British Institute for the Study of Iraq, which supported the workshop discussed in this article. Her research and heritage initiatives in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq have been supported by the British Academy, the British Institute for the Study of Iraq, the G.A. Wainwright Fund, the Cultural Protection Fund-British Council, the Royal Society of Edinburgh, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the Gerda Henkel Foundation, and the National Science Foundation.

Daniel Calderbank works for the University of Glasgow. He has received funding from the Glasgow Centre for International Development and the British Institute for the Study of Iraq, which supported the workshop discussed in this article. He has also received research funding from the British Academy, UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), and the Royal Society of Edinburgh for research and heritage initiatives in Iraq.

Jaafar Jotheri does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Nasa has named its latest flagship space telescope after the American scientist Nancy Grace Roman. Roman’s contributions to astrophysics should have made her famous, yet many people will never have heard of her.

For decades, astronomers have been spoiled with stunning data and imagery from the Hubble Space Telescope, which was launched into Earth orbit in 1990. In 2021, the James Webb space telescope (JWST) was sent into space as Hubble’s successor. Since then, JWST has identified some of the earliest stars and galaxies to form after the Big Bang and has made a host of other amazing discoveries.

JWST is designed to look at individual objects in extraordinary detail, but the Roman telescope is designed to survey the sky at scale. By monitoring vast areas of the cosmos, astronomers can piece together a broader picture of how the universe changes. The capabilities of the two telescopes are therefore complementary.

The new observatory’s name honours a scientist who battled discrimination in a male-dominated field, eventually becoming Nasa’s first chief astronomer.

Roman was born in Nashville, Tennessee, to a music teacher mother and a father who was a mathematician and physicist. She earned a bachelor’s degree in astronomy from Swarthmore College, Pennsylvania, in 1946.

She gained her PhD at the University of Chicago, completing her graduate studies at the university’s Yerkes Observatory, where she worked on mapping the motions of stars.

In her early research, Roman compared the way that stars moved in the sky with what they were made of. This led to the finding that there were different populations of stars within the Milky Way.

Roman also found that the quantities of “heavy” chemical elements (in astronomy, those elements that are heavier than helium) in these stars were linked to the speed and direction at which they were moving away.

This allowed a mathematical model to be produced that essentially reversed time, to look at how stars were born from the same nebula. Roman had discovered that all the stars in a given area are not the same age, leading to observational evidence about how our galaxy is structured.

Roman collected large quantities of astronomical observations at a time when the process for doing so – which was based around photographic plates rather than digital cameras – was much more time-consuming than it is today.

For the identification of the stars, Roman made use of a method called UV excess, which is still used today as a fast way to identify different star types.

During her time as a faculty member at the the University of Chicago’s Yerkes Observatory, Roman was subjected to wage inequality. She once estimated that she made no more than 60% of what her male colleagues earned. She also felt that she would never get tenure due to her gender.

In a 2017 interview, Roman said she brought her salary concerns to her department chair at the time, the Nobel prize-winning physicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar. He told her: “We don’t discriminate against women. We can just get them for less.”

This contributed to Roman leaving for a more secure position at the Naval Research Laboratory, in Washington DC. In this new role, the head of microwave spectroscopy, she used radio waves to increase the accuracy of the measured distance from the Earth to the Moon. She also mapped large sections of the Milky Way in radio waves.

A new role model

When Nasa was formed in 1958, most of the science section was recruited from the Naval Research Laboratory. The leadership of this group sounded Roman out about setting up an astronomy programme at the new agency.

In 1959, she moved to Nasa, as the head of observational astronomy. Her title was changed to chief of astronomy after a year. Roman was the first woman to hold any executive position at Nasa at a time when the gender pay gap in the US was 60 cents to the dollar and women were subjected to serious discriminatory practices in the workplace – as elsewhere.

During this time, Roman was solely responsible for deciding which astronomers’ projects would or would not get funding from Nasa. Today, the process is carried out by peer review panels who whittle candidates down through shortlisting rounds.

Roman oversaw the development and launch of some of the first space telescopes. The idea of putting a telescope in orbit had first been suggested by the American physicist and astronomer Lyman Spitzer in 1946.

This was before the first satellite had even been launched into orbit. Space telescopes have many advantages: they avoid the distorting effects of Earth’s atmosphere, allowing observatories to gather clearer, sharper images.

Roman initially worked on launching several smaller space telescopes that observed the sky at ultraviolet and X-ray wavelengths. She also helped launch the Kuiper Aircraft Observatory, which enabled observations of stars at infrared wavelengths (those slightly longer than visible red light).

These missions offered proof of concept for what were, at the time, cutting edge observation techniques. They also justified larger amounts of money being spent on subsequent missions. Roman worked in a skilful way to gather support for the Hubble Space Telescope (initially known as the Large Space Telescope) by giving public talks and canvassing astronomers.

Nasa’s science chief Ed Weiler would later dub Roman the “mother of Hubble” based on these efforts. She remained an enthusiastic advocate for women in science, and astronomy in general, up until her death in 2018.

The naming of this new telescope finally recognises an exceptional astronomer and architect of the era of space-based observatories. Hopefully it will also raise awareness of her life and achievements.

Ian Whittaker does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.