BIG Exclusives

  (First published on January 27, 2026) Key takeaways Data centres are not just energy intensive; they are mineral intensive, requiring 60-75 tonnes of metals per megawatt (MW) of capacity as a significant driver of mining and refining activity. The United States, home to 44% of global data-centre buildout is deeply import-dependent, with China, Canada, Belgium, Germany, and Mexico dominating mineral exposure. Critical artificial intelligence-enabling minerals (gallium, germanium, tantalum) face structural supply constraints that mining timelines cannot easily resolve. Copper...

It is time to take stock of what to date has been a mind-blowing third decade of the 21st century. A lot of you are too busy to get into the weeds, but my incredible editorial team takes a machete to the nuisance material every day to shine a light on the roots of the big issues. Because 21st-century attention spans have the longevity of a lightning bolt, I will present the summary through a series...

In my previous article, “How to recognize when science becomes selective”, I shared strategies and tools to help evaluate if information is factual, false, or misleading. Here, I explore the application of critical thinking to evaluate a real-world example that I found on social media, as well as its linked scientific publication. Scientific articles are often complex as they are aimed at an audience of peers and the broader scientific community. These articles tend to be...

(First published October 6, 2025) Picture a vast wheat field under a clear sky, where a farmer in a tractor cabin releases from a large herbicide sprayer implement a fine mist of Roundup. It is harvesting time, and glyphosate – the active ingredient in Bayer's (formerly Monsanto’s) blockbuster herbicide –doesn't just kill weeds; it forces the crop to ripen uniformly and according to a schedule that works best for the farmer, reducing losses and increasing...

Artificial intelligence is no longer defined primarily by benchmark scores or parameter counts. It is defined by control. The question that now matters most is not who has built the largest model, but who can inspect it, who can modify it, who can deploy it under which conditions, and who ultimately bears responsibility when it fails. The debate between open source and closed AI systems is therefore not ideological theatre. It is a structural contest...

Here is the standard recipe for presenting Antarctic ice data to corporate and funding clients: Show them the "photogenic edges”. Open with high-definition footage of a massive ice shelf calving into the Southern Ocean — blue-white towers of ancient water crashing into the sea. Follow with a time-lapse of the Larsen B Ice Shelf disintegrating into a slush of bergs. Show a graph of the Antarctic Peninsula, that thin arm of land reaching toward...

We live in an increasingly noisy world in which news and information bombard us night and day. Trying to make sense of it all is challenging. There are some who want the average person to accept what is being said to them at face value. How can a person decide what is true, what is misleading, and what is downright false? I am a scientist, so I will approach the topic from a scientific perspective....

The error bars disappeared from my presentations sometime late 2023, and I did not pay much attention. That is on me. I was preparing a lecture on climate projections for a sustainability and ethics course. My class consisted of future corporate sustainability officers and infrastructure planners – the kind of people who will need to understand long-term climate risks in order to help manage billions in assets. My slides showed the usual temperature projections through...

Securing the internet and combatting misinformation and disinformation have been high priorities for governments across the western world since the COVID-19 pandemic began about six years ago. Citizens in many countries have had to contend with a range of policies intended to control speech, online content, and independent media. At the start of this decade, social media platforms including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Linkedin were front and centre in the censorship game through their so-called...

In the first essay of this series, I discussed medieval vineyards in Yorkshire and cattle grazing in Greenland where permafrost now reigns. In the second essay, I revealed the dilemma of my conversion – the trappings of academic funding combined with narrative containment – you know, Deep Throat follow-the-money kinda stuff. I ended the second essay with a promise: this week I would show you what happened when I began asking, out loud, how...