Streaking & Caves

With most of the media coverage dedicated to the US election results, we have a fairly short list today.

Featured Articles

‘It wasn’t sexual in any way!’ 50 years of streaking – by the people who dared to bare all

The Guardian • 6 Nov 2024 • ~4600 words

In 1974, it became a craze, and has been happening ever since. While some streakers do it for a cause and others for a laugh, all agree the adrenaline rush is unbeatable. So do they have any regrets?

Thirty-one years on, he is believed to be the world’s most prolific streaker, having done 583. Roberts calls himself a performance artist and talks about some of his favourite streaks – such as jumping on to the floating weather map on This Morning in 1995 – and the planning that went into them. He says that he never interrupts an event mid-play, so the timing must be perfect. “2002 was a great year. I somersaulted over the net at the Wimbledon men’s final when rain stopped play, scored a goal against Bayer Leverkusen when they were playing against Real Madrid in the Champions League final and ran the 100m final in the Commonwealth Games. I set a record – slowest ever 100m final!”

Astronauts of the underworld: The scientists venturing into the deep, dark Earth

BBC • 5 Nov 2024 • ~2050 words

Blind spiders and whip scorpions, the future of climate change, photosynthesis in the dark – here's what the deepest places on Earth can reveal about life and the universe.

"If you go back to the golden era of exploration – the search for the source of the Nile, the race for the South Pole – there were no satellites, no aeroplanes," says Short. "Caving is the last realm where true, pure exploration is possible. [When you enter an unexplored cave], you're going to a place on the planet where nothing – no drone, no modern technology – has been before." And in caves, adds Short, treasures can be found, "new species, new cures for disease". Some caves are so big they are reported to have their own weather system. Some are so deep, we have yet to reach the bottom. Caves contain the secrets of human evolution, of the life that came before us, and of millennia of climate impacts. And caves are not just repositories of distant memories, but hotspots of biodiversity and endemism – entire ecosystems teaming with life.

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Big Oil’s dirty legacy in Nigeria

Financial Times • 6 Nov 2024 • ~2650 words • Archive Link

Who will clean up the environmental mess when Shell and others pull out of the Niger Delta?

Almost immediately after Shell and other international companies began extracting oil, Okpabi says there was a noticeable change in the area, evidenced by wilting fruits on contaminated farmlands and dead birds and animals. “Families used to cultivate their own food,” Okpabi, a US-educated criminologist who is now king of Ogale, says of his community before the oilmen came. There has been “a complete disappearance of a way of life and our ecosystem”, he adds. Now as the foreign companies that built Nigeria’s oil industry are exiting the polluted Niger Delta for easier, more lucrative operations offshore in the Gulf of Guinea or in other countries, communities and rights groups want to know what will become of the environmental mess left behind.