27 missing movies

Films not shown, special edition

After seeing Oxana at the cinema, I also watched the documentary I am Femen on YouTube (in Germany, it doesn't seem to work in the UK). After that the youtube bots launched an effort to show me all sorts of former Soviet Union / Eastern European films with age restriction, so I am trying to keep track of the interesting things I am discovering here. (Films from 2021 onwards I will also add to Films not shown.)

Losing innocence in Alma Ata (Теряя невинность в Алма-Ате) - Kazakhstan 2010. The first Kazakh film I've ever seen, though most of the dialogue is in Russian. From female director Zhanna Issabayeva (Жанна Исабаева) this is a collection of 13 stories on sexual beginnings, all very cute and also educational, as I knew nothing about that part of the world.

Metronom - slightly troubling Romanian film from 2022 (also added to my films not shown list for the 2020s) about teenagers in 1970s Bucharest discovering Western pop music and getting in trouble for it. I watched it on this YouTube channel, which specialises on Romanian films.

School of Senses - Érzékek iskolája Hungarian film from 1996, the colours look more like 1980s to me, which would put me off normally, but it does have visual poetry and a very watchable female lead (never mind the horrid bloke).

Лето, или 27 потерянных поцелуев (27 missing kisses) - Georgia 2000, Nana Dzhordzhadze, starring Nutsa Kukhianidze Released in Germany in June 2001 but not in the UK. Here is a version dubbed in German which I don't normally approve of but Georgian is really a language I know nothing about! (Apparently, as I just found out, it is part of the Kartvelian family which has no known relation to any other language family.)

The film may well be my favourite in this list so far. The protagonist is a blatant manic pixie dream girl, but the setting in post-Soviet Georgia offers striking visuals from the crumbling factory to the derelict ship and the old village with its rarely used cinema, so there's plenty of cinematic interest even if you have seen too many manic pixies in your life. Watch out for Pierre Richard.

A few days after watching the German copy, I watched it again in the Russian version (with the original soundtrack but the Georgian and French dialogue overdubbed) which revealed that our manic pixie speaks Georgian to her young friend but Russian to most other people and to herself. (The first version which Youtube found for me was dubbed into Czech, so I've now put the Russian version at the top, as it's the closest to the original version I could find.)

I learned that manic pixies always leave and enter the house through the windows, preferably in their night gown.

As this entry goes live, I am still discovering new stuff in this rabbit hole, so watch this space (although I may not reach the 27 movies of the title). Here are a few that I haven't watched yet:

Plemya - Ukraine 2014 - a film entirely in Ukrainian sign language ...

Do svidaniya mama - Russia 2014, Svetlana Proskurina

45m2 - Greece, 2010, Stratos Tzitzis - does Greece count as Eastern Europe?

Bonded parallels - Armenia 2009, Hovhannes Galstyan

Intimnuye mesta (Intimate parts) - Russia 2013, Natasha Merkulova / Alexey Chupov

the algorithms also came up with one movie I've actually seen when it was new:

Rouge baiser (1995) (where the rouge is an allusion to communist activities).

the centre of the world

Some thoughts on

Silk roads: A new history of the World
Peter Frankopan
Bloomsbury 2015

European history as I learned it at school doesn't make much sense between the fall of the (Western) Roman Empire and, well today, really. There are various hordes of Scythians, Huns, Vandals, Mongols as well as the Black Death coming out of nowhere to mess things up. The rapidly changing alliances of European powers with or against Russia don't make sense, from the Crimean War through to WW2. And why do European powers keep effing up Afghanistan?

All these things and many more become much clearer if you shift the focus to what Frankopan repeatedly calls the Centre of the World, namely the region of the silk roads linking China to the Mediterranean, and Russia to the Persian Gulf. The Romans essentially gave up on Western Europe, because the East was where the resources and trade opportunities were. Since then, the Caliphate of Baghdad, the long history of the Persian Empire (toppled by islamist revolution of 1979), as well as trade and conflict along the silk roads have often driven events in Europe in ways that we Europeans are insufficiently aware of.

Frankopan outlines the history of the world focused on this centre in chapters arranged chronologically but headlined with a lead theme of each period. In the earlier centuries, the book is very enlightening in terms of all the cultural and historic achievements happening there while Europe lived in the Dark Ages. It wasn't the time that was dark, it was just that the light was elsewhere.

In the more recent centuries, things become rather enraging, as it becomes more and more clear how much colonial powers messed up the region often by sheer arrogance and failing to understand the social, political and cultural systems already in place. The ancient countries of Iran and Afghanistan, along with the modern invention of Iraq bear much of the brunt of European ignorance in the 20th century. British and then Americans are trying to control these countries for their resources (aka "American interests"), including petrol, while the Soviet Union and Russia felt threatened on their soft underbelly and also wouldn't mind access to the Persian Gulf and its resources.

In the light of recent news, it is particularly intriguing how Western powers sold nuclear technology to Iran under the dictatorial regime of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, whose autocratic rule in turn was the result of a Western-backed coup against the democratic government that had dared to nationalise the country's oil resources. And then the Iran-Contra affair, where the CIA sold arms to the mullah regime (despite a US-backed embargo) and used the proceeds to fund the rightwing guerilla in Nicaragua. I'm old enough to remember that this really did happen, even though it sounds crazy in retrospect.

In his conclusion Frankopan writes (in 2015, while Obama was still president) that all the trouble we now see in this area is just the birthing pain as the region is reborn as the new centre of the world. He supports that with data of investment in infrastructure being made there and fossil fuel wealth being discovered (although globally we can't really afford to burn them). Ten years on, the conclusion strikes me as a tad too optimistic. Yes the region is more important than we (Europeans) ever realised, but its strategic importance and mineral wealth have mainly been a recipe for disaster and may continue that way.

Loving the Persian-inspired cover design. I recently reviewed Frankopan's latest book , The Earth transformed (review should come out soon), and discovered the silk roads after that selling for £1 in a charity shop.

de-extinction deconstructed

I have some sympathy for the idea of repopulating the Arctic tundra with big beasts to restore its natural ecosystem functions, although I'm not sure that elephants dressed up as mammoths are the most cost-efficient way to do this. By contrast, I was quite a bit annoyed by the recent hype over the claimed "de-extinction" of the dire wolf, which won the world's attention simply because there was footage of cute puppies.

So I've tried to write up a reasonably balanced account of the recent news from the de-extinction people, and I found that they are doing some collateral good work eg in elephant conservation and in funding genome research, but the bottom line is that I'm not convinced.

My feature is out now:

Can extinction be reversed?

Current Biology Volume 35, Issue 16, 18 August 2025, Pages R783-R785

Restricted access to full text and PDF download
(will become open access one year after publication)

Magic link for free access
(first seven weeks only)

See also my new Mastodon thread where I will highlight all this year's CB features.

My mastodon posts are also mirrored on Bluesky (starting 22.2.2025), but for this purpose I have to post them again, outside of the thread. (I think threads only transfer if the first post was transferred, so once I start a new thread it should work.)

Last year's thread is here .

The South Island giant moa (Dinornis robustus) is among the species that the company Colossal is planning to recreate. (Photo: York Museums Trust staff/Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).)

carbon ring hooked up

I don't write about real chemistry very often these days, but it's always great to hear about the creative (supra)molecular architectures and new allotropes of carbon developed in Harry Anderson's lab here in Oxford. The latest news from his lab, published in Science magazine this week, is the first molecular carbon ring stable enough to be investigated in solution by normal spectroscopy methods. Previous carbon rings were produced by atom manipulation on solid surfaces, a method requiring extremely low temperatures (see here and here).

I wrote a news story for Chemistry World about this new work, which is out now:

Ring of pure carbon stabilised by its catenane connections

Chemistry World 15.8.2025

I believe it is freely accessible as long as you haven't used up your monthly quota of free articles from CW.

The three macrocycles helped to stabilise the C48 molecule, allowing the first isolation in solution of this class of molecule. Image source: © Yueze Gao et al 2025

PS It looks like I forgot to blog some of the CW news stories of recent years, I'll list the missing ones here so I have them somewhere on this blog in case I ever get round to updating my publications list.

Proteins behind diatoms’ intricate nanoscale-patterned shells revealed
Chemistry World 5.1.2023

Light-harvesting wheel reinvented by chemists copying bacterium
Chemistry World 7.7. 2020

Hydrogens seen crystal clear in small molecules
Chemistry World 31.5. 2016

For a complete list of all my pieces in Chemistry World, see my profile page.

colours of time

Some thoughts on

La venue de l'avenir
Cédric Klapisch
France 2025
starring Suzanne Lindon, Cécile de France ...
released in Germany 14.8.2025

I was lucky to catch a subtitled preview of this latest oeuvre by Klapisch in a Düsseldorf cinema this week. The advance info wasn't very clear so I was expecting something family-heavy like Ce qui nous lie (Back to Burgundy). It turned out to be a much broader and more ambitious film that serves an astonishing number of my obsessions including family history,old photos, the handover of visual guide culture from sculpture and painting to photography and film (see the biographies of Renoir father and son), Paris in the Belle Epoque, as well as the music of Pomme (who plays a very cute supporting role that has nothing whatsoever to do with the story).

So the central and ancestral character is Adele (Suzanne Lindon), born in 1873 (which places her in the generation of my great-grandparents, six of whom were born before and two after that year). Her house in rural Normandy hasn't been opened since 1944, but now the local council wants to put up a shopping centre and a massive parking lot in its place, so Adele's 30 or so living descendants are convened to come to an agreement regarding the property. The four family delegates sent to the location discover lots of old photos inside as well as letters and an impressionist painting, so are able to piece together the life story of Adele, which is very cleverly (and very Klapisch-ly) interspersed with the present day lives of the descendants. (There are probably similarities with Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris, which I need to rewatch some time, to compare and contrast.)

Although I prefer the untranslatable word play of the original title (literally: the arrival of the future, which reflects all that excitement about modernity in the period), the German and English titles (Colours of time / Farben der Zeit) have a justification in referring to the colours, as those are obviously of prime importance in impressionist art, and the flashbacks are remarkably colourful even when they are pegged to monochrome photos.

There is a lot of art in the film, with the Musée d'orsay at Paris, the Musée d'art moderne André Malraux at Le Havre and Monet's garden all playing significant parts.

Official poster design. The red dress serves as a reminder that Paris in 1894 was just as colourful as today's world.

Monet's painting Impression, Soleil levant plays a role in the film.

NB the film was shown at Cannes this year but the Grauniad hasn't reviewed it?! Shocking.

PS: I have been following Klapisch's films on and off ever since Chacun cherche son chat (When the cat's away) was shown at the Phoenix Picturehouse in Oxford, back in 1996 - those were the days when weird little French films still got a UK release! Strangely, I haven't reviewed any of those that I saw since then, so I should at least list them if only to jog my memory:

• 1996 Chacun cherche son chat
• 1996 Un air de famille (I hated that one, and I have avoided the Jaoui/Bacri comedies ever since)
• 2002 L'auberge espagnole (I rewatch this at least once every 10 years when a sequel comes out)
• 2005 Poupees russes (sequel to Auberge espagnole)
• 2008 Paris
• 2011 Ma part du gateau
• 2013 Casse-tetes chinois (Auberge part 3)
• 2017 Ce qui nous lie
• 2025 La venue de l'avenir

29 street libraries

Two years ago, I wrote a blog entry about the 23 street libraries set up within the city limits of Düsseldorf. I embarked on a quest to visit them all, but didn't quite make it to Knittkuhl, which is not only remote but gloriously unconnected to the tram system. So that's 22 visited (marked in bold below).

This month, I checked the official website and discovered a whole bunch of new ones, including some in faraway parts of the city, so that will be another struggle.

If I have got my ducks in a row, there are new ones in Flingern, Garath, Heerdt, Lohausen, Oberbilk, and Rath, so that should make 29 overall. I did a small cycle trip to the new ones in Oberbilk and Flingern (Dorotheenplatz) already, bringing me to 24/29), but the others will need some strategic planning. This way, I will get to know all parts of the city, eventually!

City Centre:

• Mannesmannufer, next to KIT (Kunst im Tunnel), photo below
• Kö-Bogen

  Angermund (way out north, behind the airport!):

• Kreuzung Angermunder Straße, In den Blamüsen und Kirchweg

  Benrath:

• Marktplatz

  Bilk:

• Friedensplätzchen - this one is my local and the one that got me hooked. Both the range of offerings and the turnover rate are amazing. Without exaggeration, it's worth visiting every day.

  Derendorf and Pempelfort (north of the city centre) - these five are lined up very neatly:

• Frankenplatz
• Roßstraße, intersection with Klever Straße/Jülicher Straße
• Maria-und-Josef-Otten-Platz (Marschallstraße/Blücherstraße)
• Rochusmarkt
• Berty-Albrecht-Park (near the centre of this lovely park which stretches a long way, more than 1 km)

  Flingern:

• Hermannsplatz near S-Bahn Flingern
• Dorotheenplatz (not far from Hermmansplatz, actually, but I'm not complaining. I'm sure the posh neighbourhoods of Flingern have lots of nice books to give away)

  Friedrichstadt:

• Fürstenplatz

  Garath (a suburb newly built in the 1960s, deep in the south, beyond Benrath even):

• Matthias-Erzberger-Straße/Carl-Severin-Straße

  Gerresheim:

• Apostelplatz
• Gerricusplatz (historic centre of the town, worth visiting)
• „Roter Platz“ on the corner Hatzfeld- and Heyestraße, near S-Bahn station

  Grafenberg:

• Staufenplatz near eponymous tram station

  Heerdt (out west, on the wrong side of the river, beyond Oberkassel):

• Nikolaus-Knopp-Platz

  Kaiserswerth:

• Markt

  Knittkuhl (way out east, not served by the otherwise perfect tram system!):

• In der Flieth

  Lohausen:

• Alte Flughafenstraße/Niederrheinstraße (between the airport and the river, so not on the side from which one would normally approach the airport with the S11 or regional express trains)

  Oberbilk:

• Oberbilker Markt (I knew the address as a horrid intersection of two major roads, but now discovered there is also a nice little square in one of the corners, which is where the street library is).

  Oberkassel:

• Werner-Pfingst-Platz

  Rath:

• Rather Kirchplatz (not on my map, but must be near one of the two churches at Rath, both of which are near the S Bahn station)

  Volmerswerth:

• Volmerswerther Straße (next to the loop where the tram turns around)

  Wersten:

• Liebfrauenstraße
• Ickerswarder Straße Ecke Kölner Landstraße

  Zooviertel:

• Brehmplatz

Here is a recent photo I took of oldest of them all, on the river promenade near KIT (Kunst im Tunnel), showing that these are really popular. There are shelves on three sides, and it can happen that all three are occupied by people browsing:

Note that you can find books in all sorts of languages as well. On my first visit to the one at Oberbilk, I spotted at least five books in a language I really struggled to identify. After a while I spotted in one the section which gave the original title and the equivalent of translated to "language in question" and it said Shqip, so based on the "Skipetaren" in the title of a novel I read as a child, I guessed Albanian.

PS The things I discovered in these street libraries include:

• Die Meistergeige
• Ullsteinroman
• two books with kitchen songs
• High times
• the travelling hornplayer
• ... and lots of vintage rororo paperbacks - I collect the ones with the cloth around the spine - they are older than I am. Later reprints appeared without the cloth spine.

Street libraries elsewhere:

• Münster
• Strasbourg

oceans acidified

I've covered ocean acidification many years ago, when it was beginning to emerge as a threat to corals and other calcifying sea organisms, and I've written about the planetary boundary concept (most recently, when chemical pollution was found to have exceeded the boundary).

Thus the new research suggesting that ocean adicification is also outside the planetary boundary (as the seventh of the nine parameters in the original planetary boundary paper) presented a good opportunity to visit both issues in one go.

My feature is out now:

Oceans acidified beyond boundary

Current Biology Volume 35, Issue 15, 4 August 2025, Pages R739-R741

Restricted access to full text and PDF download
(will become open access one year after publication)

Magic link for free access
(first seven weeks only)

See also my new Mastodon thread where I will highlight all this year's CB features.

My mastodon posts are also mirrored on Bluesky (starting 22.2.2025), but for this purpose I have to post them again, outside of the thread. (I think threads only transfer if the first post was transferred, so once I start a new thread it should work.)

Last year's thread is here .

The cover image is not really related to my article, but to me it also symbolises the interaction between the oceans and the atmosphere, because: "Bluebottles or man-o'-war, cnidarians in the genus Physalia, use a gas-filled float and sail to catch the wind and sail the ocean surface."

Cover of Current Biology, vol. 35, issue 15, 2025.

on the origins of Femen

Some thoughts on

Oxana
France/Ukraine/Hungary 2025
Charlène Favier

The Ukrainian protest group Femen denounced the tyranny of Putin and Lukashenko long before it was fashionable, but has been widely ignored and belittled in the UK media. Even now, while everybody loves to hate Putin and love the Ukraine, we don't hear much about them. I have occasionally looked up their activities, if only because as a veteran of WNBRs, I have a cultural interest in naked protest activities, but without that, I wouldn't have heard anything about them in the last ten years.

So I was grateful to stumble over this biopic of Femen founder Oksana Shachko (1987-2018) and found it very enlightening in that it taught me a lot about the history of the organisation that I hadn't known.

In a nutshell, Shachko and two friends founded Femen in their home town of Khmelnytsky (western Ukraine) in 2008 to protest against the marketing of Ukraine as a destination for sex tourism. According to the film, a radio competition in New Zealand was about to send a man to Ukraine for a week's worth of free adventures with a local escort of his choice, and Femen's underwear protest succeeded in getting the trip cancelled. A year later, the activists moved to Kyiv and started using bare breasts as their main means of protest - and the space to write their slogans on.

They attempted protests in Belarus and in Russia as well, which led to violent persecution from the KGB. The three founding members fled to Paris to seek asylum there, and found that one of their members, Inna Shevchenko (who had joined the group in Kyiv in 2009), had set up a Femen training camp there and styled herself as the leader of the global Femen movement without consulting the founders (the film seems to suggest). Shachko returned to her career as an artist, combining the aesthetics of orthodox iconography with "blasphemic" content. The film sets glimpses of the last day of her life against flashbacks to her life in Femen.

All in all a very moving and tragic life story, and very timely too, as the issues haven't gone away. Released in Germany on July 24, 2025 (trailer). I don't have much hope for a UK release (therefore added it to the films not shown list), but would watch it again if it happened, if only because I had to put up with the dubbed dialogue in the German version.

Film poster for the release in Germany, X-Verleih.

PS: there's also a documentary with the real Oxana, called "Je suis Femen" (2014). Stop press, just found it on YouTube. This film gives the impression that as of 2014, the three founders were still ok with Inna Shevchenko's role as supreme leader. Separately, she talks about her art (in faltering French) here - and mentions that she left the Femen movement in 2015. This was filmed less than two weeks before she died.

Update 13.8.2025: My first attempt at catching the original version failed - it turned out that the cinema (in Germany) only had French or Ukrainian subtitles for it, and after it started running with the French ones, one of the five spectators complained. I'm sure the rest of us would have been fine, but the cinema insisted on switching to the dubbed version, so I left.

a violin from Czechoslovakia

Pirate Luthier update

My Freegle call looking for fiddle cases hasn't produced any actual cases, but it helped me rehome two fiddles (in their rickety old cases) and brought in a new one, number 27. This one was made in the 1960s in Cremona, but sadly not in the town in Italy but in the eponymous factory in Luby, Czechoslovakia (now in the Czech Republic). The town formerly known as Schönbach had been a centre of violin making since the 17th century, and it is not all that far away from the Musikwinkel around Markneukirchen, Germany.

The instrument has a beautiful Dresden bridge, and generally looks ok and in good condition, but the purfling (the line around the edges) is painted on, which is a very clear cost-cutting exercise (it should be a hand-crafted inlay, which serves to stop cracks progressing inwards).

I kept the historic G-string (gut) as well as the E string and added cheap strings in the middle. It does sound a bit cheap now, but plays ok. The bow needs rehairing and the case isn't up to 21st century requirements, but otherwise this one is ok. Not one I would want to keep though.

List of violins in the pirate luthier series:

violin 1) is the one my late aunt had since the 1930s, which got me started. After restoring it in November 2022, I played it almost every day for 14 months, until number 5) showed up.

violin 2) is a Stentor student 1 (a very widely used brand of cheap fiddles available everywhere and still being produced). I bought it very cheap on gumtree, mainly because I needed a case for number 1). It has a fault that is probably not worth repairing, see the blog entry on number 3) below. After stripping it of some accessories and spares, I am now inclined to keep it in a semi-functional state to try out experimental repairs, i.e. use it as a wooden guinea pig of sorts.

violin 3) came from a folkie friend who moved away. I put the soundpost back in its place and it has now found a new home.

violin 4) is a modern Chinese one which I bought from one musical friend and sold to another, no work needed.

violin 5) (donated by a friendly freegler) was my second favourite and the one I played in folk sessions for roughly a year until number 22) showed up.

violin 6) is the half-sized Lark which was one of the six violins I gave away on freegle in June 2024.

violin 7) is a skylark from 1991 which I bought on gumtree for £ 10 and fitted with a new bridge. Good enough for folk I would say. It was one of the six violins I gave away on freegle in June 2024.

violin 8) is the "ladies violin", a 7/8 skylark. It was one of the six violins I gave away on freegle in June 2024.

violin 9) is the one which needed a new bridge and a tailgut and turned out to sound quite lovely on the E string. It was one of the six violins I gave away on freegle in June 2024.

violin 10) is the 3/4 sized one with a broken neck and traces of multiple repair attempts, which I've now repaired. I kept it for a couple of months to check the neck stays in place, then gave it away to a good cause in June 2025.

violin 11) is the 3/4 sold by JP Guivier & Co Ltd. in the 1950s but may actually be older than that. It was one of the six violins I gave away on freegle in June 2024.

violin 12) is a full-size Lark which a freegle user kindly donated and delivered after seeing my offer. It was one of the six violins I gave away on freegle in June 2024.

violin 13) is still broken

violin 14) is a half-size Lark which I gave away to a good cause in June 2025.

violin 15) is a 3/4 size Stentor student 2, which I gave away to a local school in October 2024

violin 16) is the Sebastian Klotz branded one, sadly not made by the Mittenwald luthier, but by Yamaha Malaysia, who appear to have trademarked his name.

violin 17) is the supersized violin with a very strong sound.

violin 18) is the slightly drunken but nice sounding violin from Poland, which I restored and returned to its family.

violin 19) is a Stentor student 1 violin which only needed a little TLC, and within less than a week I had it brushed up and ready to move to our local school. The most intriguing problem it had was that somebody had put in the bridge the wrong way round, with the lower slope under the G string.

violin 20) is a Stentor student 1 violin I bought via GumTree. It sounds really nice for what it is, thanks in part to a good set-up with Dominant strings. My current plan is to make this one an official Cowley Orchestra instrument.

violin 21) is a nameless student violin I bought via facebook, not quite sure what to think of it. The fingerboard is horizontal, which is all wrong and may mean there is not enough pressure on the bridge to produce a good sound.

violin 22) is the 19th century Guarneri copy, still my favourite (although I'll have to fix that crack at some point).

violin 23) is a nameless student violin I bought from a charity shop. It looks unused but had no strings, so I set it up with a set of spare strings that came with another violin. It turned out to be no trouble at all and sounds ok for an instrument that looks really cheap (with the purfling painted on).

violin 24) is the densely cratered one I found lying on a chair at Oxfam, and which I currently play at sessions.

violin 25) is the fleamarket find from Neuss

violin 26) is the lady in red, which has now rejoined its family.

violin 27) is the Czechoslovakian student model described above

Balance 31.7.2025:
Of the 27 violins listed above, 8 received via freegle, 3 from friends and family, 14 bought (gumtree, facebook, charity shops, flea markets, cost ranging £ 10 to £45), 2 taken in for repair only and returned to their families.
Of the 25 acquired, 8 given away via freegle, 2 given to a local school, 2 sold to musical friends, 1 moved to Germany for holiday practice, 10 currently in house and ready to play, 2 in house and still broken.

List of other instruments in the pirate luthier series:

an old Irish banjo

guitar 1) is the 100 year-old one from Valencia which I set up with frets and strings and handed back to its owner.

guitar 2) is one I spotted in a charity shop "sold as seen" for a very affordable price with nothing more than a broken string, and I bought and repaired it because I knew the owner of the next one needed one while their guitar was out of service.

guitar 3) had a broken neck which I glued back on with hide glue at the same time when I repaired violin 10). It's holding so far.

the zither I found at the flea market in Dusseldorf.

and finally a shout-out to our family-built hammered dulcimer, which dates from 2016, long before I got any ideas about violins.

coastal squeeze

Sometimes reading a new word or phrase opens a whole new perspective on problems that we may already have known about in a less focused way. The words alone can suggest new connections, analytical methods, ways of describing things, a whole new world. This happened to me recently when I spotted the expression "coastal squeeze" in the headline of a press release. So I had to do a feature about how the coasts get squeezed, and why, and what to do about it.

My feature is out now:

Squeezed between land and sea

Current Biology Volume 35, Issue 14, 21 July 2025, Pages R687-R689

Restricted access to full text and PDF download
(will become open access one year after publication)

Magic link for free access
(first seven weeks only)

See also my new Mastodon thread where I will highlight all this year's CB features.

My mastodon posts are also mirrored on Bluesky (starting 22.2.2025), but for this purpose I have to post them again, outside of the thread. (I think threads only transfer if the first post was transferred, so once I start a new thread it should work.)

Last year's thread is here .

Coastal ecosystems are at risk of being squeezed out between rising sea levels and encroaching infrastructure. (Photo: x70tjw/Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0).)

a radiant legacy

I quite enjoyed learning about all the alumnae of Marie Curie's lab by reading:

The elements of Marie Curie
Dava Sobel
Fourth Estate 2024

It was also a good excuse to brush up on her life more generally, as it's been a fair few years since I read the biographies by Eve Curie and by Susan Quinn (long before I started to trouble the world with my reviews). My review is out now:

A radiant legacy

Chemistry & Industry Volume 89, Issue 7-8, July-August 2025, Page 31

access via:

Wiley Online Library (paywalled PDF of the whole review section)

SCI (premium content, ie members only)

a 125-year-old new townhall

The Neues Rathaus (new townhall) of Elberfeld was new in 1900, when it was inaugurated by Kaiser Wilhelm II together with the famous suspension railway on October 24. The city administration moved there from the old townhall which now houses the Von der Heydt Museum.

It was where Heinrich the cellist worked from 1919 onwards. (After the merger with Barmen in 1929 he may or may not have been working at Barmen townhall at some point, as well as the shortlived appointment at the city's pawnshop, so I'm not sure how many decades he spent working in this building - I'd say at least one). At the time it appeared in all its art nouveau glory on the cover of the residents register of the city of Elberfeld:

Although the main seat of the city administration of Wuppertal is now in Barmen, the Elberfeld townhall is still part of it and contains public-facing offices, especially social services. After realising this, I scheduled a visit to just have a look around, which I did in February this year, and I loved the place to bits. They don't do tours or open days, but the porter didn't mind me just snooping around and taking lots of photos. Here's a selection, I have also put a set of 12 photos on my flickr.

I also took a ride or two on the paternoster, which was one of the things my aunt remembered from visiting her grandparents at Wuppertal.