In Chicago’s Field Museum, behind a series of access-controlled doors, are about 1,500 dinosaur fossil specimens. The palaeobiologist Jasmina Wiemann walks straight past the bleached leg bones – some as big as her – neither does she glance at the fully intact spinal cord, stained red by iron oxides filling the spaces where there was once organic material. She only has eyes for the deep chocolate-brown fossils: these are the ones containing preserved organic matter – bones that offer unprecedented insights into creatures that went extinct millions of years ago.

Wiemann is part of the burgeoning field of conservation palaeobiology, where researchers are looking to the deep past to predict future extinction vulnerability. At a time when humans could be about to witness a sixth mass extinction, studying fossil records is particularly useful for understanding how the natural world responded to problems before we arrived: how life on Earth reacted to environmental change over time, how species adapted to planet-scale temperature changes, or what to expect when ocean geochemical cycles change.

“This is not something that we can simulate in the laboratory or meaningfully observe right now in the present day,” Wiemann says. “We have to rely on the longest ongoing experiment.”

To observe that planet-scale experiment, scientists have developed new methods of gathering information from the bones of the distant past. After collecting her fossils, Wiemann puts them under a microscope that shoots a laser at the specimen. She displays a section on her computer screen, 50 times its original size, and moves across the fossil’s surface until she finds a dark spot with a seemingly velvety surface – this is the fossilised organic matter.

Wiemann turns the room lights off, a tiny dot of light beams on to the fossil, and a curved line starts appearing on the computer screen. Every compound reacts differently to the laser, and where the bumps in this line are appearing across her chart suggest she was successful at finding organics. “This is beautiful,” she says. She will need to run through the data later, but this should reveal whether the specimen under her microscope was warm or cold-blooded.

Using this method, Wiemann studied when warm-bloodedness emerged around the Permian-Triassic mass extinction (the biggest in history) and the Cretaceous-Paleogene (when the dinosaurs went extinct). Warm-bloodedness was already established as a factor that made species less likely to go extinct, as they can regulate their internal temperature in changing climates. But Wiemann found a new result – that many animals evolved warm-bloodedness independently after each of these extinctions. This could have implications for how animals adapt and find resilience as the planet warms.

“If we want to, in any way, even in the short term, make meaningful predictions, we have to demonstrate that we understand these processes,” she says.

One of the first people to write about combining ecological and palaeontological approaches to predict extinction vulnerability was Michael McKinney, now the director of environmental studies at the University of Tennessee. After graduating with a degree in palaeontology he began working but says he kept feeling a need to be more relevant. “I love the dinosaurs, the big picture,” he says. “But I kept thinking that it gives us a great context, but it wasn’t teaching me a lot that I could apply directly to the immediate problems.”

McKinney went on to create his current department, which merges geology and ecology. Now, he sees palaeobiology as useful to predict what will happen. But understanding what to do about it is more difficult.

“If you think about what the world’s going to be like 1,000 years from now, I think deep time can help us answer that question,” he says. “But if I’m worried about the fact that the Amazon rainforest is disappearing in the next 20 years, I’m sceptical deep time can inform that.”

Humans, he says, have found new ways of driving species to extinction, from the passenger pigeon to the dodo. “We operate by rules that don’t really apply to the past. The things that we do are so fast and so unpredictable.”

But deep time can offer insights into how species respond to very large, systemic changes – such as the temperature shifts we are now seeing. Erin Saupe, a professor of palaeobiology at the University of Oxford, uses large datasets to look at patterns of extinction in the fossil record to see which traits make species most vulnerable.

In a recent paper published in Science, she and her co-authors asked whether intrinsic traits, including body size and geographic range size, were more or less important in predicting extinction than external factors such as climate change. “Nobody has looked at this question before,” Saupe says. Previous research has shown larger animals are typically less likely to go extinct in marine environments but are more prone to extinction on land, and larger “range sizes” – the distance a species is distributed over – help species avoid extinction.

The team accessed a digital database to look at 290,000 marine invertebrate fossils from across the past 485m years, and used models to reconstruct the climate over that period. They found geographic range size was the most important predictor of extinction, perhaps because of its interconnection with other factors associated with a lower extinction risk. A large range size suggests the animal is also good at moving larger distances, and if a species is widely spread, a regional climate change in one area likely wouldn’t impact all populations. The team found all intrinsic traits they looked at, as well as climate change, were important in predicting extinction.

“Even if a species has traits that usually make them resistant to climate change and to extinction, if the magnitude of climate change is large enough, they will still go extinct,” Saupe says. “I think it’s quite an important message for the present day.”

When it comes to facing a possible future extinction of yet unknown degree, Saupe says the Earth has advantages it didn’t before. For one, we no longer live on one supercontinent, which means the climate regulates better and prevents the continental interiors from becoming so hot and dry. However, similar to McKinney, she is worried that resources are limited and humans are having a disproportionate effect on biodiversity.

“In the past when you’ve had these major climatic changes, although it was devastating for biodiversity … species had the time, they had the resources for species to eventually rebound,” she says. “Today, we’re worried that those climatic changes will continue, but there is no space – there are more limited resources for species to cope with those changes.”

Find more age of extinction coverage here, and follow biodiversity reporters Phoebe Weston and Patrick Greenfield on X for all the latest news and features

“Ideas are bulletproof”. Three words, stamped out in multicolour tiles above a doorway, represented one of the last vestiges of Hong Kong’s once vibrant literary spaces. On 31 March, Mount Zero, a beloved independent bookstore in Hong Kong, closed its doors for the final time. Hundreds of Hongkongers came to say goodbye.

The bookshop, which opened in 2018, took its slogan from the 2005 film V for Vendetta; the eponymous antihero’s Guy Fawkes mask occasionally appeared during Hong Kong’s pro-democracy protests.

Mount Zero’s closure, which was announced after what the owner said was repeated inspections from the authorities, came as Hongkongers are coming to terms with a new reality of life with not one but two national security laws, which critics say are being used to crush dissent.

“People are quickly adjusting to the idea that the old days of public expression are no more,” says Bao Pu, the founder of New Century Press, a publishing house.

The pro-democracy protests that rocked Hong Kong in 2019 and 2020 feel like an increasingly distant memory. Where 2 million people once flooded the streets to oppose the government’s plans to establish closer links with mainland China, an individual can now be jailed for wearing a “seditious” T-shirt.

The quietening is largely because of a national security law that Beijing imposed on Hong Kong in June 2020. Authorities say the law was necessary to restore stability; critics say the vaguely worded crimes of secession, subversion, terrorism and collusion with foreign forces effectively criminalise dissent.

Considering the millions of people who took to the streets in 2019 and 2020, relatively few people have actually been arrested under the law: 292 as of 31 January.

“That is intentional,” says Jeffrey Wasserstrom, a professor of Chinese history at the University of California, Irvine, and author of Vigil: Hong Kong on the Brink. More than 800 people have been arrested for rioting, while nearly 300 people have been targeted using a colonial-era sedition law. Protesters have been targeted with more than 100 different types of offences. “It is hard for people to realise how much things have changed when you see these divided-up numbers,” Wasserstrom says.

And now the authorities have another tool in their arsenal: Article 23, a homegrown national security law that covers newly defined acts of treason, espionage, theft of state secrets, sedition and foreign interference.

The government has been on the offensive in condemning what it calls “scaremongering” about the new legislation. A spokesperson said it “only targets an extremely small minority of people who endanger national security”.

The legislation has been decades in the making. It comes from a provision in Hong Kong’s 1997 Basic Law. But a previous attempt to implement it in 2003 prompted 500,000 people to protest, causing the bill to be shelved. In 2024, the streets were silent.

“The children of the [2003] protesters are now going to suffer through what their parents fought against,” says Mark Sabah, director of the Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong Foundation.

Both of those generations have been swept up in a mass trial of pro-democracy figures who are waiting – most of them in jail cells – for judges hand-picked by the chief executive to decide their guilt or innocence. The prosecution of the Hong Kong 47, as they’ve come to be known, includes well-known figures such as Joshua Wong and Benny Tai and has been extensively criticised by foreign governments, human rights groups and the defendants’ lawyers.

First arrested in 2020, they were accused of plotting to bring down the government by holding informal pre-election primaries. The formal charge is “conspiracy to subvert state power”. The arrests themselves were labelled politically motivated.

The 10-month trial ended in December. A verdict would normally be expected within six months, but given the complexity and size of the proceedings – 16 of the 47 pleaded not guilty, with the remainder awaiting sentencing – many expect it to be delayed. The accused have already spent more than 1,000 days behind bars and face sentences of up to life in prison.

And while observers wait for that verdict, there are also concerns about the ongoing trial of Jimmy Lai, a British citizen and former medial mogul who has been detained since December 2020. His trial for colluding with foreign forces is expected to end in May, having been plagued by accusations that it is politically motivated and that one of the witnesses was tortured. The 76-year-old faces spending the rest of his life in prison.

Outside the courts, the government is keen to give the impression that life continues as normal. There are dozens of major events planned for the first half of this year, a lineup the government says will attract locals and tourists to “participate and experience Hong Kong’s unique glamour”. More than 75,000 people attended this year’s Art Basel, according to its organisers, despite calls to boycott the art fair because of concerns about censorship.

And despite the widespread feeling among activists that Hong Kong is becoming like any other Chinese city, differences remain. The territory still has an open internet. It is still possible to buy materials that are banned in mainland China, although the number of vendors is dwindling. Bao’s New Century Press recently published a biography of a senior Chinese Communist party official who played an important role in the Cultural Revolution. A Chinese buyer despaired when the book was confiscated on three separate occasions as he tried to take it into the mainland.

“And so far nobody has kidnapped me,” Bao jokes. “Not yet.”

But the chipping away of civil society continues. On 10 April, a representative from the NGO Reporters Without Borders was detained for several hours at Hong Kong International airport and then deported, as she attempted to travel to the city to monitor Lai’s trial. In March, Radio Free Asia, a US-funded media outlet, closed its Hong Kong bureau, citing fears for staff safety because of Article 23. A journalist at the South China Morning Post went to Beijing in October for a defence conference and disappeared. At least 90 NGOs and 22 media groups have closed since the 2020 national security law, according to the Centre for Asian Law at Georgetown University.

“If we really want Hong Kong to go back to a prosperous, safe and free city, I think we need to have a rapprochement, a dialogue with some people,” says Emily Lau, a veteran pro-democracy politician and former legislator. “Most people here accept that we are part of China. They’re not going to use violence to overthrow the government, but they would like the freedom to express their views … like they have been doing for decades.”

On 11 April, Mount Zero posted photographs of its final day on Instagram. “People came one after another, a few young people asking each other, what exactly are we going to do?” the caption reads. “No one knew the specific answer.”

Additional research by Chi Hui Lin

Donald Trump and the House speaker, Mike Johnson, plan to push for a bill to ban non-citizens from voting, the latest step by Republicans to falsely claim migrants are coming to the country and casting ballots.

Voting when a person is not eligible – for instance if they lack US citizenship – is already illegal under federal law. It is unclear what the bill Johnson and the former president will discuss in their Friday press conference at Mar-a-Lago will do to alter that. But it is one more way for the former president to focus on election security and to ding the Biden administration over the situation at the US-Mexico border, a key issue for likely Republican voters this November.

Like the other claims Trump makes about the 2020 election being stolen, the talking point about migrant voting does not have facts to back it up.

There is no evidence of widespread non-citizen voting, nor are there even many examples of individual instances of the practice, despite strenuous efforts in some states to find these cases. A large study by the Brennan Center of the 2016 election found that just 0.0001% of votes across 42 jurisdictions, with 23.5m votes, were suspected to be non-citizens voting, 30 incidents in total.

One review in Georgia found about 1,600 instances of non-citizens registering to vote from 1997 to 2022. In these instances, safeguards in the process worked: none of these attempts led to someone being allowed to register, because they did not submit proof of citizenship needed to be added to the voter rolls.

The Heritage Foundation, a conservative thinktank, has a database of voter fraud cases across the country, which, according to the Washington Post, includes just 85 cases of non-citizen voting since 2002.

Some of the isolated instances of non-citizens voting in the last decade have involved people who were confused about their eligibility and did not do so intentionally.

In general, people who are undocumented avoid scenarios that could leave them vulnerable to deportation, such as voting illegally.

The lack of prosecutions over migrant voting has not stopped Trump from making claims on the campaign trail that it will somehow steal the election from him, or that it has already happened in other elections in which he was on the ballot.

“I think they really are doing it because they want to sign these people up to vote. I really do,” Trump said in Iowa in January. “They can’t speak a word of English for the most part, but they’re signing them up.”

Trump is not the only one spreading this falsehood – it’s part of a longstanding Republican line of attack on immigration and Democrats. Now, the myth is also being pushed by Elon Musk, the owner of X, and the prominent Trump-aligned figure Cleta Mitchell, who has been circulating a two-page memo laying out “the threat of non-citizen voting in 2024”, according to reporting by NPR, which obtained the memo.

Because this is a concern Republicans consistently bring up, some states have added new laws to try to remove non-citizens from voter rolls or undertaken audits of their voters to assess citizenship status.

But, voting rights advocates have warned, these often run the risk of ensnaring naturalized citizens and other people who are eligible to vote and booting them from the voter rolls. One attempt in Texas in 2019 led the then secretary of state to send letters to nearly 100,000 people, including US citizens who were erroneously warned they might not be eligible to vote.

Widespread voter fraud, in general, does not exist in the US. There are instances of voter fraud prosecuted across the US every election, but even statewide taskforces have been unable to uncover large numbers of cases, and certainly nothing close to the scale that could swing elections.

Jeremy Paxman has said Parkinson’s disease “makes you wish you hadn’t been born” as he delivered a list of recommendations about the condition to Downing Street.

The former University Challenge and Newsnight presenter and fellow members of the Movers and Shakers podcast – which discusses the challenges of living with the disease – marked World Parkinson’s Day by presenting the “Parky Charter” and a petition with tens of thousands of names to No 10 on Thursday.

Paxman, 73, criticised the government’s response to the disease after delivering the charter, which has five key recommendations: swift access to specialists under the NHS; the introduction of a Parkinson’s UK pamphlet for enhanced awareness and support; the implementation of a Parkinson’s passport granting automatic entitlement to specific benefits; improved comprehensive care, including regular consultations with a Parkinson’s nurse; and increased government funding for research for a cure.

The prime minister, Rishi Sunak, praised the charter, saying he is “very supportive of the excellent work that the Movers and Shakers do and the charter will rightfully receive the attention it deserves”.

However, Paxman said he believes the charter and petition will have “no effect whatsoever” on the government.

He told the PA Media news agency: “The fact that they (the government) have ignored all their responsibilities to date indicates to me that they’re not going to get any better. And I suspect that the form of words devised by the Ministry of Health will confirm that.

“I don’t think we’re going to get anywhere. You feel like you’re banging your head against a brick wall.”

One in 37 people in the UK will be diagnosed with Parkinson’s in their lifetime, according to the charity Parkinson’s UK.

In the UK, about 153,000 people are living with the neurological condition.

Paxman also expressed his frustration with the public’s treatment of people with Parkinson’s. The Leeds-born broadcaster said: “You want to say, get the fuck out of the way, that’s what you want to say.”

In May 2021, the former BBC presenter announced he had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s and stepped down as the host of University Challenge.

Paxman, who began his broadcasting career on the BBC’s graduate trainee programme in 1972, added: “(Parkinson’s) may not kill you but it will make you wish you hadn’t been born. There’s nothing in it for the drug companies, it’s just more money for them.”

Movers and Shakers began in February 2023 and also features former BBC journalist Rory Cellan-Jones, the broadcaster’s former Europe and North America editor Mark Mardell, correspondent Gillian Lacey-Solymar, the late Diana, Princess of Wales’s divorce barrister Sir Nick Mostyn, and Vicar of Dibley co-writer Paul Mayhew-Archer.

A Department of Health and Social Care spokesperson said: “We want a society where every person with a neurological disease, along with their families and carers, receives high-quality, compassionate care – and having a better understanding of diseases like Parkinson’s is vital in making sure we can provide the right care at the right time.

“That’s why we committed to spend at least £375m in research into
neurodegenerative diseases over five years, so that we can better understand these conditions and improve outcomes for patients.”