The three terminals of ESA's UWB technology demonstrator. Future missions on the Moon will need reliable ways to communicate and navigate in areas beyond satellite coverage. ESA's ultra-wideband (UWB) demonstrator will test wireless communications and precise ranging between a lunar lander and rover. UWB is a short-range wireless technology that uses extremely short radio pulses to measure the time it takes signals to travel between devices. This allows the users to determine distances very accurately while also exchanging data. On the Moon, where communication and navigation services are far more limited than on Earth, UWB could enable landers, rovers and astronauts to communicate and locate one another within centimetres. By testing UWB in the lunar environment, the payload will help assess the technology’s potential to support future operations on the Moon’s surface. The demonstrator will fly on ispace Mission 3, currently planned for 2028. The payload consists of three UWB terminals: one installed on the lander and two on an ispace-Europe rover. As the rover moves across the lunar surface, the terminals will exchange signals to test both communications and ranging capabilities. In November 2024, ESA awarded Romanian company Control Data Systems a contract to develop the demonstrator; the mission is set to become the first Romanian payload on the Moon. Credits: ESA/CDS

Reflections from the EuroVelo & Cycling Tourism Conference 2026 in Utrecht There was no better place than Utrecht to talk about the future of cycling in Europe. This is where the first cycle path in the Netherlands was built, back in 1885.

British Palestinian Committee director on what divestment and electoral pressure have achieved – and where work remains

Research suggests all of the world’s songbirds can be traced back to Australia.

This essay, co-authored by a historian of science and an X-ray crystallographer, sheds new light on Rosalind Franklin’s Photograph 51. We refute the infamous claim that, unlike James Watson, Franklin failed to see the picture’s potential significance for interpreting the helical structure of DNA. Rather, Franklin decided to take Photograph 51 precisely because she knew that key parameters of DNA’s B form helix could be calculated from the resulting image. We show that she had in fact already made those calculations — on her earlier Photograph 49 — and she reused the same DNA sample for Photograph 51 to create a better-centered but otherwise identical diffraction image that would be suitable for publication. Thus Photograph 51 was not the result of an experiment in need of analysis, but was refined documentation for calculations that she had already performed on the earlier photograph. We argue that colleagues and later commentators did not merely overlook Franklin’s original reason for creating the strikingly clear and informative Photograph 51, they rhetorically erased her skill and judgment by describing it as though nature spoke for itself through the image — and to Watson, but not to Franklin.

Derelict buildings across Scotland are creating a plethora of problems. Local communities are bearing the brunt.

Engineers in Scotland and Japan are planning to put Scotch on a rocket in 2028

The motion passed by 1022 votes, with 813 against on Sunday in a move that sets out the party is anti-Zionist

Exclusive: Met police say 70 women’s accounts have hallmarks of trafficking, suggesting case numbers could rise

YouTube video by David M Tuller

Giant £4,000 Bluefin tuna caught off Devon coast could be heading to Michelin-starred restaurants

A decade after its original publication, a revised field guide to the urban internet offers a fresh perspective on the era of mass surveillance and AI blitzscaling.

Daily tracking of the 17th Ebola outbreak in the DRC: confirmed cases, deaths, recoveries, a map of affected health zones and the epidemic curve, from official bulletins.

**Historic England’s photos didn’t vanish. SmartFrame did. Then they broke their own links.** Not just the aerials. The lot. Historic England still holds the negatives, the prints and the scans. What the public lost, in early September, is the ability to look at them. The official notice, last updated 25 September 2026, is admirably blunt: > “This is because the third-party service that we use to display Archive images on our website has ceased trading and entered administration.” The 11 September version named the damage: > “This means that images are not currently available across Archive records and the Aerial Photo Explorer. Images of England images are also not available on the National Heritage List for England.” Ground shots, architectural stills, catalogue images, aerials, and the old Images of England pictures on list entries. All of it. The third party, named by Michael Pritchard on _British Photographic History_, is SmartFrame Technologies Limited. Henry Page and Shaun Walker of Mercer & Hole were appointed administrators on **26 August 2026**. BusinessCloud reports assets of about £2.3m, cash of £182k, liabilities of £1.7m, and a firm that “failed to secure further funding.” SmartFrame did not store the Archive. It _streamed_ it: zoom, captions, right-click protection, screenshot blocking, anti-scrape. A public body wrapped a national collection in a start-up’s DRM. When the start-up died, the pictures went with it. Confirmed down, because HE said so: * images on Archive records * the Aerial Photo Explorer * Images of England photographs on the National Heritage List Not named in the photo notice: England’s Places; list descriptions; the Swindon search room; copy orders. The early Aerofilms set is still on Britain from Above. HE first promised previews “in several weeks.” The 25 September update is cooler: > “We are hopeful that smaller preview images will be available on the website by 2 October… 400 x 400px image thumbnails… a longer-term solution… is likely to take many months to implement.” And, for listed-building photos on the List: > “Images of England images on the National Heritage List for England are not being replaced at this time.” Please do not email the Archive team. The page says so. Visit, or order a copy. In 2022 SmartFrame called Historic England “a great example” of its interactive frames. Critics noted the same wrapper was stopping people saving RAF verticals whose Crown copyright had already expired. HE later said, on X, that it had spent **£65,830 net** on the licence from 2020/21 to 2023/24, putting over a million images behind it, and that it was “not an income generation tool.” In 2024 there was another **£41k tender**. Call it a little over £100,000 to stop people saving pictures a public body was already putting online. The comparison is the London galleries. Douglas McCarthy’s FOI figures show the National Gallery Picture Library paying a £100,000 internal fee to exist, then posting net losses of £37,575 and £47,615 in two of the last three reported years. Andrea Wallace’s 2022 UKRI report was blunter: licensing images of public-domain works “does not appear to be a present or future revenue scheme with potential for growth, and is actually a financial burden on the GLAM sector.” Tate, which also bought SmartFrame in 2022 for Tate Images, at least has living artists to clear. Historic England was spending six figures to wrap photographs the taxpayer had already paid for. Then the wrapper died, and the public cannot see them at all. CEO Rob Sewell wrote that SmartFrame “had all the hallmarks of a global disruptor” and was “seeking to restore industry value to the photography market.” It signed football clubs and picture agencies. It did not sign a plan B for a statutory archive. **Then they did it again to the words.** ## **UPDATE 29 Sept 2026 - this problem seems to have been fixed** On 16 September 2026 Historic England switched on a new Heritage Gateway and killed the old one. For twenty years the stable record URL was: `https://www.heritagegateway.org.uk/Gateway/Results_Single.aspx?uid=219528&resourceID=19191` That path is dead. No redirect to the record. `heritagegateway.org.uk` dumps you on a search box. PastScape `hob.aspx?hob_id=` went the same way years ago and now has nowhere to land. Volunteer sites took the hit first: Megalithic Portal, Megalithomania, county walk pages, teaching lists — anything that treated a Gateway UID as a permalink. Annoying. Expected, if you hitch your wagon to someone else’s CMS. Then look at HE’s _own_ map. The Aerial Archaeology Mapping Explorer still draws. The banks and ditches are on the Open Data Hub. What died is the click. Every grey monument pop-up was supposed to open the full record. HE baked the old Gateway URLs into the GIS. The published schema says so, in words a child could read: * `HE_URL1` to `HE_URL5` — “URL link to the relevant Historic England record in Heritage Gateway” * `HER_LINK_1` to `HER_LINK_25` — the same for the local HER * `HER_PREF_REF` — “alternative HER UID that is used to create the Heritage Gateway URL” Thousands of those strings are sitting in a national dataset HE still publishes. The Mapping Explorer landing page _still_ tells you a click “will take you to the Heritage Gateway” and _still_ points at heritagegateway.org.uk/gateway. They relaunched the catalogue and left their own map wired to the corpse. Not a third party this time. Not SmartFrame. Them. A public body spent six figures locking pictures, then cancelled the only stable identifier the rest of the web — and its own aerial mapping tool — had been told to use. HIAS Principle 5 was “a national overview should continue to be delivered online through the Heritage Gateway.” Principle 6 was that knowledge “should not be at risk of loss, fragmentation… or system obsolescence.” They managed both in a fortnight. Let the photographs free. Out of copyright: a JPEG. Need a tidy file for print: charge for the file, not for the looking. And if you change a national URL scheme, redirect the old ones. A statutory archive is not a Premier League still, and a mapping explorer with thousands of dead links on the organisation’s own website is not a launch.