Sierra Leone has just reported one week of zero confirmed Ebola infections – the first time since the deadly virus reached its border in May 2014. If there are no more infections for 42 days after the country’s last Ebola patient was discharged, the outbreak will be declared over. But the race to end...

Falling four days in a row, China’s main stock index, the Shanghai Composite, has plummeted below the 3,000 threshold. This represents a huge loss of money for the investors involved. But it’s worth remembering that the stock market remains relatively peripheral to the wider Chinese economy. Indeed, China’s...

The idea of a deep-frozen world, “snowball Earth”, has captured the imagination since first proposed in the 1990s. On several occasions in history, long before animals evolved, apparently synchronous ice sheets existed on all the continents. However, much like falling into a crevasse on a glacier, it’s easy...