Doomsday: History's Most Dangerous Podcast

I've recently been helping run experiments to reduce accidents at train stations. It's a big issue and many falls are caused by people rushing. But how do you change that behaviour when most people are too frantic to pay attention to messaging? Well we (Joanna Stanley, Anita Brown, Paul Corney at Avanti West Coast and I) decided to build on existing findings on the calming role of music. For example, Charles Spence from the University of Oxford found in a 2024 study with South Western Railway that nature soundscapes (e.g. birdsong, flowing rivers) in the carriage reduced people's stress by 35%. Similarly, in 2014, Marek Franěk from the University of Hradec Králové in the Czech Republic found that downtempo music made people walk 12% slower than an uptempo soundtrack when walking a 2km circuit. We wanted to see if more fleeting exposure could have a positive effect. Our test was at Stoke train station. We picked a subway and used a stopwatch to record how long it took people to walk through it. With no music playing, people took 16.15 seconds on average. Then we rotated four different soundtracks in 30-minute intervals: ⛱️ Relaxing music (528 HZ) 🎻 Slow-tempo classical music 🎙️ Easy listening music 🕊️ Birdsong Every musical intervention slowed people down but playing birdsong had the biggest effect - in that setting, it took people 17.43 seconds to cross the subway. That's 8% slower than with no music. Of course, this study is a one-off, so it needs to be replicated to see if the effect holds. But it sits within a broader body of research on the positive effects of music on public behaviour. This is a fascinating area of research - and one that has the potential for simple, low-cost applications to make public spaces a little safer.

This guy who lives in this block of flats cuts a structural column on the 6th floor of his 20-story building to improve the view

If you told me four years ago that I’d be watching videos of a shotgun-mounted Ukrainian drone mercilessly shooting down a swarm of russian drones, I would have laughed. Yet, here we are.

Deadly Dukono eruption update: Two hikers from Singapore who had been missing since the eruption have now been confirmed dead. An Indonesian woman was also found earlier near the crater area. 17 others made it off the volcano alive. Search and rescue teams have been dealing with continuing eruptions, falling ash and terrible conditions on the mountain, making recovery efforts extremely difficult. Officials are now reportedly looking into how climbers were able to enter the area despite restrictions already being in place around the volcano.

On May 9, 1980, a 1,400-foot section of the Sunshine Skyway Bridge collapsed over Tampa Bay, Florida, after the bridge was hit by a freighter. Thirty-five people in six cars and a Greyhound bus fell 150 feet to their deaths