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Watch The Moment Maya Jama Asks King Charles About His Love Island Knowledge
If there are two things we never imagined uttering in the same breath, they’re probably King Charles and Love Island.
The monarch and his wife Queen Camilla hosted a garden party at Buckingham Palace on Wednesday (15 May) to celebrate the creative industries, where they took some time to meet their celebrity guests.
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One particularly notable meeting took place when the King introduced himself to Love Island host Maya Jama, who jumped at the opportunity to tell the royal about the popular reality dating show.
As the presenter introduced herself, she said: “I host Love Island. I don’t know if you’ve watched that, though? It’s a reality dating show.”
The King, looking amused, replied: “There’s one born every minute.”
Maya then revealed that she was “just about to go to Spain to film some young people snog”.
During her short interaction with Charles, Maya even admitted to once previously breaking protocol by touching the royal when she wasn’t supposed to, which got a laugh out of the King.
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Other guests at the afternoon garden party included model Kate Moss, documentarian Louis Theroux, director Sir Ridley Scott and artist Tracey Emin.
As for Love Island’s return this summer, there’s still some speculation about the exact date it will be back on screen, but previous years suggest it might be the first week of June.
The new series will welcome a whole new crop of islanders to the villa in Mallorca this summer, where young singletons will search (and graft) for love.
Earlier this year marked the first time a host of former contestants returned to the villa for Love Island All Stars.
It was series six’s Molly Smith and season nine’s Tom Clare who were crowned the public’s favourite pairing at the final, though it turned out the voting figures were actually pretty close.
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‘Seriously Steamy’ Or ‘Stale’? Critics Can’t Agree On Bridgerton Season 3
After the first two seasons became record-breaking TV smashes, hopes have certainly been high for the long-awaited next chapter in the high-society world of Bridgerton.
Part one of season three is now streaming on Netflix, with viewers finally able to swoon over the much-hyped romance between Penelope Featherington (Nicola Coughlan) and Colin Bridgerton (Luke Newton).
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This next instalment certainly marks the biggest romantic build-up the regency drama has teased so far – but was the wait worth it?
While some critics have praised the Netflix show’s reliable format and sweet chemistry between its stars, others fear the show might be losing its spark.
Here’s the consensus on the first half of season three so far…
“Nicola Coughlan is sensational as Penelope Featherington, whose long-simmering romance with Colin Bridgerton reaches boiling point – and the bonking is scarce but seriously steamy… As we dive into season three, the show’s delights are still blindingly obvious, its flaws possible to overlook. Just like the besotted couples it follows, Bridgerton’s honeymoon phase is far from over.”
“There is something about seeing the bond between Colin and Penelope transform from comfortably platonic to yearning and passionate that elevates this journey. Coughlan and Newton have always had a beautiful rapport, but watching Colin realise he desires Penelope sexually […], creates a sparkling tension throughout Part 1 that threatens to burst off the screen.”
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“Still sweet and seductive but the taste is growing stale…If you don’t have much of a sweet tooth, this still won’t be the show for you. But if you’re craving an early-summer pick-me-up, you’ll devour these warm and watchable episodes in one scrummy sitting.”
LIAM DANIEL/NETFLIX
“In Season 3 of Netflix favourite, the spell starts to wear off…despite the friends-to-lovers premise, we are given little sense of what Colin and Penelope are like as buddies before they’re thrust into the awkwardness of attraction. Combined with the fact that Colin is written to have little of the rich inner life that Penelope enjoys […] the relationship that should be this volume’s breathless centrepiece feels uneven.”
IGN (6/10)
“Bridgerton Season 3 Part 1 has the bones of something great. Nicola Coughlan and Luke Newton excel as the couple at centre stage, beautifully portraying the knife’s edge balance on which Penelope and Colin’s relationship sits…Time will tell if the rest of Bridgerton’s third season can balance its overabundance of plot threads, but Nicola Coughlan and Luke Newton’s chemistry as Penelope and Colin is shaping up to be worth the wait for Part 2.”
“One of the best things about Bridgerton is its ability to tell a different kind of love story each season. Yes, there is a rotating cast of characters who each get their own storylines, but the central romance – and its dynamics and tropes – stand apart, giving us an opportunity to enjoy and experience something fresh each time.”
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“Even though this is very much Penelope and Colin’s time in the spotlight, the third season (of which the first six episodes were provided for review) also begins to sow the seeds of other love stories that, quite frankly, need plenty of time to grow. These teased threads don’t just prove that the future of Bridgerton is already being taken into consideration, but that the series itself is still as good as ever.”
“Nicola Coughlan is superb – but the Netflix show is losing its bite… The writing in this third chapter is particularly flimsy, while the production design looks increasingly like the hyper-saturated, uncanny results produced by an AI tool.”
“Regency romp has gone stale – even the sex scenes are dull…What was once fresh and fun now seems stuck in a rut, as the hit period drama begins to show signs of wear.”
The first half of Bridgerton season three is available to watch now on Netflix, with the next four episodes set to drop on Thursday 13 June.
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Putin And Xi Have Denied The Obvious With A Strange Take On Russia’s Relationship With China
Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping have revealed that they apparently share a rather unusual view on Russia and China’s place in the world.
The Russian president is currently on a rare two-day state visit to Beijing to visit one of his few remaining allies after his illegal invasion of Ukraine, Xi.
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According to the Russian state news agency, TASS, Putin began his trip by claiming relations between Moscow and Beijing “are not opportunistic and are not directed against anyone”.
While this year marks the 75th anniversary of positive relations between the two countries, there’s no doubt that this “bond” deepened after Putin invaded Ukraine in 2022.
Beijing supplies Moscow with essential equipment used to build weapons, while also buying enough Russian fossil fuels to keep the economy afloat amid Western sanctions.
China stops short of offering actual weapons or ammunition though, so as to dodge the West’s ire.
However, Putin did not mention any of this transactional relationship – in public, at least.
Instead, he said: “Our cooperation in world affairs today serves as one of the main stabilising factors in the international arena.”
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Putin continued: “Together, we uphold the principles of justice and a democratic world order that reflects multipolar realities and is based on international law.”
Similarly, Chinese outlet Xinhua reported that the Xi said their close cooperation helped maintain positive global stability and promote greater democracy.
“China and Russia defend a world order based on international law,” Xi said.
An international arrest warrant is actually out against Putin right now over for the illegal deportation and transfer of children during the Ukraine war.
This move prompted the leader of a group seeking independence for the Uyghur people from China to request a similar warrant for Xi.
The Chinese leader has also faced international condemnation for the suppression of protests in Hong Kong.
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Putin was just re-elected for his fifth term in office in a sham election, after he eliminated all feasible opposition – and China is known as a one-party state.
However, both leaders claim to be figures of harmony.
Referring to Xi as “my dear friend”, Putin said: “We are determined to further harmonise integration processes in the Eurasian space.”
The Russian president also thanked his Chinese counterpart for his efforts to “regulate the situation” in Ukraine, referring to Beijing’s 12-point plan to end the Ukraine war.
Junior doctors in England agree to talks with government
Members of the British Medical Association union have been staging walkouts for more than a year.
Infertility treatment doubles the risk of postpartum heart disease
A study by Rutgers Health experts of more than 31 million hospital records shows that infertility treatment patients were twice as likely as those who conceived naturally to be hospitalized with heart disease in the year after delivery.
Patients who underwent infertility were particularly likely — 2.16 times as likely as those who conceived naturally — to undergo hospitalization for dangerously high blood pressure or hypertension.
“Postpartum checkups are necessary for all patients, but this study indicates they are particularly important for patients who undergo infertility treatment to achieve a conception,” said Rei Yamada, an obstetrics and gynecology resident at Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School and lead author of the study.
The study authors say their results support standards of care that now call for an initial postpartum checkup three weeks after delivery, standards that some health systems have yet to adopt. Much of the elevated risk came in the first month after delivery, particularly for patients who developed dangerously high blood pressure.
“And these results aren’t the only ones to indicate that follow-up should occur early,” said Cande Ananth, chief of the Division of Epidemiology and Biostatistics in the Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology, and Reproductive Sciences at Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School and senior author of the study. “We have been involved in a series of studies over the past few years that have found serious risks of heart disease and stroke to various high-risk patient populations within those initial 30 days after delivery — risks that could be mitigated with earlier follow-up care.”
The study analyzed the Nationwide Readmissions Database, which contains nationally representative data on about 31 million hospital discharges and readmissions per year. The database contains diagnosis codes, which let researchers find specific populations and identify reasons for readmission.
The researchers used data from more than 31 million patients who were discharged following delivery from 2010 to 2018, including 287,813 patients who had undergone any infertility treatment.
Although infertility treatment predicted a sharply elevated risk of heart disease, the study authors said the relative youth of infertility treatment patients kept their overall risk fairly low. Just 550 of every 100,000 women who received infertility treatment and 355 of every 100,000 who conceived naturally were hospitalized with cardiovascular disease in the year after delivery.
The cause of the elevated risk of heart disease associated with infertility treatment remains unclear. The increase in heart disease could stem from the infertility treatments themselves, the underlying medical issues that made patients infertile or some other cause.
“Looking forward, I’d like to see if different types of infertility treatment and, importantly, medications are associated with different risk levels,” said Yamada. “Our data gave no information about which patients had undergone which treatment. More detailed information might also provide insight into how infertility treatment impacts cardiovascular outcomes.”
Scientists want to know how the smells of nature benefit our health
Spending time in nature is good for us. Studies have shown that contact with nature can lift our well-being by affecting emotions, influencing thoughts, reducing stress and improving physical health. Even brief exposure to nature can help. One well-known study found that hospital patients recovered faster if their room included a window view of a natural setting.
Knowing more about nature’s effects on our bodies could not only help our well-being, but could also improve how we care for land, preserve ecosystems and design cities, homes and parks. Yet studies on the benefits of contact with nature have typically focused primarily on how seeing nature affects us. There has been less focus on what the nose knows. That is something a group of researchers wants to change.
“We are immersed in a world of odorants, and we have a sophisticated olfactory system that processes them, with resulting impacts on our emotions and behavior,” said Gregory Bratman, a University of Washington assistant professor of environmental and forest sciences. “But compared to research on the benefits of seeing nature, we don’t know nearly as much about how the impacts of nature’s scents and olfactory cues affect us.”
In a paper published May 15 in Science Advances, Bratman and colleagues from around the world outline ways to expand research into how odors and scents from natural settings impact our health and well-being. The interdisciplinary group of experts in olfaction, psychology, ecology, public health, atmospheric science and other fields are based at institutions in the U.S., the U.K., Taiwan, Germany, Poland and Cyprus.
At its core, the human sense of smell, or olfaction, is a complex chemical detection system in constant operation. The nose is packed with hundreds of olfactory receptors, which are sophisticated chemical sensors. Together, they can detect more than one trillion scents, and that information gets delivered directly to the nervous system for our minds to interpret — consciously or otherwise.
The natural world releases a steady stream of chemical compounds to keep our olfactory system busy. Plants in particular exude volatile organic compounds, or VOCs, that can persist in the air for hours or days. VOCs perform many functions for plants, such as repelling herbivores or attracting pollinators. Some researchers have studied the impact of exposures to plant VOCs on people.
“We know bits and pieces of the overall picture,” said Bratman. “But there is so much more to learn. We are proposing a framework, informed by important research from many others, on how to investigate the intimate links between olfaction, nature and human well-being.”
Nature’s smell-mediated impacts likely come through different routes, according to the authors. Some chemical compounds, including a subset of those from the invisible realm of plant VOCs, may be acting on us without our conscious knowledge. In these cases, olfactory receptors in the nose could be initiating a “subthreshold” response to molecules that people are largely unaware of. Bratman and his co-authors are calling for vastly expanded research on when, where and how these undetected biochemical processes related to natural VOCs may affect us.
Other olfactory cues are picked up consciously, but scientists still don’t fully understand all their impacts on our health and well-being. Some scents, for example, may have “universal” interpretations to humans — something that nearly always smells pleasant, like a sweet-smelling flower. Other scents are closely tied to specific memories, or have associations and interpretations that vary by culture and personal experience, as research by co-author Asifa Majid of the University of Oxford has shown.
“Understanding how olfaction mediates our relationships with the natural world and the benefits we receive from it are multi-disciplinary undertakings,” said Bratman. “It involves insights from olfactory function research, Indigenous knowledge, Western psychology, anthropology, atmospheric chemistry, forest ecology, Shinrin-yoku — or ‘forest bathing’ — neuroscience, and more.”
Investigation into the potential links between our sense of smell and positive experiences with nature includes research by co-author Cecilia Bembibre at University College London, which shows that the cultural significance of smells, including those from nature, can be passed down in communities to each new generation. Co-author Jieling Xiao at Birmingham City University has delved into the associations people have with scents in built environments and urban gardens.
Other co-authors have shown that nature leaves its signature in the very air we breathe. Forests, for example, release a complex chemical milieux into the air. Research by co-author Jonathan Williams at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry and the Cyprus Institute shows how natural VOCs can react and mix in the atmosphere, with repercussions for olfactory environments.
The authors are also calling for more studies to investigate how human activity alters nature’s olfactory footprint — both by pollution, which can modify or destroy odorants in the air, and by reducing habitats that release beneficial scents.
“Human activity is modifying the environment so quickly in some cases that we’re learning about these benefits while we’re simultaneously making them more difficult for people to access,” said Bratman. “As research illuminates more of these links, our hope is that we can make more informed decisions about our impacts on the natural world and the volatile organic compounds that come from it. As we say in the paper, we live within the chemical contexts that nature creates. Understanding this more can contribute to human well-being and advance efforts to protect the natural world.”
Killer whales breathe just once between dives, study confirms
A new study has confirmed a long-held assumption: that orcas take just one breath between dives.
The researchers used drone footage and biological data from tags suction-cupped to 11 northern and southern resident killer whales off the coast of B.C. to gather information on the animals’ habits.
Whaley fun facts
Published in PLOS ONE, the study found that residents spend most of their time making shallow dives, with the majority of dives less than one minute. The longest dive recorded was 8.5 minutes, for an adult male. “Killer whales are like sprinters who don’t have the marathon endurance of blue and humpback whales to make deep and prolonged dives,” said co-author Dr. Andrew Trites, professor in the UBC Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries (IOF).
For how many fish could an orca wish?
Confirming orcas take only one breath between dives allowed the researchers to calculate how many litres of oxygen adults and juveniles consume per minute. This provides another piece of the puzzle in estimating orca energy expenditure, and eventually, how many fish the animals need to eat per day. “Researchers can then work out if the orcas are getting enough food, including the endangered southern residents, a key factor in their conservation,” said first author Tess McRae, IOF masters student.
Breathe like an orca
Killer whales in the study took 1.2 to 1.3 breaths per minute while resting and 1.5 to 1.8 while travelling or hunting. Comparatively, humans tend to take about 15 breaths per minute when resting and from 40 to 60 while exercising. “It’s the equivalent of holding your breath and running to the grocery store, shopping, and coming back before breathing again,” said co-author Dr. Beth Volpov, IOF postdoctoral fellow.
