In 1998, about 300 Guardian articles mentioned populism. In 2016, 2,000 did. What happened? • Revealed: how populists tripled their vote over 20 yearsPopulism is sexy. Particularly since 2016 – the year of the Brexit referendum and the election of Donald Trump – it seems as if journalists just cannot get enough of it. In 1998, the Guardian published...

It’s time to say goodbye to the Political Science blog at the Guardian – but we’re moving to a new homeLast week, the results of a successful trial of a new diet pill – lorcaserin – were published in the New England Journal of Medicine and immediately hailed by some as a “holy grail” in the fight against obesity. The study of 12,000 people in the US...

With more than £500m a year at stake, the scale of losses to UK research from a no-deal Brexit are becoming clearOn 14 June 2016, just over a week before the EU referendum, Vote Leave were keen to calm the fears of British scientists, farmers and others who relied on European funds. The thirteen Vote Leave ministers signed a pledge, still standing on...

The government has shaken up the UK research system. But fossil fuels, not low-carbon technologies, still seem to be in the driving seat.A new report by Richard Jones and James Wilsdon invites us to question the biomedical bubble - the slow but steady concentration of research and development (R&D) resources in the hands of biomedical science.A...

A new study calls for a rebalancing of research and innovation funding to better meet the UK’s economic, social and health needsThe political turmoil over recent days has meant that a speech last week by Sam Gyimah, minister for universities and science, hasn’t received the attention it deserves. Opening the Schrödinger Building in Oxford, Gyimah set...

A new report takes stock of how metrics are being used and abused in research management across UK universities In his 2003 bestseller Moneyball, the writer Michael Lewis describes how the fortunes of the Oakland Athletics baseball team were transformed by the rigorous use of predictive data and modelling to identify undervalued talent. These approaches...