I’m a Celebrity contestant Kelly Brook had to be reminded it was her birthday after getting the days mixed up on Sunday (23 November).

Drag Race UK star La Voix exited Strictly Come Dancing during the Blackpool special on Sunday due to an injury announced in the previous episode.

BBC’s Strictly Come Dancing star Nikita Kuzmin has issued a heartfelt message to those diagnosed with type 1 diabetes.

Anti-AI and pro-beauty, Leo XIV has proved an unlikely custodian of culture – and a patron of meaningful work in a world of algorithmic slop

So, who figured that Pope Leo XIV would end up being kind of cool? Not me. Although as a lapsed Catholic I had little stake in the conclave race, I felt that there was something unglamorous, dare I say godless, about a first-ever supreme pontiff born in the US, let alone one hailing from Chicago, the same city as Hugh Hefner, Hillary Clinton and Kanye West. There were greater apprehensions beyond taste, too. Would this finally be the ordination of the reinvigorated Maga movement after the death of the compassionate Pope Francis? When Leo appeared on the balcony of St Peter’s Basilica wearing the traditional red mozzetta cape eschewed by his predecessor, it was too easy to jump to conclusions.

By the grace of God, the red mozzetta was a red herring. Very quickly, American conservatives went into meltdown over the pope’s patent anti-Maga leanings and his empathy for migrants and marginalised groups – “anti-Trump, anti-Maga, pro-open borders and a total Marxist,” fumed far-right activist Laura Loomer. That alone has been a relief. But perhaps even more significantly, Leo has demonstrated the benefits an American bishop of Rome can have for the rest of us, Christian, Catholic or otherwise: that is through his exemplary cultural leadership, and close engagement with the arts.

Jason Okundaye is an assistant newsletter editor and writer at the Guardian. He edits The Long Wave newsletter and is the author of Revolutionary Acts: Love & Brotherhood in Black Gay Britain

From Claire Foy’s Anne Boleyn in Wolf Hall to Adriana in The Sopranos, we meet the actors who had to bump off TV legends … and then face the wrath of the public

Talk about being a pantomime villain. It’s unpopular enough playing the antagonist who murders a long-running TV character. When your victim is a fan favourite, though, you risk being vilified even more. So what’s it like being the ultimate baddy and breaking viewers’ hearts? Do they get booed in the street or trolled online? We asked five actors who killed off beloved characters – from Spooks to The Sopranos, Wolf Hall to Westeros – about their experiences …

The masked singer’s jagged pop deals in suburban bleakness, English nationalism and jilted romance against a backdrop of DIY drum machines and acoustic guitar

From Darlington, County Durham
Recommended if you like Blood Orange, Dean Blunt, Elliott Smith
Up next The Dirt Pt 1 EP out now

As the internet spits out underground artists like mouthwash, it’s becoming harder to separate the visionaries from the vibe-hackers. But Pollyfromthedirt’s jagged pastoral pop demands more than just a passing scroll. Released independently this week, the County Durham native’s first EP clashes brass band samples, shuddering Midi strings and awkward acoustic guitar together. There’s a trace of Elliott Smith in his grey-skied songwriting, yet made entirely his own by the crude drum machines, pitched-up vocals and DIY production. At best, like the EP’s weirdest track, Kalm, the music departs from traditional song structure and coalesces into delay-steeped, swirling ambience.

Irish indie acts used to be ignored, even on Irish radio. But songs confronting the Troubles, poverty and oppression are now going global – and changing how Ireland sees itself

On a hot Saturday afternoon at Glastonbury, while many are nursing halfway-point hangovers, the Dublin garage punk quartet Sprints whip up a jubilant mosh pit with their charged tune Descartes, Irish tricolour flags bobbing above them. As summer speeds on, at Japan’s Fuji rock festival, new songs from Galway indie act NewDad enrapture the crowd. Travy, a Nigerian-born and Tallaght-raised rapper, crafts a mixtape inflected with his Dublin lilt, the follow-up to the first Irish rap album to top the Irish charts. Efé transcends Dublin bedroom pop to get signed by US label Fader, and on Later … With Jools Holland, George Houston performs the haunting Lilith – a tribute to political protest singers everywhere – in a distinctive Donegal accent.

From Melbourne to Mexico City, concertgoers continue to scream to that opening loop on strings of Fontaines DC’s Starburster, and CMAT’s viral “woke macarena” dance to her hit single Take a Sexy Picture of Me plays out in festival pits and on TikTok. You might have heard about Kneecap, too.

I guessed it would be worth a couple of hundred pounds at most, but it was a preparatory print for his famous 1639 etching The Goldweigher

My father died 20 years ago, when I was 26, and my mother died 10 years later. I’ve always felt grateful that one of the things they passed on to me was a love of art. My dad, Alan Barlow, was a stage designer, a Benedictine monk and then, after marrying my mother, Grace – who was a GP – he became a full-time artist.

In his studio in Norfolk, there were two big Victorian plan chests, where he stored paper and sketches he had created. He was also an art collector and some of the drawers contained artworks he had bought but didn’t have wall space for. For a long time, I didn’t feel ready to go through everything in his studio. I always felt connected to him when I went in there.

His love of ‘good northern soul and funk’ was always in evidence and had a lasting impact on alternative music

• Gary ‘Mani’ Mounfield dies aged 63

• Mani: a life in pictures

By any metric, the rise of the Stone Roses was a sudden and remarkable thing. It took place over the course of 12 months. At the start of 1989, they were just a local cause of excitement in Manchester, largely ignored by the traditional outlets for alternative rock in Britain. John Peel wasn’t a fan. The music press had barely mentioned their most recent single, Elephant Stone. They were barely able to fill even a more modest London venue such as Dingwalls. But by November they were huge. Their single Fools Gold had entered the charts at No 8 and their performance was the big attraction on that week’s Top of the Pops – a barely imaginable state of affairs for most indie bands in the late 80s.

In retrospect, you can find any number of reasons why the Stone Roses cut such an extraordinary path, clearly attracting a far bigger and broader audience than usually displayed an interest in alternative rock at the time. They were set apart by their look – which seemed to align them more to the burgeoning acid house scene – their cockily belligerent attitude and the skill of the guitarist John Squire, unashamedly virtuosic in a world of distorted thrashing downstrokes.

Ian Brown and Tim Burgess were among those to pay tribute to Mani, whose death was announced by his brother and nephew

• Alexis Petridis: ‘Mani’s writhing, relentless bass was the Stone Roses’ secret sauce – it taught indie kids how to dance’

• Gary ‘Mani’ Mounfield: a life in pictures

Gary “Mani” Mounfield, best known as bassist of the Stone Roses and later a member of Primal Scream, has died aged 63. The cause of death has not been shared.

His brother Greg Mounfield posted the news on Facebook on Thursday: “It is with the heaviest of hearts that I have to announce the sad passing of my brother.” His nephew also shared the news.

When Austrian philosopher Otto Neurath invented the visual language of Isotypes, it was to democratise education. As a new exhibition shows, it ended up influencing pop art, graphic design and electronic musicians from Kraftwerk to OMD

When Otto Neurath died in Oxford some 80 years ago, far away from his native Vienna, he was still finding his feet in exile. Like many a Jewish refugee, the economist, philosopher and sociologist had been interned as a suspected enemy alien on the Isle of Man, along with his third wife and close collaborator Marie Reidemeister, having chanced a last-minute life-saving escape from their interim hideout in the Netherlands across the Channel in a rickety boat in 1940.

Thanks to Neurath’s pioneering use of pictorial statistics – or “Isotypes” as Reidemeister called them, an acronym for “International System of Typographic Picture Education” – he left behind an enormous legacy in the arts and social sciences: it is the language through which we decode and analyse the modern world. But his lasting relevance would have been hard to predict at the time of his death at the age of 63.

On Tuesday 7 October the winner(s) of the 2025 Nobel Prize for Physics will be announced. The process of choosing the winners is highly secretive, so looking for hints about who will be this year’s laureates is futile. Indeed, in the immediate run-up to announcement, only members of the Nobel Committee for Physics and the Class for Physics at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences know who will be minted as the latest Nobel laureates. What is more, recent prizes provide little guidance because the deliberations and nominations are kept secret for 50 years. So we really are in the dark when it comes to predicting who will be named next week.

If you would like to learn more about how the Nobel Prize for Physics is awarded, check out this profile of Lars Brink, who served on the Nobel Committee for Physics on eight occasions.

But this level of secrecy doesn’t stop people like me from speculating about this year’s winners. Before I explain the rather lovely infographic that illustrates this article – and how it could be used to predict future Nobel winners – I am going to share my first prediction for next week.

Inspired by last year’s physics Nobel prize, which went to two computer scientists for their work on artificial intelligence, I am predicting that the 2025 laureates will be honoured for their work on quantum information and algorithms. Much of the pioneering work in this field was done several decades ago, and has come to fruition in functioning quantum computers and cryptography systems. So the time seems right for an award and I have four people in mind. They are Peter Shor, Gilles Brassard, Charles Bennett and David Deutsch. However, only three can share the prize.

Moving on to our infographic, which gives a bit of pseudoscientific credibility to my next predictions! It charts the history of the physics Nobel prize in terms of field of endeavour. One thing that is apparent from the infographic is that since about 1990 there have been clear gaps between awards in certain fields. If you look at “atomic, molecular and optical physics”, for example, there are gaps between awards of about 5–10 years. One might conclude, therefore, that the Nobel committee considers the field of an award and tries to avoid bunching together awards in the same field.

Looking at the infographic, it looks like we are long overdue a prize in nuclear and particle physics – the last being 10 years ago. However, we haven’t had many big breakthroughs in this field lately. Two aspects of particle physics that have been very fruitful in the 21st century have been the study of the quark–gluon plasma formed when heavy nuclei collide; and the precise study of antimatter – observing how it behaves under gravity, for example. But I think it might be a bit too early for Nobels in these fields.

One possibility for a particle-physics Nobel is the development of the theory of cosmic inflation, which seeks to explain the observed nature of the current universe by invoking an exponential expansion of the universe in its very early history. If an award were given for inflation, it would most certainly go to Alan Guth and Andrei Linde. A natural for the third slot would have been Alexei Starobinsky, who sadly died in 2023 – and Nobels are not awarded posthumously. If there was a third winner for inflation, it would probably be Paul Steinhardt.

Invisibility cloaks

2016 was the last year when we had a Nobel prize in condensed-matter physics, so what work in that field would be worthy of an award this year? There has been a lot of very interesting research done in the field of metamaterials – materials that are engineered to have specific properties, particularly in terms of how they interact with light or sound.

A Nobel prize for metamaterials would surely go to the theorist John Pendry, who pioneered the concept of transformation optics. This simplifies our understanding of how light interacts with metamaterials and helps with the design of objects and devices with amazing properties. These include invisibility cloaks –the first of which was built in 2006 by the experimentalist David Smith, who I think is also a contender for this year’s Nobel prize. Smith’s cloak works at microwave frequencies, but my nomination for the third slot has done an amazing amount of work on developing metamaterials for practical applications in optics. If you follow this field, you know that I am thinking of the applied physicist Federico Capasso – who is also known for the invention of the quantum cascade laser.

The post Quantum information or metamaterials: our predictions for this year’s Nobel Prize for Physics appeared first on Physics World.