The web has changed hugely since it was first launched 30 years ago today – and not all for the better. A new generation of technologies, from private peer-to-peer networks to blockchain, appears promising in the fight back against the dominance of a handful of corporate tech giants accused of invading our privacy and strangling economic growth. But, write Edina Harbinja and Vasileios Karagiannopoulos, this vision of Web 3.0 – with projects using similar technology to Bitcoin and blockchain already underway – also comes with some serious risks.

The idea that humanity has permanently changed the geological record is marked by the Anthropocene. It’s a powerful idea, and recognises the damage humans have done to the planet. But it’s also a faulty one, argues Matthew Adams, because considered in the context of Earth’s deep time, humanity is irrelevant – much better, he says, to reignite our sense of reverence at nature, and time itself.

William Shakespeare is the most famous playwright in the English language, but what of the actors who spoke his lines? Richard Burbage, the man for whom many of the Bard’s greatest roles were written, died 400 years ago today. Shakespeare scholar Lisa Hopkins talks us through the stage career of one of the great actors of the Elizabethan age and what the clues in plays such as Twelfth Night and Romeo and Juliet tell us about him and other actors of that time.

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