This week you’ll notice a few changes to our email as we’ve adopted a style that is more like the main newsletters of our other editions. We hope you keep enjoying our European-focused content as we cover more and more European research.

As we prepared this email, news was breaking of far-right leader Geert Wilders apparent win in the Dutch election. Is this another sign of the power of nostalgia in European politics? Stefan Müller of University College Dublin and Sven-Oliver Proksch of the University of Cologne have been studying how parties appeal to the past.

Speaking of the past, British director Ridley Scott is no stranger to historical films. More than two decades ago he released Gladiator, which won the Oscar for best picture. But just because Scott has a preference for stories from the past doesn’t mean he clings rigidly to historical evidence. His new film, which opens this week in much of Europe, aims for a monumental feat: to cover the life and work of Napoleon Bonaparte in two and a half hours. Critics have already jumped on the film, pointing out its historical errors. Scott’s response? To tell them to get lost.

We wanted to find out which of the details Scott has chosen to include might not be entirely true. Joan Tumblety, from the University of Southampton in the UK, sorts fact from fiction – and explains the sources of the stories we’ve been told about Napoleon.

Misinformation is not only found in films, which after all have a licence to fictionalise. Today, social media is full of fake news. New research by Carlos Diaz Ruiz, of the Hanken School of Economics, shows that the presence of misleading information is now essentially a feature of the business model rather than a bug.

In a recent newsletter, we talked about fewer insects ending up squashed on our car windscreens these days as a sign of troubling species loss. Today we focus specifically on the declining bee population and how to solve it. A group of scientists wants to arm bees with robots. In one of their projects, they will turn a beehive into a smart home. Another will be devoted to pampering the queen bee. Both demonstrate the surprising and exciting directions science can take when faced with an urgent and vexing problem.

Please, feel free to browse around our other articles, including research in politics looking at why the radical left hasn't been able to replicate the successes of Wilders and the rest of the radical right in Europe ... and Russian rap.