Back in the days we were allowed to go to parties, my friends would often get annoyed at me. While they were talking, I’d be easily distracted by something going on at the other end of the room. I was trying to concentrate, but struggled to focus on their voice when there were so many others around me talking. I know I’m not alone in this, but I had no idea the issue doesn’t just affect humans.

Female frogs use the calls of males to pick out a potential mate. But when there are more than 40 species of frog all living and croaking in the same place, the sounds are easily drowned out. It turns out tree frogs have evolved a clever trick to help. Their lungs produce a sound and transmit it directly to their eardrums, at exactly the right frequency to muffle the sounds of different species. This leaves the calls of their own species much clearer. This is just how a pair of noise cancelling headphones works to muffle background noise.

As we mark one year from the first death in the UK publicly attributed to COVID-19, Danny Dorling looks at why the death toll has been so high, and suggests inequality may have been partly to blame. Meanwhile, people in the south-west of Iceland have been told to be extra careful as more than 17,000 earthquakes have been recorded in just one week, just 27km from the country’s capital. In the past, similar periods of turbulence have led to volcanic eruptions.

Finally, make sure you listen to latest episode of our podcast, The Conversation Weekly. This week we look at how climate change is flooding the Arctic Ocean with light – and what that means for the species that live there.

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