All posts tagged: tracks

Trains to London Stansted cancelled after wildfires erupt near tracks | UK | News

Trains to London Stansted cancelled after wildfires erupt near tracks | UK | News

Published by Sam Flores

Wildfires have erupted next to a busy railway line, sparking travel chaos for people travelling to and from Stansted Airport. Trains serving London Liverpool Street have been halted following a fire near the tracks in Waltham Cross, Hertfordshire, just before 3pm on Sunday. Greater Anglia said the London Fire Brigade called for trains to be stopped due to the fire’s proximity to the railway lines. Services to and from Stansted Airport, Cambridge North, Meridian Water, and Hertford East have all been affected. Services operating through these stations can expect to be delayed, cancelled or diverted through Seven Sisters, Greater Anglia added. An LFB spokesman said: “One of the Brigade’s Terrain Support Vehicles has been sent to the scene to support firefighting efforts. The vehicle provides off-road capability enabling the transportation of additional equipment closer to fires on open ground. “Each vehicle carries approximately 475 litres of water, a backpack blower, ear defenders, beaters and misting lance technology, which allows firefighters to pump water and drive, enabling them to tackle grass fires more quickly and safely.” …

Bombshell figures reveal how often Royal Navy tracks Putin’s warships | UK | News

Bombshell figures reveal how often Royal Navy tracks Putin’s warships | UK | News

Published by Sam Flores

Royal Navy ships are being deployed on average twice a week to monitor Russian warships and sanctioned oil tankers, new figures show. The Navy “activated” ships 116 times in the past year to track nearly 90 Russian or Russian-linked vessels in the UK’s exclusive economic zone, reports say. It follows warnings from the First Sea Lord that Russian incursions into British waters had soared by nearly a third in the last two years. General Sir Gwyn Jenkins has said Britain is facing an “open sea border” with Russia in the North Atlantic as tensions continue to rise between Moscow and NATO. The new figures were released in the Ministry of Defence’s (MoD) annual report. It said a total of 61 Russian warships and submarines were shadowed by the Navy during the last 12 months, according to The Telegraph. While 28 “Russian merchant vessels”, suspected of being part of Moscow’s shadow fleet, were followed. The vessels are accused of helping to fund Russia’s war on Ukraine by transporting oil and gas while evading international sanctions. A …

Add to playlist: the art-pop showtunes of Luki and the week’s best new tracks | Music

Add to playlist: the art-pop showtunes of Luki and the week’s best new tracks | Music

Published by Sam Flores

From Hastings, UKRecommended if you like Mary Margaret O’Hara, Tori Amos, Fiona AppleUp next Old Feelings EP out now, album to follow later in 2026 The first time listening to Luki feels like a miraculous discovery of something timeless and true, as though they’ve been waiting patiently to be discovered in the noisy maelstrom of contemporary pop music. The collaborative alias of singer/composer Lucy Duncan and producer Niac, Luki write off-kilter showtunes performed as baroque art songs, embodying a seemingly contradictory combination of grand melodrama and nuanced emotional character. Luki’s debut album Wisps was released by the excellent Glasgow-based tape label GLARC in 2018, followed by a sporadic string of singles over subsequent years. With the new EP Old Feelings, the project appears to be building up to something more substantial. The title track feels like a climactic ballad from a lost, late-period Sondheim musical by way of 90s Celine Dion: all rolling pianos and wry regrets, with synth lines lingering like dry ice. Strong, direct and rich with character, Duncan’s voice shares the wisdom …

New PACA mapping tool tracks fossil locations back through millions of years

New PACA mapping tool tracks fossil locations back through millions of years

Published by Jenni Sidey

The Paleocoordinates Calculator, or PACA, lets users reconstruct ancient fossil locations from modern coordinates and geological ages without coding or desktop software. The web tool compares results from five established global plate models and measures how much their predictions differ. PACA displays reconstructed points in tables and on interactive 3D paleogeographic globes, with export options for further analysis. Validation across 142 reconstructions showed near-perfect agreement with GPlates desktop software, with median spatial errors below 17 metres. Fossils are often discovered in one place but formed in another, carried across the planet by tectonic plates over millions of years. Reconstructing that earlier location usually demands specialist software, model knowledge and careful handling of geological data. The Paleocoordinates Calculator, known as PACA, converts present-day fossil coordinates into estimated positions from deep time. Users can upload a CSV file containing modern longitude, latitude and geological age, then receive reconstructed paleocoordinates within seconds. The BIOST3 Research Group developed the tool and described it in the journal Scientific Reports. The team included Noa Scholz-Murcia, Alejandro Rodríguez-Mena, Víctor Madarnás-Gómez and Antonio …

Add to playlist: the fluid club deconstructions of Stolen Velour, Floco and Aria SL and the week’s best new tracks | Music

Add to playlist: the fluid club deconstructions of Stolen Velour, Floco and Aria SL and the week’s best new tracks | Music

Published by Sam Flores

From South LondonRecommended if you like FKA twigs, James K, Anysia KimUp next Debut album Underlight out now The Guardian’s journalism is independent. We will earn a commission if you buy something through an affiliate link. Learn more. There are many ways to deconstruct club music. On Bristol label Illegal Data, releases might take explosive approaches to scary (Ship Sket) and whimsical (Mun Sing) extremes. More recently, the same label finds Stolen Velour, Floco and Aria SL filling the club chest-high with liquid: you hear elements sink, dissolve, or float past serenely on the surface. The trio began as housemates in south east London, where sounds bleeding into one another was less a creative choice, and more a reality of housesharing. To create their sound, they pooled their ideas as producers, before adding their individual touches: Floco’s violin, Aria SL’s bel canto vocals and Stolen Velour’s clubbier production chops. Their shapeshifting approach to live club music has meant an unusual spread of support slots: somehow, they complement both Jabu’s dubby shoegaze, and the hardcore horror rave …

Amazfit’s Screenless Wearable Tracks Fitness With an Added Waist Motion Sensor

Amazfit’s Screenless Wearable Tracks Fitness With an Added Waist Motion Sensor

Published by skeptic

People want to spend less time looking at screens, and health tech companies are taking notice with screenless wearables, including Whoop, Polar, Luna and, most recently, Google with its Fitbit Air, all of which use wrist-based sensors to monitor your health.  We haven’t yet seen a health-tracking device that integrates a second sensor location until the Helio Strap Pro from wearables brand Amazfit. The $200 Helio Strap Pro was released on Monday and builds on Amazfit’s Helio Strap wrist-based fitness tracker, which launched last June.  Designed for hybrid athletes and those taking part in a Hyrox competition, the Helio Strap Pro includes both a clip-on waist motion sensor to track stability and movement and an upper-arm heart rate sensor. Hyrox is a global fitness race in which participants run 1 kilometer, then complete one of eight workout stations, repeating the cycle until all stations have been visited. How the Helio Strap Pro system works The company states in its press release that the upper-arm sensor can capture more reliable heart rate data than a wrist-based sensor because it’s closer to …

Add to playlist: the wild club-pop of Zara Larsson cowriter Helena Gao and the week’s best new tracks | Music

Add to playlist: the wild club-pop of Zara Larsson cowriter Helena Gao and the week’s best new tracks | Music

Published by Sam Flores

From Aarhus, DenmarkRecommended if you like Caroline Polachek, Zara Larsson, GrimesUp next Debut project coming later this year You could hardly make a better professional songwriting debut than co-writing nine 10ths of a moment-defining album – namely Zara Larsson’s Midnight Sun – then getting a Grammy nod for it. It’s an enviable springboard for the relaunch of Helena Gao’s solo career. Over the past few years, the Chinese-Danish artist has released a handful of singles and EPs – standout God’s Favourite split the difference between NewJeans and R&B, and comes with an excellent Sims-referencing video – but her new music feels like a real flourishing, sidelining her older sweetness for a freakier braid of heavy bass, stuttering trance and a pitch-bending falsetto to rival that of Caroline Polachek, singing in English and Mandarin. You can trace her evolution in tracks released just a few years apart. When Gao put out Pretty Please in 2023, the glittering, new-agey rhapsody was laced with innuendo: “I’m a bit of a prude,” she said, conscious of her parents hearing …

Cycling in the tracks of Britain’s camping pioneers from Oxford to Surrey | Camping holidays

Cycling in the tracks of Britain’s camping pioneers from Oxford to Surrey | Camping holidays

Published by Sam Flores

Skylarks call out a cascading trill as I pedal between the pink and white hawthorn blossoms that make my path look like a May Day parade. I’m on the outskirts of Oxford, a city I thought I knew well, yet as I follow the National Cycle Route 57 on the e-bike I’d picked up in Jericho, it feels as though I’ve discovered a secret passageway. This year the Camping and Caravanning Club (CCC) turns 125 – and I’m celebrating with a 60-mile cycling and camping trip, leaving from the city where the organisation was born and heading to Walton-on-Thames to stay at one of the oldest campsites in the CCC network. The CCC began life as the Association of Cycle Campers before becoming the club it is today. It all started when founder Thomas Hiram Holding, already a keen camper, was visiting his friend Rev EC Pitt-Johnson’s Oxford home in 1901 and they decided there was enough demand and interest in the hobby to form a club. They elected each other president and secretary respectively …

World Cup Fever Study tracks how football viewing stress impacts fan’s bodies

World Cup Fever Study tracks how football viewing stress impacts fan’s bodies

Published by Jenni Sidey

Crowds rise, voices sharpen, and a match can turn on a single kick. Now a team at Bielefeld University wants to know exactly what those moments do to the body. Its Football Fever Study, launched for the 2026 FIFA World Cup, is recruiting supporters of all national teams to track how match events affect heart rate and stress levels. The project uses smartwatch data to follow what happens during games, then compares those bodily changes with what is unfolding on the pitch. The appeal is broad by design. Anyone using a device from one of 13 supported brands can take part. The study records heart rate, stress, movement and sleep automatically through the watch, and the researchers say the data are collected anonymously and in line with data protection rules. That reach has widened quickly. When the study opened on 28 May, only Garmin devices were compatible. Since then, the team has added 12 more brands: Apple Watch, Google Pixel Watch, Samsung Health, Withings, Fitbit, Oura, Polar, Amazfit, Coros, Whoop, Xiaomi Mi Fitness and Wahoo. …

Add to playlist: the sweet plunderphonics of Quiet Light and the week’s best new tracks | Music

Add to playlist: the sweet plunderphonics of Quiet Light and the week’s best new tracks | Music

Published by Sam Flores

From Boston, via TexasRecommended if you like Grace Ives, Porter Robinson, GrimesUp next Touring EU/UK in November Riya Mahesh has perfected her own sweet, whimsical brand of plunderphonics; her seventh project as Quiet Light in six years, this year’s Blue Angel Sparkling Silver 2, sounds a little as if it’s been chopped together from samples of Mahesh’s own memory. On Berlin, she sings to a wayward love interest over a moony breakbeat and IDM glitches, as a spoken-word part – what sounds to me like a recording of a lecture – floats in the background. Star100 starts all whispers and garbled laughter, before ceding space to Mahesh’s multitracked harmonies. Sometimes, Mahesh will suddenly deliver a wildly catchy chorus, something she clearly has an aptitude for – check Dealerz, her collab with Danish band A Good Year. Mahesh’s music is avowedly feminine in its tone; she seems to advocate for sample-heavy music, as a form, as a perfect way to deconstruct and reconstruct fantasies and memories. True to that idea, Blue Angel Sparkling Silver 2 is …