The 2019 UK General Election had seismic consequences for British politics. After three years of political turmoil following the 2016 referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Union (EU), the 2019 election marked a victory for the Leave side of the Brexit debate, putting to rest questions of a second referendum and any chance of Parliament blocking the Withdrawal Bill. The United Kingdom left the EU on January 31, 2020. Although there were clear consequences for Britain’s EU membership, there is debate about whether 2019 was a “Brexit election” (Prosser 2020)—even a critical election (Green 2021)—or the continuation of long-term realignments in British politics (Cutts et al. 2020; Jennings and Stoker 2017). By most accounts, Brexit dominated the 2019 election as a political issue, but whether this represents a key moment in a process of realignment of voters in Britain remains to be seen.

The IntCal family of radiocarbon (14C) calibration curves is based on research spanning more than three decades. The IntCal group have collated the 14C and calendar age data (mostly derived from primary publications with other types of data and meta-data) and, since 2010, made them available for other sorts of analysis through an open-access database. This has ensured transparency in terms of the data used in the construction of the ratified calibration curves. As the IntCal database expands, work is underway to facilitate best practice for new data submissions, make more of the associated metadata available in a structured form, and help those wishing to process the data with programming languages such as R, Python, and MATLAB. The data and metadata are complex because of the range of different types of archives. A restructured interface, based on the “IntChron” open-access data model, includes tools which allow the data to be plotted and compared without the need for export. The intention is to include complementary information which can be used alongside the main 14C series to provide new insights into the global carbon cycle, as well as facilitating access to the data for other research applications. Overall, this work aims to streamline the generation of new calibration curves.

In a survey of infection prevention programs, leaders reported frequent clinical and infection prevention practice modifications to avoid coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) exposure that exceeded national guidance. Future pandemic responses should emphasize balanced approaches to precautions, prioritize educational campaigns to manage safety concerns, and generate an evidence-base that can guide appropriate infection prevention practices.

We demonstrate that the desirability bias, the elevation of the estimated likelihood of a preferred event, can be due in part to the desire for consistency between the preference for the favored event and its predicted likelihood. An experiment uses a participant’s favorite team in Major League Baseball games and a recently devised method for priming the consistency goal. When preference is the first response, priming cognitive consistency moves prediction toward greater agreement with that preference, thereby increasing the desirability bias. In contrast, when prediction is the first response, priming cognitive consistency facilitates greater agreement with the factual information for each game. This increases the accuracy of the prediction and reduces the desirability bias.

Sea-level science has seen many recent developments in observations and modelling of the different contributions and the total mean sea-level change. In this overview, we discuss (1) the evolution of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) projections, (2) how the projections compare to observations and (3) the outlook for further improving projections. We start by discussing how the model projections of 21st century sea-level change have changed from the IPCC AR5 report (2013) to SROCC (2019) and AR6 (2021), highlighting similarities and differences in the methodologies and comparing the global mean and regional projections. This shows that there is good agreement in the median values, but also highlights some differences. In addition, we discuss how the different reports included high-end projections. We then show how the AR5 projections (from 2007 onwards) compare against the observations and find that they are highly consistent with each other. Finally, we discuss how to further improve sea-level projections using high-resolution ocean modelling and recent vertical land motion estimates.