A PhD student, scrolling through publicly available survey material from a Mexican environmental project, noticed shapes that didn’t sit comfortably with the idea of untouched jungle. The files had been online for years; nothing new about them. But once processed through archaeological mapping techniques, the patterns stopped looking like random terrain. Roads, raised platforms, and…

When the Strait of Hormuz tightened, many braced for $200-a-barrel oil. More than three months on, that nightmare scenario is still nowhere in the picture.The disruption, which removed more than 10 million barrels a day of Middle Eastern supply from the market, had fuelled warnings of crude prices soaring to as much as $200 a…