At a moment when the world feels like a particularly unsettling place, Science Weekly is asking what it is that makes humans happy – and how we can bring more happiness into our lives.

In episode two, Ian Sample asks which happiness strategies are backed up by science. He hears from Elizabeth Dunn, a professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia, who recently scrutinised a whole lot of happiness research to work out which recommendations are most reliable

Clips: 9NEWS

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Crops have failed in several countries, with 27m people at risk of hunger according to World Food Programme

Emmanuel Himoonga paced his dry field, picking up stalks of maize that had been bleached almost to bone white.

The 61-year-old chief of Shakumbila, a mainly agricultural community of about 7,000 people roughly 70 miles west of Zambia’s capital, Lusaka, had seen droughts before .

With infestations of rats, bedbugs and moths on the rise, there are things you can do to reclaim your home – from putting away dog food to building a slinky slide

With reported rises in the number of rats and bedbugs , it is likely that many of us are sharing our living space with some pest or other. How can you go about getting rid of them? And what can you do to avoid them moving in to start with? Here, pest controllers share the secrets to an infestation-free life.

Travelling many miles across multiple states, I saw Republicans united in their disdain for facts – and a Democratic party far too relaxed about challenging them

In the early hours of Wednesday morning last week, I sped down an empty motorway as rain pounded the asphalt, heading towards a Republican election-night party in the outskirts of Detroit. It was one of those storms that distorts your vision, where the lines of the road blur in slicks of water and the street lights refract through cascading droplets on the windscreen. The lonely roads and perilous weather felt like an apt backdrop. Donald Trump was about to be declared the next president of the United States.

I went through the double doors and into the large, carpeted convention hall just seconds before Fox News called the race. The chatter began to dissipate as the crowd erupted, surging towards a stage at the back and waving large, black flags that read “Fix America Again”. Elation and relief. Mayhem and incoherence. “Lock them up! Send them back! Jesus! Jesus!” shouted one woman.

After Donald Trump has announced his new defence secretary to be the former Fox News host Pete Hegseth, John Harris speaks to the Guardian’s defence and security editor, Dan Sabbagh, who is in Ukraine. Plus, at Cop29, Ed Miliband has said the green transition is unstoppable even with Trump as president. Is he right? John speaks to the former Green party leader Caroline Lucas

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This gripping adaptation of Patrick Radden Keefe’s bestselling book tells the shocking story of the IRA’s Price sisters, but makes little attempt to hide its sympathies

Say Nothing could so easily be absolute chaos. It comprises at least seven narratives, jumping back and forth over four decades, with different actors playing older and younger versions of the same characters. But it has such a firm grasp of those characters – and of all its stories and the history against which they unfold – that you are never confused, only gripped throughout.

This is not to say that the nine-part drama about the Troubles is without troubling aspects, but we will get to that. Based on the bestselling 2018 book of the same name by the New Yorker staff writer Patrick Radden Keefe, it opens with an abduction so cruel that it will become notorious – that of Jean McConville (played by Judith Roddy), a widowed mother of 10 in west Belfast. Rumoured to be an informant (although no evidence has been found that she was), she is bundled into a van by masked men in December 1972 and never seen alive again.

With Putin’s threats in Ukraine, China’s accelerated weapons programme and the US’s desire for superiority, what will it take for leaders to step back from the brink?

Like Toto in The Wizard of Oz, at their 1985 summit in Geneva President Ronald Reagan and the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev pulled back the curtain to reveal the truth behind the terrifying spectre of nuclear war, which their countries were spending hundreds of billions of dollars to prepare for. “A nuclear war cannot be won,” they jointly stated, and “must never be fought.” They omitted the inescapable corollary of those first six words: a nuclear arms race also cannot be won.

Still, the statement, almost unique among government declarations for its blunt truthfulness, strengthened the case for the arms control and nonproliferation undertakings that followed. Decades of agonisingly difficult negotiations built up a dense structure of treaties, agreements and even a few unilateral moves dealing with offensive and defensive nuclear weapons of short, medium and long range, with provisions for testing, inspections and an overflight regime for mutual observation. Often the two sides would only give up systems they no longer wanted. Frequently the language of the agreements was the basis of future friction. On the US side, the political price of securing Senate ratification of treaties could be extremely high.

Study says funding to cope with climate breakdown needed five years earlier than expected

Poor countries need $1tn a year in climate finance by 2030, five years earlier than rich countries are likely to agree to at UN climate talks , a new study has found.

Waiting until 2035 to receive the funding, which is to help them cut greenhouse gas emissions and cope with extreme weather, would place damaging burdens on vulnerable countries, warned the Independent High-Level Expert Group on Climate Finance, a group of leading economists.

The climate crisis created the setting for Trump’s economy-first win and it’s the global south that will suffer most

Donald Trump’s election is a triumph for the politics of the doomsday bunker, which is bad news for the world’s environment.

This is the idea that in an age of climate disruption, nature extinction and ever wider social inequality, the best chance of survival for those who can afford it is to construct a personal shelter, where they can keep the desperate masses at bay. It is survival of the richest .