Fifteen years ago, a Barbie doll’s verdict on math class focused attention on a gender conundrum in US schools which continues to test the data analysts inside University of Texas child development research.

The history of public health activism in the UK has much to say to today’s ambitious community initiatives about the value of the unholy but potent alliances – for example between politics and science and science and the media – that typify successful campaigns.

Lancaster University researchers may be the first to have succeeded in wading through all the myth and supposition to establish how the pattern of young adult offending in the UK has changed over the last 30 years.