Netflix will return to the streets of Edinburgh and Dept. Q.
The streamer has ordered a second season of Dept. Q, its Scotland-set crime drama starring Matthew Goode and created by Scott Frank (The Queen’s Gambit). The renewal comes about 2 1/2 months after the series premiered to both solid reviews and audience numbers.
The series, based on novels by Jussi Adler-Olsen, stars Goode as Detective Chief Inspector Carl Morck, who leads a small team that works cases that were previously considered unsolvable from a basement office in Edinburgh. Alexej Manvelov, Leah Byrne and Jamie Sives also star.
“We are going downstairs to Dept. Q for a second season,” said executive producer Rob Bullock of Left Bank Pictures. “We at Left Bank Pictures nervously await what Scott has in store for his alter-ego Carl Morck, and the other enabling members of team do-lally. We salute Netflix’s courage to let them loose once again.”
Added Frank, “I’m grateful to the folks at Netflix, as well as our shining cast and crew, for once more risking their careers to enable my folly.”
Dept. Q spent six weeks in Netflix’s top 10 English language series worldwide, amassing some 222 million hours (equivalent to about 27 million complete showings of the season). In the United States, it drew 47.57 million hours of viewing over four weeks in Nielsen’s streaming top 10.
Frank writes, directs and executive produces Dept. Q. Bullock and Charlotte Moore also executive produce; Mona Qureshi and Manda Levin oversee the show for Netflix.
“We are raring to return to Carl Morck and his band of glorious misfits at Dept. Q,” said Qureshi and Levin. “Scott Frank brought us best-in-class storytelling and thrilled Netflix audiences worldwide. We can’t wait to see what Morck and the gang uncover in season two.”
Netflix has ordered a second season of Dept. Q, its British crime procedural that’s an adaptation of Jussi Adler-Olsen’s novels.
Matthew Goode will return as DCI Carl Morck, as will Alexej Manvelov as Akram, Leah Byrne as Rose and Jamie Sives as Hardy. Like the first season, Season 2 will be filmed and set in Edinburgh, Scotland.
The drama, which spent six weeks in the Global Top Ten shows on Netflix, follows Morck as he heads up Dept. Q from the basement of an Edinburgh police station. The unit is charged with cases previously deemed unsolvable.
Scott Frank (The Queen’s Gambit, Godless) serves as writer and director. He also executive produces with Rob Bullock and Charlotte Moore.
“I’d like to thank Netflix for giving us the opportunity to further investigate Department Q’s storylines,” said Goode in a statement. “We have a wonderful cast and crew, headed by our resident genius Scott Frank. I cannot wait to read what comes from his magic quill.”
Said Bullock in a statement: “So, we are going downstairs to Dept. Q for a second season. We at Left Bank Pictures nervously await what Scott has in store for his alter-ego Carl Morck and the other enabling members of team do-lally. We salute Netflix’s courage to let them loose once again.”
David Cameron’s “bonfire of the quangos” decision to abolish England’s council spending watchdog has left a broken system that is costing taxpayers more money than it was promised to save.
In a highly critical report, academics at the University of Sheffield said the coalition government of the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats had promised savings of £100m a year by abolishing the Audit Commission.
However, replacing the public body with a private-sector model had resulted in “chaos” and soaring costs to audit councils amid the financial crisis hitting England’s town halls.
Several councils have declared effective bankruptcy linked to years of austerity, soaring costs amid pressure on services, as well as local missteps. They include Birmingham, Nottingham and Woking.
The Audit Reform Lab at Sheffield said the average cost of external auditors checking a local authority’s finances was now at least £50,000 higher in cash terms than when the Audit Commission was disbanded in 2015.
Private-sector accountancy firms took over the job of auditing local government accounts in England after the agency was abolished, in an austerity-driven push by Tory and Lib Dem ministers to find savings and efficiencies.
“Ten years on, however, it now seems clear that these reform ambitions have failed,” the authors of the report wrote.
“Only 1% of audits were delivered on time in 2022-23, with many audits delayed by several years. Audit costs have risen dramatically in response. An unwieldy, but ultimately operational centralised bureaucracy was replaced by market chaos. The £100m per annum savings heralded by the UK government in 2014 are now a distant memory.”
The report found that average audit costs in England had more than tripled – an average increase of 238% – in the year to 2023-24. It blamed most of this increase on private-sector auditors hiking their rates.
It compared the large rise in audit costs in England to much smaller increases in Scotland and Wales, where it said there was a much stronger level of central oversight of private-sector auditing.
Some of the biggest increases were at financially stricken councils, including a 620% rise in audit fees at Woking, as well as leaps of 470% at Runnymede and 450% at Spelthorne.
In total 13 councils had fee scale increases of 300% or more in 2022-23. Birmingham city council paid an audit fee above the £1m mark, representing a 314% increase. The councils were approached for comment.
Three auditors dominate the local audit market: EY, Grant Thornton and Forvis Mazars. Others including Deloitte and BDO have exited because profit margins are considered too low, while complexity and risks have risen.
EY and Grant Thornton declined to comment. A spokesperson for Forvis Mazars said: “We are working closely with all stakeholders including MHCLG [Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government] and remain committed to supporting the return to the delivery of good quality audits for local authorities.”
skip past newsletter promotion
after newsletter promotion
While audit costs have risen sharply, so has the complexity of checking council finances at a time when growing numbers of local authorities are running into severe financial difficulties.
Experts have also long warned local audit fees have been too low to attract accountancy firms to do the job, compared with the money available in private-sector auditing.
In 2020, an independent review by Sir Tony Redmond found fees were “at least 25% lower than required to fulfil current local audit requirements effectively”.
The breakdown in local audit reached crisis point two years ago when only 1% of English councils had their 2022-23 accounts signed off in time. Ministers then allowed accounts to be completed with qualifications – whereby an auditor signs off but expresses reservations – to clear the backlog.
A new Local Audit Office is also being established to centralise previously fragmented oversight of the process.
An MHCLG spokesperson said: “We have taken decisive action to restore the broken audit system, providing £49m to help councils clear backlogs – but we know there is more to do. This is why we will set up a new Local Audit Office to simplify the system and increase capacity by establishing public sector audit provision.
“This will ensure the local audit system provides accountability, transparency, and value for money for taxpayers.”
Runnymede council said it was on a sound financial footing and did not recognise the fees quoted in the Audit Reform Lab report.
Netflix has renewed “Dept. Q” for a second season.
The series stars Matthew Goode as Carl Morck, a detective chief inspector in Edinburgh. Per the official logline, Carl “is a brilliant cop but a terrible colleague,” who survives a shooting that kills a young polive officer and paralyzes his partner. Traumatized, he is relegated to become the only member of the police department’s cold case unit, but unexpectedly “starts to build a gang of waifs and strays who have everything to prove.” Together, they begin to unravel the case of disappeared prosecutor Merritt Lingard (Chloe Pirrie). Alexej Manvelov, Kelly Macdonald and Leah Byrne star alongside Goode and Pirrie.
“Dept. Q” is based on Jussi Adler-Olsen’s crime novel series “Department Q.” Season 1 premiered in May and was generally well received, scoring an 88% on Rotten Tomatoes and spending six weeks on the Netflix Top 10.
Scott Frank writes and directs the series, and serves as executive producer alongside Rob Bullock via Left Bank Pictures and Charlotte Moore. Mona Qureshi and Manda Levin are the executives overseeing for Netflix. Like the first season, Season 2 will be shot in Edinburgh.
“We are raring to return to Carl Morck and his band of glorious misfits at ‘Dept. Q,’” Qureshi and Manda Levin said in a statement. “Scott Frank brought us best-in-class storytelling and thrilled Netflix audiences worldwide. We can’t wait to see what Morck and the gang uncover in Season 2…. Edinburgh, we’re back.”
“So, we are going downstairs to ‘Dept. Q for a second season.’ We at Left Bank Pictures nervously await what Scott has in store for his alter-ego Carl Morck, and the other enabling members of team do-lally,” Bullock said. “We salute Netflix’s courage to let them loose once again.”
“I’m grateful to the folks at Netflix, as well as our shining cast and crew, for once more risking their careers to enable my folly,” Frank said.
“I’d like to thank Netflix for giving us the opportunity to further investigate Department Q’s storylines,” Goode said. “We have a wonderful cast and crew, headed by our resident genius Scott Frank. I cannot wait to read what comes from his magic quill!”
Headline has acquired SA Barnes’ Death’s Daughter in an overnight, three-book pre-empt.
You’ve hit your free article limit.
Serious about the book trade?
Join thousands of industry professionals who never miss a story.
Sign in or create a free account to unlock 2 articles a month and receive tailored newsletters with the latest from the book trade.
Want full access? Subscribe from just £3.65 a week and unlock full access to exclusive interviews, rights deals, industry data and more:
🗞Weekly print copies of The Bookseller magazine 📱Unlimited access to thebookseller.com (single user) 👨💻The Bookseller digital edition for desktop, tablet and mobile 💌Subscriber-only newsletters 📚Twice-yearly Buyer’s Guides worth £30 💡Discounts on events and conferences
Ornithologists from the University of Tokyo have observed excretions of streaked shearwaters (Calonectris leucomelas) in the open ocean using belly-mounted video cameras. These seabirds exhibited a tendency to avoid excretion while floating on the sea surface and consistently excreted during flight; excretion timings showed periodicity, occurring every 4-10 minutes during daylight hours with inter-event intervals varying within a few minutes.
The streaked shearwater (Calonectris leucomelas), a species of seabird found in the Pacific Ocean. Image credit: Kanachoro.
Understanding when and how often seabirds excrete at sea is important for understanding their potential influence on marine ecosystems.
Whales are known to redistribute nutrients through excretion, the ‘whale pump.’
Large and widespread populations of seabirds could similarly shape key pelagic ecosystem processes.
“I was studying how seabirds run on sea surface to take off,” said lead author Dr. Leo Uesaka, a researcher at the University of Tokyo.
“While watching the video, I was surprised that they dropped feces very frequently.”
“I thought it was funny at first, but it turned out to be more interesting and important for marine ecology.”
Using eraser-sized, backward-facing cameras strapped to the bellies of 15 streaked shearwaters, Dr. Uesaka and his colleague, Dr. Katsufumi Sato, recorded and analyzed nearly 200 defecation events.
They found that the birds almost always relieved themselves while flying and that defecation often followed shortly after takeoff.
Occasionally, the birds took off solely for bathroom breaks and returned to the water within a minute.
These findings suggest that they intentionally avoid pooping while floating.
“Streaked shearwaters have very long and narrow wings, good for gliding, not flapping,” Dr. Uesaka said.
“They have to flap their wings vigorously to take off, which exhausts them.”
“This means the risk of excreting on the sea surface outweighs the effort to take off. There must be a strong reason behind that.”
The researchers suspect this habit may spare the birds from fouling their feathers with feces, help them avoid attracting predators, or simply help the birds poop more easily compared to a floating position.
While in flight, the birds pooped about every 4 to 10 minutes.
The authors estimated that the birds excrete 30 grams of poop every hour, which is about 5% of their body mass.
“We don’t know why they keep this excretion rhythm, but there must be a reason,” Dr. Uesaka said.
To find out, the scientists plan to use cameras or temperature sensors with longer battery life, combined with GPS, to map where seabirds release their droppings at sea.
They hope that these future studies will offer further insights into the role of seabird feces in marine ecology.
“Feces are important. But people don’t really think about it,” Dr. Uesaka said.
The findings appear today in the journal Current Biology.
_____
Leo Uesaka & Katsufumi Sato. Periodic excretion patterns of seabirds in flight. Current Biology 35 (16): R795-R796; doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2025.06.058
Leeds, amid the cacophony, pinned passive, panicky Everton back in the first half, every tackle bringing supporters to their feet – especially a crunching challenge by Ethan Ampadu that left Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall prone on the turf.
If there was a worry for Leeds and Farke, it was that their dominance in the first half brought no reward, their attack a blunt instrument despite their superiority, with only one of their 12 shots on target.
Could they maintain that intensity after the break? The answer was no.
Instead, Leeds showed other qualities they will require this season as they dug deep, did the dirty work – albeit with little or no threat from a dreadful Everton – and eventually claimed the win with that dramatic late twist.
New Leeds keeper Lucas Perri was given a comfortable introduction as Everton left him virtually unemployed apart from one low shot from Carlos Alcaraz in the closing stages, which he saved comfortably.
Everton introduced new loan signing Jack Grealish with 20 minutes left, but this was a performance beyond rescue and redemption – an illustration of why Moyes has expressed his concerns about the lack of new arrivals, with acquisitions needed at right-back, on the right side and in the central midfield position.
Moyes clearly feels France under-21 striker Thierno Barry is a raw work in progress, but it is hard to see how he could have delivered anything worse than the performance Beto served up at Elland Road.
Leeds, in contrast, will be buoyed by the sheer exuberance and energy that poured down from the stands into Farke’s players. One game only, yes, but the surge of belief and optimism this result and performance will deliver is vital.
Ultra-fast wireless signals have a weakness: they can’t see walls. As engineers push into the sub-terahertz spectrum to handle the enormous data demands of virtual reality and autonomous vehicles, even a bookcase or a passing person can block a signal, causing data loss.
Now, researchers at Princeton University have developed a system that allows these high-frequency signals to bend around obstacles, keeping data flowing in even the most cluttered environments.
The breakthrough uses a combination of physics and machine learning to create “Airy beams”—curved transmission paths that can navigate around objects instead of bouncing off them.
First proposed in 1979, Airy beams had mainly been studied for their physics. Princeton’s team went a step further: they trained a neural network to select the optimal beam in real time for any environment, adapting as obstacles appear or move.
Lead researcher Yasaman Ghasempour, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at Princeton, said, “As our world becomes more connected and data-hungry, the demand for wireless bandwidth is soaring.
Sub-terahertz frequencies open the door to far greater speeds and capacity.” She added that the work is an important step toward deploying data transmission in the sub-terahertz band, which could handle 10 times the data of current wireless systems.
Signals adapt in real-time
Unlike lower-frequency radio waves that spread widely, sub-terahertz signals travel in tightly focused beams, making them vulnerable indoors.
Previous solutions relied on reflectors to bounce signals around obstacles, but these are not practical in most real-world settings. The new approach allows the signal itself to curve, much like a curveball in baseball, using precise beam shaping.
Graduate student Haoze Chen, the paper’s lead author, said, “This is for complex indoor scenarios where you don’t have line of sight. You want the link to adapt to that.”
He added, “Most work with Airy beams has focused on creating the beams and exploring their underlying physics. What we are doing is not only generating the beams but finding which beams work best in the situation. People have shown that these beams can be created, but they have not shown how the beams can be optimized.”
Simulator enables virtual training
To train the neural network, the team developed a simulator that could model countless indoor scenarios without physically testing each one.
Chen explained, “For Airy beams, this is impractical. There are infinite ways of curving, depending on the degree of the curve and where the curve happens. There is no way a transmitter can scan through.”
Coauthor Atsutse Kludze said, “Throwing a lot of data at the neural net is not effective. Instead, we use principles from physics to create and train the neural net.”
Once trained, the system adapts incredibly quickly, maintaining strong connections even in crowded, constantly changing environments.
The team tested the system in experimental setups designed to mimic complex, real-world indoor environments. While the experiments focused on understanding and controlling the technology, the results suggest practical applications are within reach.
These include ultra-fast VR systems, fully autonomous vehicles, and future indoor wireless networks that can transmit massive amounts of data without interruption.
Ghasempour said, “This work tackles a long-standing problem that has prevented the adoption of such high frequencies in dynamic wireless communications to date. With further advances, we envision transmitters that can intelligently navigate even the most complex environments, bringing ultra-fast, reliable wireless connectivity to applications that today seem out of reach—from immersive virtual reality to fully autonomous transportation.”
The findings have been published in the journal Nature Communication.
Former Little Mix star Cameron Diaz has told her fans to ‘wake up’ as she teased her brand-new solo music after sharing her tragic baby loss story
23:51, 18 Aug 2025Updated 23:51, 18 Aug 2025
Perrie Edwards drops Cameron Diaz music video amid solo career after baby loss(Image: Ian West/PA Wire)
Perrie Edwards has teased her brand-new solo music in an exciting The Holiday themed montage with fans on Instagram.
The former Little Mix singer, 32, delighted her loyal fans on Monday evening when she posted a 60-second clip of what will be the music video to her new song which is about to drop this week. The clip draws inspiration from Cameron Diaz in The Holiday as a narrator mocks Perrie after she wakes up from her slumber.
“This Autumn, find out what Perrie doesn’t have, the narrator teases as Perrie, who is dressed in a sequin baby blue blazer dress, furiously pushes an eye-mask back on her face after getting roasted by the voice. “Wakey wakey, it’s release week,” the singer teased in the caption.
It comes after former Little Mix singer Perrie confessed that she had an “out of body experience” when she found out she had suffered a miscarriage for the second time in her life in 2022.
READ MORE: Jade Thirlwall admits ‘daily battle’ to not take Ozempic after cruel commentsREAD MORE: Perrie Edwards struggled to leave the house over devastating health issue
The Little Mix singer, 32, shares son Axel, who turns four this week, with former Arsenal midfielder Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain, also 32, but has now opened up about the devastating miscarriage they suffered less than a year after Axel’s birth.
“We went for what was a 20-week scan, but we were actually 22 weeks, and that was just the worst day of my life. Like horrendous,” the singer revealed in a heartbreaking confession.
Content cannot be displayed without consent
“And I just knew something was wrong in the scan, and [the doctor] just kept going over the same thing, over the same thing… I’ve never experienced an out-of-body experience where everything goes in slow motion,” said Perrie as she shared the ordeal with Celebs Go Dating expert Paul C. Brunson on his podcast, We Need To Talk.
Perrie continued: “So then I remember sobbing. [Alex] was injured at the time and he couldn’t really drive. He was struggling to drive, but I couldn’t see straight. I was just distraught. And yeah, we basically lost the baby at like 24 weeks.”
This wasn’t Perrie’s first experience with losing a child, with the singer describing Axel as a “rainbow baby” after she lost a baby during her first pregnancy.
Perrie and Alex are proud parents to son Axel(Image: Instagram/perrieedwards)
“I had a miscarriage very early on with my first ever pregnancy, and it was so early. I remember finding out I was pregnant. Obviously, I started bleeding not long after, and I went to the hospital and I had the scan and they were like, ‘There’s no baby.’”
However, it was the second experience which Perrie said really hit home, after she and Alex had already begun preparing for the newborn’s arrival.
“When you’re fully, like carrying in your 24 weeks and you’ve planned out like that room and all these things, it’s really hard. And nobody knows other than, like, immediate friends and family. And I remember, like, shortly after, like, friends would message and be like, ‘how’s the bump?’ And I’ll be like, there is no bump.”
Perrie bravely opened up about her baby loss on the podcast(Image: PR)
Despite the heartache, Perrie describes being pregnant as one of the “best times” in her life, and couldn’t be happier to be a mum to Axel.
“When I was pregnant with [Axel], like, I loved being pregnant, it was one of the happiest times of my life. Like, I just love carrying babies. And it was lovely.
“But I was a bit on edge thinking, oh, gosh, like, I want to get past the 12 weeks. I want to get past this. And when I get past every scan and that pregnancy was complete bliss, it was perfect.”
Perrie and her fiancé Alex
The South Shields-born singer has been in a relationship with footballer Alex, who now plays for Turkish team Beşiktaş, since 2016, after meeting on celebrity dating app Raya.
The couple got engaged in 2022, with Alex organising a romantic beachside proposal, but are yet to reveal any details of a wedding.
If you have been affected by this story, advice and support can be found at the Miscarriage Association. You can call them on 01924 200799 or email info@miscarriageassociation.org.uk
