Junior doctor Lisa Linpower recorded her experience of lockdown for the BBC PM programme’s Covid Chronicles. The front-line worker speaks of how vital her phone has been as a tool, a companion and as a source of comfort for patients and their families.

The Covid Chronicles were launched in March when Radio 4’s PM asked its audience to write in with personal accounts of life during lockdown. Submissions will be archived in the British Library.

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If you like The Beatles you should mark this date on your calendar because it is Global Beatles Day! This date celebrates the huge influence that Paul McCartney, George Harrison, John Lennon, and Ringo Starr had on the world, not only regarding their music but also because of their moral values. They promoted the idea that we could all live in a peaceful world, built on the ideas of truth, love, and reaching beyond the boundaries of current human consciousness. But, do you know where the name of the group came from? Or which group member was dyslexic and legally blind?

Find out 96 curiosities about the Beatles here and access the original news

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A pair of eyes and red lips floating in a midnight sky above the bright lights of New York on The Great Gatsby. The half-man, half-devil on Brett Easton Ellis’s American Psycho. A single cog for an eye on A Clockwork Orange. Two orange silhouettes on David Nicholls’ One Day. The original Harry Potter colour illustrations…

A great book might stay with us for a long time but, often, its cover does too. There’s a famous saying about never forming your opinion of a book by the jacket adorning it. But most readers know that we do, in fact, judge books by their covers all the time. Everything about a book’s cover – the font, the images, the colours – tells us something about what we can expect to find, or not, inside.

A reader in the market for some bleak dystopian fiction is unlikely to have their head turned by a pastel-hued jacket with serif font.

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Few things have been left unaffected by Covid-19 – even email. As San Francisco-based podcast host Olivia Allen-Price wrote on Twitter: “2020: The year my e-mail sign-off went from ‘Cheers’ to ‘Hang in there’”.

Salutations once considered polite – ‘All the best’ or ‘Regards’ – can now come off as overly detached.

Other more cheerful sign-offs – ‘Hope you’re having a great week!’ – seem tone-deaf. Email communication has become a balancing act: to ignore the pandemic seems disingenuous, but to overdo the platitudes about health and safety might peddle more panic.

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Major tech companies say they are open to their staff working from home permanently. Employees are coming to realise remote working is not only possible but, in some cases, preferable.

A shift to a new way of working might already be under way.

Such a shift could have profound implications on our home life, and by extension on the life of our towns and cities: almost a quarter of all office space in England and Wales is in central London alone.

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In 2017, a troupe of Ghanaian pallbearers went viral following BBC Africa’s coverage of their flamboyant coffin-carrying dances, garnering millions of views. Three years later and the group has experienced a second round of internet fame, with social media users adopting the troupe as a dark-humoured symbol of death in the time of Covid-19.

BBC Africa’s Sulley Lansah met up with the leader of the troupe to get his reaction to his new-found fame and see how he’s coping during the pandemic.

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English is spoken by hundreds of millions of people worldwide, but do the development of translation technology and «hybrid» languages threaten its status? Which country boasts the most English speakers, or people learning to speak English?
According to a study published by Cambridge University Press, up to 350 million people in China have at least some knowledge of English – and at least another 100 million in India.

There are probably more people in China who speak English as a second language than there are Americans who speak it as their first.

But for how much longer will English qualify as the «world’s favourite language»?

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Since the coronavirus lockdown, the hashtag «can’t sleep» has been trending, with tales of people struggling to get their heads down for the night.

One of those people is Laura Coppell who declares that before the lockdown, she would sleep like a log, but now it’s the opposite. If that’s also you, here’s how you can reverse that trend. Follow these 5 steps for a week and check out the results.

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Our bodies are extraordinary. They contain elements that have a commercial value, megabytes of data, and trillions of cells, most of which aren’t our own. Welcome to The Making of Me and You, a unique, new digital interactive from BBC Earth that details extraordinary personalised facts and instantly find out things like: the chemical ingredients that make up you, and what your body is worth, the size and weight of your internal organs and how much wee, poo, sperm or eggs you have produced so far.

Click here to read the original news and do the test