In late July 2022 French president Emmanuel Macron concluded a tour of Cameroon, Benin and Guinea-Bissau. And he visits Algeria between 25 and 27 August. At first glance, his choice of countries is difficult to understand. Three former French colonies – Cameroon, Benin and Algeria – and a former Portuguese colony, Guinea-Bissau, seem very different. Nevertheless, taken together, Macron’s visits tell a story in which France is doing penance for its colonial crimes while simultaneously trying to maintain the influence it gained through colonialism. These two themes also emerged at the New…

Elena and her husband are shepherds. Their herd of 400 free-roaming goats were bred over generations to make the most of the patchwork of woodlands and pastures that cover their local mountain range in central Spain. This type of farming produces some of the most sustainable meat and dairy that money can buy. They use little feed and fertilisers and the goats maintain biodiversity-rich grasslands through grazing. Even so, eking out a livelihood here is becoming increasingly difficult. Across Spain, local butchers and cheesemakers have closed down, rigid food standards prevent farmers from…

Freie Universität Berlin’s Department of Biology, Chemistry, Pharmacy Rising Star Fellowship Program is open to researchers who have completed a doctoral degree within the last four years. Applicants cannot be alumni of Freie Universität Berlin or have been employed at one of the university’s departments or institutes. The fellowship’s monthly stipend amounts to 2,500 euros for two years. It also includes supplementary funds for travel expenses, family members, and research costs. Applications are due by November 30, 2021, and must be submitted via email. Selection is expected to take place…

Owing to government mandates and subsidies, electric cars have become popular, and as long as European consumers pretend the electricity to power them does not come from fossil fuels we can feel like we are helping the environment. No one can ignore the environmental apocalypse of the batteries, though.  EU demanding 30,000,000 electric cars by 2030 is a disaster for batteries in landfills because battery recycling uses smelting, which loses so much lithium and other raw materials while requiring so much energy to get even that it is an environmental negative.  Advanced processes can…

Poor students in cities are a lot more likely to get into top universities, and that is because schools have created 'urban escalators' which leave rural students on the margins. That is not to say that rural students go to university less, they go more, it is just that elite schools and governments prefer urban-centered policy interventions and the targeting of university and third-sector outreach activities to urban areas. Researchers from the University of Bath analysed data from the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) of 800,000 English students beginning university in the academic…

Marie Stopes opened Britain’s first clinic offering birth control advice to married women. Born in Edinburgh in 1880, Stopes was an author, women’s rights campaigner and trained paleobotanist. She railed against the Catholic church and the male-dominated medical establishment. And her work – including her 1918 book Married Love – was pioneering. She was also a fierce advocate for eugenics. This is the practice or advocacy of controlled selective breeding to improve the “quality” of a population’s genetic composition. She called for the “hopelessly rotten and racially diseased” to be…

A statistical association between food and disease or health is created by asking people how much of something they consume and then matching it up to the diseases. If statistical significance can be found, a paper is written on the observational study but there is obviously a high risk of bad data when people are asked to recall how much of anything they have. And if an epidemiologist has a goal in advance, it is easy to create statistical significance and highlight a risk that experts would dismiss. A new paper says that the recent stalling of salt reduction programmes in the UK will eat…

The UK's first national lockdown in March 2020 created a massive shift in consumer habits from which it will take years to recover.  A new study from the universities of Cambridge and Newcastle used an approach normally used to estimate cumulative excess deaths and found this new mortality was among UK retailers and restaurants.  To compare retail, hospitality and online sales in the UK between March and August 2020 with average figures for the same months for the years 2010-2019. Their economic models suggest that shops predominantly selling food, such as supermarkets, saw a 5-10% bump in…

If you ask even the mode ardent Parisian anti-vaxxer about a COVID-19 vaccine, almost all will want to take it. While measles was claimed to be a philosophical debate about choice, SARS-CoV-2 can clearly kill people and a lot of distrust of medicine and chemicals evaporates when a real problem occurs. Until then, we have masks and social distancing, but what about an "immunity passport" for people immune to COVID-19 and unlikely to catch or spread the disease? That's a philosophical debate but also a science one. From a science perspective, immunity may not mean what the public thinks it does…

Forced contraception in exchange for aid is the solution. The problem is that there are too many of us. COVID-19 is nature’s way of dealing with the situation. These comments are among the most popular responses recently published in the Sun in response to an article by the broadcaster David Attenborough on the climate crisis. But don’t be fooled into thinking the same scapegoating can’t be found below the line in a more progressive newspaper such as the Guardian – even if the racism is less explicit. A larger population does make it harder to treat the environment in the right way. But…

Benedictus, Benedicat, per Jesum Christum, Dominum Nostrum. Amen. Please be seated. It’s dinner time in St Paul’s College, Sydney, where I’m dean and head of house at Graduate House. The members of the High Table, wearing academic gowns, have processed into the refectory to a table laden with candelabra and silver accoutrements from the college treasury, each place set with cutlery and glasses. The students, also in gowns, rise from their seats to acknowledge the High Table, and stand until the presider has finished the Latin grace (this is the shorter one – a longer version is kept for…

Farmers from Europe to South America have one large, fragile asset more important than all others. Their land. Specifically, a thin layer of topsoil that can readily wash away or be depleted. To prevent that, many farmers grow inedible plants during the off-season.They help prevent erosion and absorb excess nutrients like nitrogen.  These cover crops have become so common it can be difficult to know which to choose from when it comes to complex crop rotations. A recent experiment in the U.S. state of Illinois planted different cover crops between the common rotation of corn and soybeans.…

With US-EU agriculture trade talks already stalled, the EU’s new "Farm to Fork” strategy escalates the science war and perhaps even isolates the EU even more - because EU wants to bully other countries into adoption of EU-style regulation.  If there is one thing COVID-19 has taught us, it's that food regulations just get in the way. Individuals couldn't buy what they wanted, rationing occurred, but the reason was not supply. Businesses were not allowed by regulation to sell bulk foods they had purchased to consumers. And companies were not allowed to sell food meant to be sold in bulk to…

A UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) claimed that agriculture is one of the main sources of greenhouse gases - a climate villain. But their finding was not based on science, it was based on simplistic parameters, a closed system which any field of science would disregard as intentional framing. Yet activists opposed to agriculture and the fields of science that support it jumped on it as settled science, where instead there was no consensus at all. The fundamental process in agriculture is photosynthesis, in which carbon dioxide is captured by crops and at the same time…

The advent of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) pandemic and the dynamics of its spread is unprecedented. It is therefore, of paramount importance to get a vaccine that can stop the spread of the virus. But basic knowledge about the virus and kinetics of immune responses against it is still emerging. An added difficulty is that different strains of SARS-COV-2 have been reported – even in the same country – within six months of its emergence. Vaccines are preventive or therapeutic interventions that dramatically reduce morbidity and mortality caused by infectious…

The brain has very high energy demand. For its body mass, the brain keeps mitochondria firing producing our body's common energy currency, ATP, from the fats, proteins, and carbohydrates in our food. and reacts very sensitively to oxygen deficiency. Ludwig-Maximilian-Universitaet (LMU) in Munich neurobiologists have now succeeded for the first time in directly correlating oxygen consumption with the activity of certain nerve cells. Since the brain requires a disproportionate amount of energy compared to its body mass, and this energy is mainly generated by aerobic metabolic processes that…

It is often said that animals behave unusually before an earthquake. In an international cooperation project, researchers investigated whether cows, sheep, and dogs can actually detect early signs of earthquakes. In the experiment, sensors to the animals in an earthquake-prone area in Northern Italy and recorded their movements over several months. In order to be able to use animal activity patterns as a kind of early warning system for earthquakes, the animals would have to show measurable behavioural changes. Moreover, if they do indeed react to weak physical changes immediately before an…

Thirty years after the U.S.S.R. collapsed we are still learning about the ramifications of overarching government control of essential services. Though the combined Germany now has nationwide healthcare, some government health care is worse than others. You don't want to be in a South African public hospital today and you didn't want to be in a communist Russia one then. East Germans still have many more hospitalisations for heart failure compared to West Germans. Heart failure is the most common reason for hospital admissions and is responsible for a large part of the total health…

The complex ways in which quarks bind themselves into composite particles such as the protons and neutrons found inside atomic nuclei are not yet understood so the discovery of a four-quark particle, the first of a previously undiscovered class of particles, could provide valuable insight into physics at the very small level. Quarks typically combine together in groups of twos and threes to form particles called hadrons. Physicists had only observed tetraquarks with two heavy quarks at most and none with more than two quarks of the same type but had predicted the existence of four-quark and…

A stark warning about the kind of summer that could become routine in the UK by the end of this century has been issued in a new study by the country’s Met Office. Using temperature data and climate model simulations, the researchers tested the likelihood of UK temperatures exceeding 30°C, 35°C, and 40°C each summer over the next 80 years. They found that if global greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise, temperatures exceeding 40°C could be reached somewhere in the UK every three-and-a-half years by 2100. If you live or have travelled in a hot climate, you might know the stifling heat that…