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…

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…

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…

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,…

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…

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 –…

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…

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…

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…

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…