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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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,…