How much do people have to pay for a travel permit to another country? A research team from Göttingen, Paris, Pisa and Florence has investigated the costs around the world. What they found revealed a picture of great inequality. People from poorer countries often pay many times what Europeans would pay. The results have been...
March 26 marks 50 years since the start of Bangladesh’s liberation war, a bloody nine-month campaign that culminated in the nation’s independence on Dec. 16, 1971. It was a violent birth, with some of its roots in the 1947 partition of India – when Pakistan was created as a separate nation. As the British Empire...
The remote learning experience of parents who had their children at home in Spring 2020, as schools across the US closed during the United States’ COVID-19 lockdown, was more positive than widely believed. That is the suggestion from a new study published in the Journal of School Choice, which looked at the experience of a nationally...
A group of scientists led by the American Museum of Natural History and Bat Conservation International have discovered a new species of a striking orange and black bat in a mountain range in West Africa. The species, which the researchers expect is likely critically endangered, underscores the importance of sub-Saharan “sky islands” to bat diversity....
A new leader takes office and foreign rivals begin to test the waters. How tough is this new leader? Are they willing to risk war, or just full of bluster? This testing can escalate crises, increasing the risk of war as international adversaries gauge the new leader’s willingness to use force. A new paper co-written...
Water isn’t just crucial for life, it’s fundamental to increasing opportunities for women and girls in rural areas across the globe. A new Stanford study reveals how bringing piped water closer to remote households in Zambia dramatically improves the lives of women and girls, while also improving economic opportunities, food security and well-being for entire...
A first-of-its-kind, international study of 107,000 children finds that higher temperatures are an equal or even greater contributor to child malnutrition and low quality diets than the traditional culprits of poverty, inadequate sanitation, and poor education. The 19-nation study is the largest investigation of the relationship between our changing climate and children’s diet diversity to...
Canada is at the forefront of global efforts to end child marriage abroad. Yet this practice remains legal and persists across the country. In Canada, more than 3,600 marriage certificates were issued to children, usually girls, under the age of 18 between 2000 and 2018, according to a new study from researchers at McGill University....
Chinese tech billionaire Jack Ma has allegedly fallen out with the Beijing government. Several recent articles reported that Ma offended the Chinese authorities by delivering a speech in Shanghai in October criticising financial regulation, and that he and his colleagues were called in for questioning. The planned IPO of his financial services powerhouse, Ant Group,...
Humans feeding leftover lean meat to wolves during harsh winters may have had a role in the early domestication of dogs, towards the end of the last ice age (14,000 to 29,000 years ago), according to a study published in Scientific Reports. Maria Lahtinen and colleagues used simple energy content calculations to estimate how much energy...
