Feed the Future, the U.S. government’s global hunger and food security initiative, has prevented 2.2 million children from experiencing malnutrition in sub-Saharan Africa, researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have found. The researchers, led by Tess Ryckman, a Stanford Health Policy graduate student, compared children’s health in 33 low- and middle-income countries in...
If you want to know how climate change and hypoxia — the related loss of oxygen in the world’s oceans — affect fish species such as the economically important Baltic cod, all you have to do is ask the fish. Those cod, at least, will tell you that hypoxia is making them smaller, scrawnier and...
It’s time to write about Indigenous Australian place relationships in a new way – in a language that speaks in Indigenous terms first, to convey a rich meaning of Country and best identify its deep ecological and social relevance to Aboriginal people. Flinders University anthropologist and Matthew Flinders Fellow, Professor Amanda Kearney, explains the need...
Drones with cameras might be a nuisance to privacy in the suburbs, but in Southern Africa they are helping a UNSW Sydney research team to save a threatened species: the humble hippo. Wild numbers of the vulnerable Hippopotamus amphibius are declining because of habitat loss and hunting for meat and ivory, so monitoring their population is crucial...
How the languages of the world emerged is largely a mystery. Considering that it might have taken millennia, it is intriguing to see how deaf people can create novel sign languages spontaneously. Observations have shown that when deaf strangers are brought together in a community, they come up with their own sign language in a...
Inaccessible valleys and ravines lead from the North East Indian Meghalaya plateau to the wide plains of Bangladesh. In the monsoon months the mountain streams in the forests swell into torrential rivers. In order to cross these rivers, the indigenous Khasi and Jaintia peoples have long built their bridges out of the living aerial roots...
A study published November 8 in Science focuses on the ancient DNA of individuals from Rome and adjacent regions in Italy, spanning the last 12,000 years. Those genetic data reveal at least two major migrations into Rome, as well as several smaller but significant population shifts over just the last few thousand years. Notably, DNA analysis revealed...
West Virginia University geographers are linking the political and human rights issues at borders today to the legacies of foreign and domestic policy across the globe since World War I. Karen Culcasi and Cynthia Gorman, of the Department of Geology and Geography in the Eberly College of Arts and Sciences, have studied more than 100 years of international laws that have...
When the Berlin Wall was completed in August 1961, East German residents immediately tried to figure out ways to circumvent the barrier and escape into West Berlin. By the following summer, NBC and CBS were at work on two separate, secret documentaries on tunnels being dug under the Berlin Wall. The tunnel CBS chose was...
What is the deadliest weapon of the 20th century? Perhaps you think first of the atomic bomb, estimated to have killed as many as 200,000 people when the United States dropped two on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. But another weapon is responsible for far more deaths – numbering up into...