Tons of acorns? It must be a mast year

Nov 19, 2019 03:44 am UTC| Insights & Views Nature

If you have oak trees in your neighborhood, perhaps youve noticed that some years the ground is carpeted with their acorns, and some years there are hardly any. Biologists call this pattern, in which all the oak trees for...

Government flood response harms the most vulnerable – not everyone can get 'resilient'

Nov 19, 2019 03:10 am UTC| Insights & Views Nature

After severe flooding in the North of England, many affected residents have been left feeling let down and left behind by the systems in place to protect them. Our research suggests that they, and many other communities...

Humans light 85% of bushfires, and we do virtually nothing to stop it

Nov 19, 2019 02:47 am UTC| Insights & Views Nature

Its hard to comprehend why someone would deliberately light a bushfire. Yet this behaviour regularly occurs in Australia and other countries. We would go a long way to preventing bushfires if we better understood this...

What 3,000-year-old Egyptian wheat tells us about the genetics of our daily bread

Nov 05, 2019 02:30 am UTC| Insights & Views Nature

Human societies need food and that often means wheat, which was first cultivated more than 12,000 years ago. Today, around one in five calories consumed by humans is from wheat. Over this time, humans have moved wheat...

Climate Change Series

Climate crisis: the countryside could be our greatest ally – if we can reform farming

Nov 05, 2019 02:30 am UTC| Insights & Views Nature

Around 20% of the UKs farms account for 80% of the countrys total food production, and they do this on about half of all the farmed land there is. At least 80% of farms in the UK dont produce very much at all. In...

Recycling plastic bottles is good, but reusing them is better

Nov 05, 2019 02:25 am UTC| Insights & Views Nature

Last week Woolworths announced a new food delivery system, in collaboration with US company TerraCycle, that delivers grocery essentials in reusable packaging. The system, called Loop, lets shoppers buy products from...

Australia's only active volcanoes and a very expensive fish: the secrets of the Kerguelen Plateau

Nov 04, 2019 23:55 pm UTC| Insights & Views Nature

Stretching towards Antarctica lies a hidden natural oasis - a massive underwater plateau created when continents split more than 100 million years ago. Straddling the Indian and Southern Oceans, the Kerguelen Plateau is...