Japan’s prime minister, Shinzo Abe, has announced that he is retiring due to worsening health. The condition 65-year-old Abe suffers from is ulcerative colitis. But what exactly is this disease? Ulcerative colitis is a long-term condition that causes the lining of the colon and rectum to become inflamed and developContinue Reading
Monkey Business Images/Shutterstock Pupils in many countries will be returning to the classroom in September after a significant break from being in a typical school environment. They will also be facing the upheaval of a new school year. The process of transition – moving from one class to another, suchContinue Reading
The government “decided to lie to the population.” Photo: Max Pixel, under CC0 Public Domain license. On August 17, the decentralized cyber hacking group Anonymous attacked Nicaragua’s Health Ministry archives. The 400 leaked files revealed a surplus of 6,245 positive COVID-19 cases in Nicaragua that were previously unknown to the public.Continue Reading
Hurricane Laura’s landfall on the coasts of Louisiana and Texas came just as New Orleans prepared to mark the 15th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, and with the region already reeling from the coronavirus pandemic. For many, the wounds of the COVID-19 disaster and now Hurricane Laura are all too reminiscentContinue Reading
Over the last few months, there has been much discussion of leadership during the pandemic. What constitutes good leadership? Who has performed better and which countries have been worse? One pattern that emerged early on was that female leaders were seen to have handled the crisis remarkably well. Whether itContinue Reading
Meanwhile, similar open-source community efforts are in the pipeline Collage of Odia Book Covers. Image via Flickr by Erin Mclaughlin. From the Flickr set Odia Book Covers. CC-BY 2.0. While open-source initiatives are still underway, Google and Microsoft have both added the Odia language of India to their respective machine translationContinue Reading
Challenges at the intersection of health, ecology, and climate science A forestry worker, wearing a face mask for protection against coronavirus, gathers fallen wood from a tropical area, in Guinée, Africa. Photo courtesy Aboubacarkhoraa Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0) COVID-19 lockdowns have yielded dramatic scenes of natural recovery: smog disappearingContinue Reading
k.nykyforova Chocolate in all its forms is something that I, along with many others like to indulge in on an almost daily basis. But chocolate as it’s enjoyed today is quite different from when it first arrived in Europe from South America around the 16th century. To the indigenous AztecContinue Reading
Coronavirus is back in large numbers across Europe. Since governments began to lift lockdowns at the start of the European summer, positive cases of COVID-19 have been steadily increasing in countries that previously had the spread of the disease under control, including Spain, France, Italy and Germany. In recent days,Continue Reading
