By Mathis Hampel, University of East Anglia

Scientists tell us the world is warming and that a climate catastrophe is imminent.

They’re probably right.

Yet climate change framed by scientists, politicians and economists as a straightforward pollution problem will neither convince skeptics nor advance the difficult decision-making process.

By Sayed Azam-Ali, University of Nottingham

Africa will be able to feed itself in the next 15 years.

That’s one of the big “bets on the future” that Bill and Melinda Gates have made in their foundation’s latest annual letter. Helped by other breakthroughs in health, mobile banking and education, they argue that the lives of people in poor countries “will improve faster in the next 15 years than at any other time in history”.

By Chad Orzel, Union College

By Claire Belcher, University of Exeter and Rory Hadden, University of Edinburgh

The asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs set off an intense heat wave that briefly boiled the Earth’s atmosphere – but it didn’t burn off all the plants.

By Andrew Hughes, Australian National University