The Conversation

The Australian dairy farming industry is in a state of crisis. Cheap dairy products and fluctuations in both the domestic and global markets have taken a financial toll on farmers. Consumers have rallied to help struggling dairy producers.But this is only half the problem. The true cost of dairy is also paid by dairy cows and the environment.

Tobacco kills nearly half of all long-term smokers and in the UK alone accounts for the deaths of 100,000 people annually, according to the public health charity ASH. This is the harsh reality behind plain packaging for tobacco, which comes into force in the UK on May 20 2016.

We’re not even halfway through the year but already you may have heard talk of 2016 being the hottest on record. But how can scientists be so sure we’re going to beat the previous record, set just last year?

A big push is under way in higher education to measure how students are learning and how good lecturers are at teaching them. Universities can track how much time a student spent on a learning module or how often they accessed a journal article or online book.

In the wake of the damaging Alberta fires, there has been a lot of attention paid to what role climate change plays in wildfires. Yet 2016 is also a powerful El Niño year, which has created ideal conditions for the extraordinary fires in Alberta.So what climate phenomena could have led to the persistent warm, dry conditions and the extreme fire events?I have analyzed weather trend data and found that higher temperatures and lower precipitation created the conditions for the extensive fires. It is by looking at exactly when those warmer months occur that we can begin to sort out the role of El Niño versus climate change.

Recent years have seen claims that a “national sex revolution” is well underway in China and that it has “has reached a point of no return”. But according to my new research looking at the views of people across China on sex, this is going too far.In 1989, only 15% of people in China had sex before marriage.

If I said I was a licensed architect helping to fight dementia, you’d probably assume I was designing a care home or some similar building. Actually, I’ve been working alongside neuroscientists, psychologists, doctors and programmers to produce a computer game that could lead to better diagnoses for the condition.

Sea-level rise, erosion and coastal flooding are some of the greatest challenges facing humanity from climate change.Recently at least five reef islands in the remote Solomon Islands have been lost completely to sea-level rise and coastal erosion, and a further six islands have been severely eroded.These islands lost to the sea range in size from one to five hectares. They supported dense tropical vegetation that was at least 300 years old. Nuatambu Island, home to 25 families, has lost more than half of its habitable area, with 11 houses washed into the sea since 2011.

Pregnancy sounds like the ultimate form of animal cooperation – mothers share their own bodies to grow and support their children’s prenatal development. But in reality, embryos use every trick in the book to take more than their fair share. Mothers, in turn, marshal their best defensive tactics.Ultimately, it’s an evolutionary arms race. Offspring continually evolve strategies to steal resources, while mothers evolve strategies to defend their resources. Natural selection will favor embryos that are able to steal resources, but this will impose costs on the mother.

As anyone who has visited the London Science Museum’s current exhibition will know, Leonardo da Vinci is famed as an artist, mathematician, inventor, writer … the list goes on. He was a figure who did not see disciplines as a checkerboard of independent black and white tiles, but a vibrant palette of color ready to be combined harmoniously and gracefully. Today, the polymath may seem like a relic of the past.

People are fascinated by the unknown, by the possibility that there are things out there that are yet to be discovered.We think that most of our planet has been mapped by satellites and continents have been thoroughly explored. Although scientists estimate that millions of species are yet to be discovered, these are mostly assumed to be very small animals, especially invertebrates.Long gone are the days of famous explorers, when the borders of uncharted lands were marked with warnings such as “here be dragons”. And yet, many of us, still hope that some amazing, unexpected creatures may be hiding somewhere.

A lost Nazi gold train was discovered in Poland. At least, that’s what a couple of treasure hunters told the world last year. Like all lost treasures, the search for this one had been going on for many years, usually without success.