Topic description and stories

How 'more food per field' could help save our wild spaces

28 Jan 2016

Increased farm yields could help to spare land from agriculture for natural habitats that benefit wildlife and store greenhouse gases, but only if...

Read more
Silver Lake, Wasatch watershed, Utah

Opinion: Paying people to stay away is not always the best way to protect watersheds

24 Dec 2015

Libby Blanchard and Bhaskar Vira from Cambridge's Department of Geography argue that we need to consider alternative approaches in order to protect...

Read more
Bombus pascuorum

The Life and Death of the Queen Bumblebee

23 Sep 2015

The Cambridge Animal Alphabet series celebrates Cambridge's connections with animals through literature, art, science and society. Here, Q is for...

Read more
Vast pivot irrigator shows farming encroaching on wilderness in New Zealand.

Paying farmers to help the environment works, but ‘perverse’ subsidies must be balanced

09 Sep 2015

First analysis of effectiveness of agri-environment schemes measured at a national level suggests that they work, but are still a drop in the ocean...

Read more
Dorsal view of adult Dixa BM, BL, median and lateral bands on the scutum

What's the point of midges - and how do you stop them biting?

26 Aug 2015

The Cambridge Animal Alphabet series celebrates Cambridge's connections with animals through literature, art, science and society. Here, M is for...

Read more
Professor Sir Partha Dasgupta. His lecture at St John’s will call for a different attitude to natural resources compared with most commodities and for ecology to be a fundamental part of young peoples’ education.

“Not just another commodity”: Leading economist backs Pope’s stance on poverty and environment

29 Jun 2015

Professor Sir Partha Dasgupta, who last year co-authored an appeal to the Pope for moral leadership on climate change, will back his recent...

Read more
Rotherhithe tunnel 6

Bad air day? Low-cost pollution detectors to tackle air quality

02 Jun 2015

Pollution causes 30,000 people a year in the UK to die early yet most of us are unaware of the degree to which we are exposed to it. Low-cost...

Read more

Words for mud and mountain, wind and wetland: answers on a postcard, please

01 Apr 2015

‘Dumberdash’ is an old Cheshire term for a short but violent storm. A ‘lumpenhole’ is a deep trench for fluid farmyard waste. The man who remembers...

Read more
Left: A view across a valley in the Messak landscape. Right: A Levallois core, a distinctive type of Middle Stone Age stone tool, recovered on the surface of the Messak

Saharan 'carpet of tools' is the earliest known man-made landscape

11 Mar 2015

Researchers used the new survey of the Messak Settafet to estimate that enough stone tools were discarded over the course of human evolution in...

Read more

Where there’s muck there’s aluminium (if not brass)

04 Dec 2014

Technology developed at the University of Cambridge lies at the heart of a commercial process that can turn toothpaste tubes and drinks pouches into...

Read more
A chimpanzee uses a stone to crack a nut

Opportunity, and not necessity, is the mother of invention

12 Nov 2014

When food is scarce, tool use among non-human primates does not increase. This counterintuitive finding leads researchers to suggest that the driving...

Read more
Swaddywell Pit near Helpston, Northants

'Besom ling and teasel burrs': John Clare and botanising

20 Sep 2014

A symposium taking place on Tuesday (23 September 2014) at Cambridge University Botanic Garden will unite artists, writers, scientists and literary...

Read more

Pages