Topic description and stories

Cows

First national model for bovine TB calls for greater focus on cattle

02 Jul 2014

The majority of outbreaks of bovine TB within cattle herds are caused by multiple transmissions routes – including failed cattle infection tests...

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From athletes to couch potatoes: humans through 6,000 years of farming

08 Apr 2014

Research into lower limb bones shows that our early farming ancestors in Central Europe became less active as their tasks diversified and technology...

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Camel farming

Farming the 'long-necked thing’: moving from cows to camels

23 Sep 2013

A move from cattle herding to camel keeping among Kenyan farmers is more than an economic transition, it represents a fundamental shift in age-old...

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Charles Towne, Hilly Landscape, Oil on canvas, 38.7cm x 51.1cm (detail)

Views of the landscape

17 May 2013

In a talk on Monday (20 May 2013) Dr Simon Nightingale will explore how painterly interpretations of the countryside were embedded into the...

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March of the superbugs

13 Feb 2013

Scientists who recently discovered a new strain of superbug have now tracked its transmission between animals and humans.

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Dadaab, the world’s largest refugee camp, on the Kenya-Somalia border. The Horn of Africa frequently experiences severe drought and hundreds of thousands of people have trekked to Dadaab seeking food, water, shelter and safety.

Feeding seven billion

21 Nov 2012

With the world’s population already estimated to be over seven billion and rising fast, the challenge of how to produce enough food has never been...

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Green and pleasant land: A farm near East Meon in Hampshire.

Farming loved but misunderstood, survey shows

23 Aug 2012

A YouGov Cambridge poll has revealed widespread affection for agriculture, even though there is a surprising level of ignorance about the sector and...

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Kharaneh shells

From foraging to farming: the 10,000-year revolution

23 Mar 2012

Excavation of 19,000-year-old hunter-gatherer remains, including a vast camp site, is fuelling a reinterpretation of the greatest fundamental shift...

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Gola Forest credit Jeremy Lindsell

Canopy commerce: forest conservation and poverty alleviation

03 Feb 2012

Innovative approaches for protecting the future of Sierra Leone’s Gola Forest – globally important for its biodiversity and its carbon reserves – are...

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Irish tenants are evicted and their homes torn down under the supervision of troops

Whose fault is famine? What the world failed to learn from 1840s Ireland

19 Jul 2011

A new book by a Cambridge University academic revisits one of the worst famines in recorded history. The Irish Famine of the 1840s had terrible...

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