World

A Sudanese demonstrator at a protest in the capital Khartoum. Ashraf Shazily/AFP via Getty Images David E Kiwuwa, University of Nottingham In the last few days, tens of thousands of people have, once again, taken to the streets of Sudan’s major cities to demand “freedom, peace and justice”, the rallying cry for the protesters who ousted Omar al-Bashir in 2019. …

hobbit/Shutterstock Adam Kleczkowski, University of Strathclyde Nearly 100 years ago, two British researchers, William Topley and Graham Wilson, were experimenting with bacterial infections in mice. They noticed that individual survival depended on how many of the mice were vaccinated. So the role of the immunity of an individual needed to be distinguished from the immunity of the entire herd. Fast …

Jose Angel Astor Rocha/Shutterstock William Feeney, Griffith University and Marc Besson, École pratique des hautes études (EPHE) Australia barely had time to recover from record breaking fires at the start of 2020 before the Great Barrier Reef experienced its third mass coral bleaching event in the past five years. Only five of these have occurred since records began in the …

The Nile river in Cairo. Grant Faint/Getty Images Mahemud Tekuya, University of the Pacific Ethiopia, Sudan and Egypt are a step closer to resolving their disputes over the filling and operation of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam. The dam – a huge project on one of the River Nile’s main tributaries, the Blue Nile in Ethiopia – is designed to …

Research grant for biochemist to go ‘back to the future’ to get to grips with COVID-19 Dr Cooper is the academic lead for a project titled SARS-CoV-2 in silico protein modelling and determination of novel therapeutic drug candidates to treat COVID19 UNIVERSITY OF HUDDERSFIELD THE University of Huddersfield has awarded funding to a research team that aims to provide a …

Daniel Carpio/Shutterstock Lindsay Bottoms, University of Hertfordshire The coronavirus began to affect sporting events as early as January 30, when the Chinese Football Association announced it was delaying the start of the football season. Two months later it was revealed that the Tokyo Olympic Games would be postponed until the summer of 2021 – the first postponement in modern Olympic …

eamesBot/Shutterstock Lena Ciric, UCL What constitutes a safe distance when it comes to the spread of COVID-19? The answer depends on where you live. China, Denmark and France recommend social distancing of one metre; Australia, Germany and Italy recommend 1.5 metres, and the US recommends six feet, or 1.8 metres. The UK, meanwhile, is reconsidering its relatively large two-metre distancing …