By Adrino Mazenda, Senior Researcher, Associate Professor: Economic Management Sciences, University of Pretoria
Chinese lenders have invested billions in African agriculture. But new research shows the money often misses what’s needed to modernise the sector.
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By Andrew Gawthorpe, Lecturer in History and International Studies, Leiden University
Serious hostilities between the US and Iran have resumed. On July 8, Donald Trump said that the ceasefire agreed by the two countries in June was “over”. Since then, he has ordered the US military to carry out intensive airstrikes on Iran and has reimposed an economic…
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By David Turner, Senior Lecturer in Sports Coaching, Anglia Ruskin University
As a football coach, Thomas Tuchel has done things differently to many of his colleagues.
For example, it is extremely rare for lower league footballers to become the head coaches of top sides. But that’s what Tuchel did, playing as a defender in Germany’s bottom tiers, before going on to manage elite teams like Paris Saint-Germain and Chelsea.
It’s also unusual for youth team coaches to become coaches to senior sides, or to make the leap from coaching relatively small clubs to some…
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By Lala Rukh, PhD Candidate, Energy, University of Galway; Atlantic Technological University
Imagine an apartment that could be teleported across Europe. In Spain, its energy certificate might read D. In Germany, the same apartment could earn a C on a scale that runs to H. In Brussels, it might land on B, one of more than 15 subclasses. In the Netherlands, where the scale climbs to A+, it would look positively mediocre.
Same walls, same boiler, same physics, eight different letters.
This is not a thought experiment. It…
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By Paul Hansbury, Research Fellow in the Institute for Global Sustainable Development, University of Warwick
With Russia pressuring Belarus to play a more active role in the war, Ukraine is strengthening the hand of the exiled Belarusian opposition.
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By Rachel Sykes, Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Literature, University of Birmingham
Confessions II might be a spiritual sequel to Confessions on a Dancefloor, but the new album is both sonically different and much more confessional.
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By Nathan Abrams, Professor of Film Studies, Bangor University
As plumes of steam rise and dissipate from the grates of New York in the opening frames of Taxi Driver, we see the unsettled brown eyes of Travis Bickle, played by Robert De Niro in a career-defining role.
The second of Martin Scorsese’s successful collaborations with De Niro, the pair went on to make another eight feature films. Scorsese was a new breed of director, pushing the boundaries of “New Hollywood” – an era that broke the rules of the studio system to produce something rawer, darker and willing to explore…
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By John McGarry, Senior Lecturer in Law, Leeds Beckett University
A trial would not be fair if a jury’s decision about a defendant’s guilt or innocence was influenced by material they saw online.
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By Néstor Banderas Navarro, Profesor de Didáctica de las Ciencias Sociales, Universitat de València
The Spanish civil war lasted from 1936 to 1939, and led to the repressive Francisco Franco dictatorship, which lasted until 1975. Today, 90 years after the war broke out, it remains a traumatic, controversial part of Spain’s collective memory, and still weighs heavily on ideological and political debates.
Teaching it is vital, not just to understand the country’s relatively recent past, but also to lay the foundation of understanding on which civic and democratic education can be built.
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By Brian Ingalls, Professor, Department of Applied Mathematics, University of Waterloo
Marc Aucoin, Professor of Chemical Engineering, University of Waterloo
Modern medicine has made significant advances in cancer treatments over the decades. But all cancer therapies still face one critical challenge: how to target cancers without damaging healthy cells.
Imperfect solutions lead to side-effects: surgery and radiation can damage nearby healthy tissue, while chemotherapy can indiscriminately target fast-growing cells, damaging healthy hair follicles and stomach lining.
An alternative approach involves recruiting a surprising ally: bacteria. Some species of bacteria cannot survive in the presence of oxygen. They live in low-oxygen…
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