Bees

“Bees and other wild pollinators are fascinating, beautiful, and vital to our food production. They have pollinated our crops for millennia; now it’s time for us to return the favour.” – Dave Goulson, DEFRA

by Erin Cullen

Pollination is the process of pollen being transferred to the female reproductive organs of a plant and fertilisation taking place. Pollinators (which include honeybees) are vital to the process of pollination in flowering plants. Therefore pollinators provide vital ecosystem services which include food production as well as being important for biodiversity and conservation. With the need for food production to increase, now is an important time for pollinator security. However, their numbers are in decline. This piece will consider the legislation in place to protect pollinators both at a UK and international level, and examine the evidence collected by scientists to determine its efficacy. Although government commitment to biodiversity is strong in the UK, patchy legislation means that this commitment may not translate into protection for pollinators.

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Brains

Most diseases have sudden well-defined symptoms, but isn’t forgetfulness just a part of ageing? How do you know when you should be concerned? 

by Philip Lindstedt

With the increasing life expectancy of the global population age-associated diseases stand to become the greatest plague of the 21st century. Indeed, in the U.K. dementia has recently overtaken heart disease as the leading cause of death. While not through a lack of effort, the development of effective therapies for dementias, especially Alzheimer’s disease, the most prevalent form, has been woefully unsuccessful. Policy makers around the globe have settled on a deadline of 2025 for a single effective therapy against Alzheimer’s in order to mitigate the potentially immense cost of the care burden. Although some candidates appear promising, recent high-profile failures showcase the difficult path towards 2025, casting doubt on the possibility for researchers to meet their deadline in the current policy paradigm.

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Shivi field

When researchers asked questions about life before and after access to solar home systems, they were struck by the fact that none of the answers centered on the women’s own needs in their life.

by Shivi Chandna

In rural India, women in poor households spend a large part of their day performing basic tasks such as collecting fuel wood or kerosene, which keeps them away from employment or education opportunities and makes their lives more difficult. Access to electricity is therefore increasingly regarded as a means to improve their status in society. Although a large number of small-scale and community-based off-grid renewable energy projects are in place to provide access to electricity with a women-centric approach, research on the benefits to women has been largely anecdotal. A review of the evidence for the impact of rural electrification on women’s lives concluded that electricity access has a positive effect on women’s practical needs by reducing drudgery and providing better health, time-savings and income generation.

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Smithsonian-001

The loss of skilled women from the STEM workforce in academia has not gone unnoticed…[but] even with policies in place, a change in broader culture will be necessary to precipitate the desired changes.

by Sumana Sharma

The underrepresentation of women in leadership positions in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) is usually attributed to the ‘leaky pipeline phenomenon’, according to which an increasing proportion of women leave their occupational fields at each stage along their career paths. This attrition is most pronounced for the academic biological sciences, in which the most significant attrition occurs at the postgraduate-to-group leader transition. To illustrate: in the UK in 2014/15, 66% of bioscience postgraduate students, but only 18% of professors, were female.

A huge gender difference in leadership positions is evident across all STEM fields: overall, 82% of all professors are men, as of 2014. This attrition of women in the STEM workforce raises questions over specific barriers faced by women in this field for career advancement. These barriers can be multi-faceted; thus, accurately identifying the main barriers and designing policies to address them will be essential to resolving gender disparity in the field of STEM.

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Electricity meter

[ Image Credit: Niel Lall ]

The broad question looming over these recommendations is this: will this new intervention – which is essentially a negation of the previous one – bring about positive outcomes for the consumers?

by Paul Monroe

Ensuring sufficient competition in the energy market is a key role of the regulator. One of the most popular measures for measuring competition has been in the analysis of customers switching between tariff plans. Unfortunately, switching rates are comparatively low and the market remains dominated (85%) by the six largest energy companies. Many regulatory interventions have been made, but one of the most significant was a cap on the total number of tariff plans on offer by suppliers.

Earlier in 2016, this decision was reversed and the cap was eliminated. The primary reasoning was that the cap now inhibited competition because, alongside other measures, it prevented the creation of innovative offerings, like reward plans paired with other services, discounted “smart home” packages, and more.

The broad question looming over this decision is whether the cap removal will promote innovation or simply represent at return to the previous state of affairs. Furthermore, the implications for vulnerable customers – who benefit greatly from regular switching but may be dissuaded from doing so in this scenario – require exploration. This paper will detail the potential effects of this policy intervention in depth.

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