News: December 2019

North Wales Tech meetup at Bangor University

Publication date: 12 December 2019

Can African smallholders farm themselves out of poverty?

A great deal of research on agriculture in Africa is organised around the premise that intensification can take smallholder farmers out of poverty. The emphasis in programming often focuses on technologies that increase farm productivity and management practices that go along with them. Yet the returns of such technologies are not often evaluated within a whole-farm context. And – critically – the returns for smallholders with very little available land have not received sufficient attention. This article by David Harris , School of Natural Sciences ; Jordan Chamberlin , International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) , and Kai Mausch , World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF) is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article .

Publication date: 11 December 2019

Talking About Wardrobe Waste

How much waste do you have in your wardrobe? Sequins on clothing are on-trend this season, but this fast fashion craze can have a serious impact on our environment.

Publication date: 5 December 2019

Why some scientists want to rewrite the history of how we learned to walk

It’s not often that a fossil truly rewrites human evolution, but the recent discovery of an ancient extinct ape has some scientists very excited. According to its discoverers, Danuvius guggenmosi combines some human-like features with others that look like those of living chimpanzees. They suggest that it would have had an entirely distinct way of moving that combined upright walking with swinging from branches. And they claim that this probably makes it similar to the last shared ancestor of humans and chimps. This article by Vivien Shaw of the School of Medical Sciences and Isabelle Catherine Winder , of the School of Natural Sciences , is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article .

Publication date: 5 December 2019