staying alive

In the madness of the UK's Covid response, public health expert Devi Sridhar was a lone voice of reason. Remembering this, I was keen to read her book about the wider application of her thinking to population scale life and death from all causes and found it quite enlightening. Most importantly, she demonstrates how dramatically the political decisions affecting public health differ between countries and how that leads to very different results in avoidable deaths from causes ranging from guns to cars.

How Not to Die (too soon): The Lies We’ve Been Sold and the Policies That Can Save Us
Devi Sridhar
Penguin Viking 2025

My review of the book is now out in the April issue of Chemistry & Industry:

Health accountability

Chemistry & Industry Volume 90, Issue 4, April 2026, Page 34

access via:

Wiley Online Library (paywalled PDF of the whole review section)

SCI (premium content, ie members only)

In the same issue I also have a feature about plant microbiomes. I've covered the field a couple of times in Current Biology (most recently in 2022), but this one is slightly different in emphasis as C&I wanted more about the application side of it than I have previously covered.

Plant probiotics

Chemistry & Industry Volume 90, Issue 4, April 2026, Pages 22-25

access via:

Wiley Online Library (preview of the first page and link to paywalled PDF)

SCI (premium content, ie members only)

aurochs dead and alive

My latest feature in Current Biology is about a big beast of the Pleistocene that has been extinct for almost four centuries, but is also present in the genomes of current livestock: the aurochs. A large scale study of ancient genomes has revealed the population history of the Eurasian species from which today's domestic cattle descends, and based on this wealth of information, the chances are improving to recreate an aurochs-like bovine that could serve the ecosystem services of the defunct species.

Big bovines lost and reborn

Current Biology Volume 34, Issue 23, 2 December 2024, Pages R1159-R1161

FREE access to full text and PDF download

See also my Mastodon thread where I highlighted all CB features of 2024.

The thread for 2023 is here .

Cave art at Lascaux, shown here, depicts the aurochs among other large mammals present across Europe in the Pleistocene. (Photo: JoJan/Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0).)

playing cat and mouse

After the Covid communications feature, I needed a little bit of light relief and was very grateful to discover through the twitter feed of French newspaper Libération a recent paper about how mice became associated with human settlements. Obviously, once we had mice in our houses eating all our grain provisions, we also needed cats. Libération referenced an ancient story about cat domestication from the 00s, but I was sure I had seen something more recent elsewhere, and I found it, and so I could close the circle of life: humans - grains - mice - cats - humans. That was very satisfying, and it fits in really nicely with lots of earlier features I wrote about things like the evolution of agriculture, the Indoeuropean languages, dogs, Bronze Age civilisations, and more.

So, great fun, and I hope you enjoy it too.


Of mice and men, cats and grains

Current Biology Volume 30, Issue 14, 20 July 2020, Pages R783-R786

FREE access to full text and PDF download




New analyses of ancient rodent remains suggest that the house mouse moved in with Neolithic humans even before they started storing grain. (Photo: Chris Game/Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0).)


PS It just dawned on me that this was my 222nd feature in this format, published on July 20, 2020. Also, if you're on instagram (I'm not), you can find the feature here, and like, share, comment, or whatever people do on instagram.

say cheese

In a widely publicised paper this summer, researchers claimed to have dicovered the world's oldest cheese in an Egyptian tomb. Only that the remains of that cheese were mainly sodium carbonate, and that two weeks later, traces of cheese were discovered that were twice as old. I wrote a column poking fun at the short-lived "oldest cheese in the world" but in the process discovered that the paper about the earlier cheese traces was really interesting, because it pushes the origins of cheese-making in Europe to a time that is earlier than the arrival of lactose tolerance. Which means that cheese, containing less lactose than fresh milk, may have been the gateway of ancient Europeans to the benefits of using nutrients from milk beyond early childhood. And then, being culturally prepared to use milk and milk products, ancient Europe was a fertile ground for the lactose tolerance genes when they arrived.

The whole story is now out in feature format:


On the origins of cheese

Current Biology
Volume 28, Issue 20, 22 October 2018, Pages R1171-R1173

OPEN access to full text and PDF download





Europeans enjoy an overwhelming variety of cheese products. Interestingly, the earliest evidence of cheese making in Europe now predates the arrival of lactose tolerance genes, suggesting that cheese may have paved the way for dairy use. (Image: Ted Drake/Flickr by a CC BY-SA 2.0 licence.)

latest buzz

I've been covering bee problems for well over a decade now - since the crisis around colony collapse disorder in the mid-00s. Progress has been made in terms of recognising the subtle kinds of damage that neonicotinoids can do to pollinators. But the fundamental paradox remains - we depend on insects for our nutrition (never mind to maintain a residue of a natural environment), and yet we put tonnes of insecticides into the environment.

Three neonics are now being banned EU-wide, but one of the products that may replace them is now also implicated in (bumble)bee problems. One day we'll have to acknowledge that the problem isn't insects, it's monocultures. And we'll have to learn agriculture from scratch again as our ancestors did some 12,000 years ago.

Anyhow, my latest buzz on bees is out now:

Bee worries beyond neonicotinoids

Current Biology
Volume 28, Issue 19, 8 October 2018, Pages R1121-R1123

FREE access to full text and PDF download




(Own photo, taken at Chelsea Physics Garden, London.)

losing ground

Even after the international year of soils (which was in 2015, in case you missed it), the world cares too little about the ground we stand on and which actually feeds us. On current trends, most fertile soils may disappear well within this century, and food security with them. It's a global problem that political leaders could fix with sensible regulations, if they weren't so busy deregulating everything.

My feature on the state of our soils is out now:

Losing the soils that feed us
Current Biology Volume 27, Issue 5, pR163–R166, 6 March 2017


Restricted access to full text and PDF download
(will become open access one year after publication)



We often dismiss soil as the dirt below our feet, yet it is a vital resource for food production as well as a highly complex and insufficiently understood ecosystem. The image shows farmers in Kyuso, Kenya terracing part of their land in order to minimise erosion losses. (Photo: ©FAO/Thomas Hug.)

edited crops

The genome editing method CRISPR-Cas promises genetic improvements in crops and livestock without the drawbacks of conventional GM. Regulators have given it carte blanche, but will consumers also accept it? Much depends on how this latest agricultural revolution will be communicated, and whether its potential to empower a wider range of participants (rather than encouraging a monopoly of the GM/Monsanto kind) will be realised.

I've explored these questions in my latest feature which is out now:

Harvest time for CRISPR-Cas?

Current Biology Volume 26, Issue 20, pR903–R905, 24 October 2016

Restricted access to full text and PDF download
(will become open access one year after publication)

The mushroom Agaricus bisporus is the first food variant edited with the help of CRISPR-Cas technology and cleared by the US Department of Agriculture. (Photo: Leif K-Brooks.)

bees can't help it

Another news story on bees and and neonicotinoids. Over the last few years it has become clear that sublethal effects of the pesticides are very bad news for the success of bee colonies. The UK govt seems to think that bees could just say no to poisoned nectar.

Research from Geraldine Wright's lab now shows that they can't detect the poison with their sense of bitter taste. Worse still, they have a tendency to eat more of the toxic stuff. Full story out in Chemistry World, free access:

Bees 'prefer' neonicotinoid-laced nectar
Chemistry World 22.4.2015

The story also appears in the June issue of the printed magazine, on page 29.

own photo (not sure if I've used this one before?)

PS related news that came in just after this:

• Bumblebee genomes
• Bumblebees self-medicate with nicotine

bees to birds

I have covered the threats to bees and other pollinators a few times since the emergence of Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) in the noughties (see the label bees, although this blog doesn't quite go back to the very beginning of the problem). Gradually, the emphasis shifted to the question of if and how systemic pesticides and in particular the neonicotinoids, could through indirect or subtle sublethal effects cause pollinator problems.

Ecologists have now compiled evidence suggesting that it's not just the pollinators that suffer from systemic pesticides accumulating in soil and surface water. Collateral damage ranges from annelid worms to birds, and valuable ecosystem services (beyond pollination) are under threat. I've written a feature about all this which is now out in Current Biology (restricted access):

Systemic pesticide concerns extend beyond the bees
Current Biology Volume 24, Issue 16, pR717–R720, 18 August 2014
Summary and restricted access to full text and PDF file

Bumblebees in a garden in Germany. Own photo.

food speculation update

Back in October 2011, I published a feature on food speculation (i.e. the gambling with vital commodities on international financial markets, which can leave real people unable to buy the food they need to survive), so I was pleased to hear yesterday that the EU is now taking action, as it sealed a deal on the reform of the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID), which sets new regulation for financial markets.

As always when the EU does a good thing, the UK government is fighting hard to stop it, but I understand it only succeeded in watering it down a bit, and campaigners from the World Development Movement are claiming the EU decision as a win for their fight against food speculation.

Here are the reactions from:

WDM: EU takes historic step to stop banks betting on hunger

Oxfam: EU deal on curbing food speculation comes none too soon

Friends of the Earth: New finance directive lays out improvements, but loopholes remain

See also this report from the Guardian: EU moves to curb food price bets by traders

Photo: WDM.

moving targets

Are plant diseases that cause catastrophic famines a thing of the past? Well, ahem, the pests and pathogens keep evolving, moving and spreading, and human activities like global trade and large scale monoculture often help them. So new threats to food security are emerging, and scientists have to find new ways of saving the crops we eat.

Some very scary things I learned from researching this feature which is now out:

Pests on the move

Current Biology, Volume 23, Issue 19, R855-R857, 7 October 2013, doi:10.1016/j.cub.2013.09.034

Free access to full text and PDF file

Stem rust on wheat stalks. (Photo: Liang Qu/IAEA.)

how cereals tricked us

In my latest feature, out today, I looked at the origins of agriculture. People like to think that it was an invention in the sense that neolithic hunter-gatherers "invented" farming and found it more efficient so switched from food-finding to food production.

However, recent research has shown up a massive paradox in this narrative. For the people concerned, farming wasn't a better way to make a living than foraging. If anything, they had to work harder for less reward. Also, the feat of "domestication" wasn't a clever trick devised by early plant breeders. Rather, people harvested the grains they liked and took them home, and unwittingly exerted selection pressure that changed the species they ate.

When birds spread plant seeds by eating berries, we tend to credit the plant for recruiting the animals as helpers in their own reproduction. After writing this feature I arrived at the conclusion that the origin of agriculture was very similar. Barley tricked humans into spreading its seeds around the world.

Anyhow. Full story here:

The paradoxical evolution of agriculture

Current Biology, Volume 23, Issue 16, R667-R670, 19 August 2013 doi:10.1016/j.cub.2013.08.001

Free access to:

HTML text

PDF file

Image source: Wikimedia commons

food security and climate change

Last month, I attended a discussion meeting on food security and climate change at the Royal Society, London. As in other areas, it appears that change is going to hit those people hardest who are already in a precarious situation and can least afford to protect themselves. However, I also heard of some approaches promising efficiency improvements with very simple means, such as clever combinations of crops.

I've summarised some of the things I learned there in a feature which appears in this week's issue of Current Biology:

Food security in the times of climate change
Current Biology, Volume 23, Issue 1, R1-R4, 7 January 2013
doi:10.1016/j.cub.2012.12.

Full text and free access to PDF file.

food fight

I don't often write about food and agriculture, but hey, it's harvest time, and world population is going to pass the 7 billion mark soon, so naturally our thoughts turn to how to feed all those people.

Chemical crop protection is under attack from all sides, as GM crops push some of it out of the global market (though not the European one, where people mistrust GM), resistance to established herbicides is spreading, and the fears of side effects (most recently: on bees) aren't going away either.

So I've looked into what direction the industry may take to get out of this trouble, and found a few interesting new approaches.

Read my feature in today's issue of Current Biology:

New directions in crop protection
Current Biology, Volume 21, Issue 17, R641-R643, 13 September 2011
doi:10.1016/j.cub.2011.08.055
Summary and limited access to PDF file




Don't know what they fed this quince tree (not mine)!