News
Professor Peter Ryan of the Fitzpatrick Institute of Ornithology, who has recently returned from the Antarctic Circumnavigation Expedition (ACE), one of the biggest and most ambitious scientific expeditions in history, will talk about seabirds and his experiences in the Antarctic in a Winter School course entitled A Birder's Perspective on the Antarctic.
Eating insects has long made sense in Africa. The world must catch up.
Eating insects is as old as mankind. Globally, 2 billion people consume insects, a practise known as entomophagy. It is more common in Africa than anywhere else in the world. The continent is home to the richest diversity of edible insects – more than 500 species ranging from caterpillars (Lepidoptera) to termites (Isoptera), locusts, grasshoppers, crickets (Orthoptera), ants and bees (Hymenoptera), bugs (Heteroptera and Homoptera) and beetles (Coleoptera). Read more about this story on The Conversation.
Mike Picker's Summer School course on insects is full booked, but you can join the waiting list for a possible repeat.
A November 2016 edition of the journal Nature Scientific Reports tells the story of a new species of winged dinosaur discovered in southern China by construction workers, who almost destroyed it with dynamite. Rare discoveries of fossils like these inspire Professor Anusuya Chinsamy-Turan, who will be lecturing on The Curious Lives of the Thunder birds and their Kin at Summer School 2017.
Svetlana Alexievich, who won the 2015 Nobel Prize for literature for her book Second-Hand Time, described by the judges as “a monument to suffering and courage in our time”, has been shortlisted for the £30,000 Baillie Gifford prize for non-fiction. Alexievich’s study of life in the Soviet Union just before the system collapsed will be of interest to the many participants enrolling for Ten Days and a Hundred Years: The Long Shadow of the Bolshevik Revolution.