There’s a looming economic crisis in higher education. Perhaps you have lost work already and you’re wondering how you will support yourself (I’m really sorry). It’s hard to know if you’ll get more or less teaching next semester and what form it will take. Will it be online? Or face to face? Maybe your courses […] … learn more→

What if the experience of containment was ultimately good for the school? As with any crisis, the lessons that can be drawn from it will depend on the ulterior motives that both will invest in it. By extracting oneself from the political perspectives that will have to be analyzed at one time or another, a new horizon […] … learn more→

Approximately 1.4 billion children worldwide are currently living under partial or full lockdown as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. In the UK, and in many other countries across the world, it has been six weeks or longer since children last played, in person, with a friend. Initial data collected as part of my ongoing research […] … learn more→

With many universities shifting their exams online as a result of the coronavirus, questions are being asked about how students can be given an equal chance to succeed given their varying levels of access to a conducive home environment. This, I predict, is likely to be a very vexed issue given the volume of complaints […] … learn more→

As an atmospheric scientist, I am well aware that air pollution is bad. And as a human being in 2020, I am also well aware that this coronavirus is also bad. However, while it’s true that both pollution and the pandemic are worse in cities, simplistic correlations between air quality and COVID-19 deaths have often […] … learn more→

When the state of California cut funding to the University of California system by US$619.3 million, or 19%, in the wake of the 2008-09 recession, the leaders of the UC system tried to spread the resulting economic pain to its employees in a fair way. More specifically, employees with bigger salaries took on larger cuts – […] … learn more→

Australia’s researchers have answered the call to help with urgent pandemic clinical trials and other research needs, placing other work on hold. Experts across a broad range of disciplines are crucial to our health, mental health and economic well-being. And yet the COVID-19 pandemic has posed one of the most significant threats in history to […] … learn more→

Be kind to others and to yourself. Do what you can do. Make small daily goals. Be realistic. Celebrate every victory.  Don’t be hard on yourself. These are extraordinary times. These are the messages that I and a lot of others have been spreading during lockdown. And I stand by those sentiments. However, seven weeks in […] … learn more→

Human knowledge of viruses and human bodies has reached the molecular and even atomic scale, yet the past few months has revealed how vulnerable we remain to pandemics. This, in turn, illustrates that for all of humanity’s progress in understanding nature and humanity itself over the past centuries, some of the scientific problems and global […] … learn more→

My 6-year-old hates the British. To be more specific, the British Empire that ruled over up to a quarter of the world’s land by the early 1900s. Hates that one of the biggest diamonds in the world, found in India over 1,000 years ago, now sits in the queen’s set of crown jewels. Hates that they drew up borders quickly and […] … learn more→