December 2016

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The Shaping of Tuscany

I grew up in the outskirts of Florence in the 1970s and 1980s, in a town that was neither city nor country and that is now firmly embedded in Florence’s metropolitan area.…

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The remarkable Dr Robertson

The latest Parasitology Paper of the Month is “The remarkable Dr Robertson” by Tansy C. Hammarton. It’s strange to think that little over a year ago, my knowledge of Muriel Robertson was limited to the two paragraphs I’d read about her in ‘The Scottish Encounter with Tropical Disease’ , namely that she had studied in Glasgow in the early 1900s and later travelled to Africa where she made key discoveries about the life cycle of the African trypanosome parasite.…

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Two glaciers collapse in western Tibet

A glacier near Lake Aru in western Tibet collapsed on 17 July 2016. Now the Journal of Glaciology publishes the first scientific account of this cryospheric disaster in which nine local yak herders were killed. Eyewitnesses reported that the episode lasted only four to five minutes. More than 70 million cubic metres of ice tumbled down a mountain valley, spreading over a distance of 6 kilometres onto the lowland below.

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