A biweekly round-up of recent articles, blog postings and tweets about livestock, aid and other topics that may be of interest to ILRI staff, compiled by David Aronson.

First, this cool graphic, a random find on Reddit: Population density of the 1.4 billion cows of the world per square kilometer.

The Thomson Reuters Foundation has a nice piece about how scientists are fighting global warming by making cows less gassy. The article quotes Mazingira’s Lutz Merbold, extensively.

ILRI’s recent report, The influence of livestock-derived foods on nutrition during the first 1,000 days of life, released in conjunction with Chatham House, continues to generate significant media attention. This report in SciDev quotes Delia Grace and offers a good write-up of the main points of the report.

Is there nothing new under the sun? In ancient Egypt, leaders increased their empire’s grain production and crossbred cattle for resilience in an early effort to ward off climate disaster, a new study shows.

Despite what you might think, scientists in areas that lack the basics — including dependable electricity, water and funding — do manage to do research that has a high societal impact. This article in Nature describes how five scientists are making do with less.

Scholars in the *global south* are hugely under-represented in top international peer-reviewed social and medical sciences journals. A study originally published in The Conversation found that less than 3% of 947 full-length articles in four major journals were written by scholars based in the south. ‘The exclusion of scholars based in the global south undermines the quality of scholarship and sends a negative message to students,’ say the authors of the study, who also propose some remedies.

Resistance to warnings about climate change in the US is fueled largely by political tribalism, a new study finds. The New York Times has a long piece on what makes people believe or not believe in scientific findings. It turns out that actual evidence has surprisingly little to do with changing people’s minds.

There’s a new approach to farming that places ecological science at the center of food production. The New York Times reports on the first global conference on agroecology, recently held in Rome, and on global initiatives ‘to take full advantage of nature’s assets, drawn from the farm itself and surrounding ecosystems, to grow food.’ José Graziano da Silva, the director general of the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization, says that agroecology represents a ‘transformative change toward sustainable agriculture and food systems.’

We often think—I know I certainly did—that there’s a link between poverty and obesity in the global north. As paradoxical as it might seem to people who live in developing countries, in the rich world, it’s the poor who get fat. The rich take out gym memberships, buy organic veggies, and find satisfaction in their careers and hobbies. Or so I always thought. This turns out to be false, according to the Washington Post: In the US, at least, it’s neither the poor nor the rich who are obese, but the middle class.

This is an interesting Twitter thread from food historian Rachel Laudan about the perils of romanticizing so-called peasant life and the ‘all-natural’ diets of our pre-industrial ancestors: ‘Life was all too often insecure, subject to exploitation, and lacking in variety and opportunity.’

A leading global think tank says that conflicts between farming and herding communities in central Nigeria have claimed six times more lives this year than a deadly Islamist insurgency in the northeast and is now the nation’s biggest security threat.

The editor-in-chief of Nigeria’s Daily Trust newspaper says the solution to these conflicts is simple: Force the herders to settle. Turn them into ranchers. It’s an old proposal, one that anthropologists have been contesting for decades.  (Check out the concluding chapter.)

In India, meanwhile, Muslims who trade cattle are facing ever greater threats from lynch mobs and Hindu vigilantes, reports the Washington Post.

In April, a batch of bad romaine lettuce out of Arizona caused 17 people all over the US to fall sick and six to be hospitalized. A long article in The New Republic looks at America’s enduring failure to prevent food-borne Illnesses, as evidenced by recurrent bouts of food poisoning like that one.

In a lengthy article, ProPublica reports on the push to clean up the health and environmental risks associated with open hearth cooking. The bottom line: The USD75-million initiative to solve these problems, introduced in 2010 as the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves, has been a major disappointment.  It turns out the risks associated with open hearth cooking might not have been as grave as originally feared.

‘Nothing in agriculture is as divisive as a modified genome,’ declares this article in Vox.com, which clearly hasn’t been following the debates about livestock. The article focuses on the public reaction to the rapid incursion of CRISPR technology in agriculture. Scientists fear a repeat of the negative response to GMOs, it says, and industry is gearing up for a fight.

For more on CRISPR—though not specifically on its role in agriculture—watch this review by the comedian John Oliver.  It’s very informative and very funny.

How can scientists make a difference? It’s not enough to find the truth, this scientist says, ‘We must also become storytellers.’ An article in the Guardian makes the case that ‘We [scientists] have little choice but to apply the philosophy of judo to the problem of communicating scientific work and findings.’

Finally, here’s some alarming news about the latest in food convenience, as reported in ‘America’s finest news source,’ the satirical journal The Onion.