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.

Rotterdam will soon house the world’s first floating dairy farm, a multilevel, hi-tech home to 40 Meuse Rhine Issel cows, and perhaps the world’s most expensive bovine real estate.

Chinese officials are scrambling to stop a deadly African swine fever outbreak with the potential to ravage the country’s pig population.

The Guardian newspaper, which has published numerous articles opposing the livestock industry, features this opinion piece arguing that ‘calls for us all to switch entirely to plant-based foods ignore one of the most powerful tools we have to mitigate these ills: grazing and browsing animals.’

Increased levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere due to climate change will affect plant growth and suppress the levels of zinc, iron, and protein in staple crops. That means that by 2050, an additional 175 million people worldwide will be deficient in zinc, 122 million more won’t be eating enough protein, and 1.4 billion women and children under the age of 5 stand to lose an additional 4% of their dietary iron intake.

Climate change is expected to cause an additional 250,000 deaths every year between now and 2050, says UN chief Antonio Guterres.

The Chinese have been using plant-based foods to mimic meat for hundreds of years, reports the Economist. In the time of the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907), for example, an official hosted a banquet at which he served convincing replicas of pork and mutton dishes made from vegetables…

A Somali refugee has opened his country’s first dairy in 27 years. Constant security challenges in the capital, Mogadishu, have affected both production and distribution. Uncowed, however, he ploughs forward.

Wheat’s genome has finally been decoded. This will make it much easier to breed new varieties of the world’s most important crop.

A burial site near Lake Turkana in Kenya from 5,000 years ago shows that early human communities did not inevitably develop powerful elites or compete violently for scarce resources, but may have worked together to overcome challenges instead.

The signature style of Mind the Map, a French graphic design firm, is the simple, seemingly hand-drawn map that manages to convey complex data. These maps depicting Africa’s primary suppliers are a case in point.

Is everything we know about China’s Great Leap Forward wrong? A new book argues that China’s communal farms saw dramatic productivity gains and set the stage for the country’s emergence as a major power.

Young African scientists face persistent barriers which cause them to leave their own countries, and even academia. This means the continent’s work force loses highly trained people who are crucial for economic and technological advancement. This is where they emigrate to, according to the Global Young Academy:

Never mind the headlines—the world is getting better every day and every way, says Our World in Data’s Max Roser. And he’s got the data to prove it. And more here—on extreme poverty, hunger and malnutrition, global health, population growth, and global education. The Center for Global Development weighs in here with a dozen key data points on global poverty.

I would not say these are entirely inaccurate, notwithstanding the occasional solecism, in their elaboration on the errors—or perhaps the faults—that can sometimes, although to be sure not always, pervade or beset the communications of trained—oh screw it: Here are Five writing mistakes new scientists make. A recommended book on the subject is The Scientist’s Guide to Writing, by Stephen Heard.

Benin is building a whole ecotourism industry around this aquatic antelope, says Le Monde.

A 38-second video of two men in Lambadipalli, a village in Central India, splashing around to a hip-hop song while trailing behind their mud-splattered oxen has been viewed by millions of people around the world. You should watch it too.