Social Relations and Money

About a decade ago, Dr Tom McDonald of the Department of Sociology was studying media use in rural China. But the deeper he got into his topic, the more he realised something bigger was afoot. Money exchanges on different kinds of social media were aligning with...

Crypto Meets the Real World

Fiat money, generally speaking, is money that is issued and backed by states who promise to uphold its value. But that has not stopped people from imagining a world where currencies are ‘denationalised’. About 50 years ago, when economist Friedrich Hayek speculated on...

Chain Reactions

The H5N1 bird flu first jumped to humans in 1997 in Hong Kong, killing six of the 18 patients infected. But that was not the end of H5N1. In 2003 it resurfaced in humans and over the next few years was detected in wild birds in many regions around the world. For...

Disunity of Purpose

In 2007, the Indonesian government announced it would stop sending samples of the H5N1 avian influenza virus detected in its country to the World Health Organization’s (WHO) reference laboratories. Its worry was that these samples, provided freely, would be used by...

The ‘One Health’ Challenge

What does One Health mean in practice? Professor Malik Peiris, Tam Wah-Ching Professor in Medical Science, of the School of Public Health, one of the most highly cited scholars in the world on emerging infectious diseases and recent joint recipient of the prestigious...