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given skepticism about China from Africa’s own increasingly vibrant civil society, which is demanding to know what China’s billions of dollars in infrastructure building, mineral extraction and land acquisition mean for the daily lives and political rights of ordinary Africans.

at the start of a four-country African trip, Prime Minister Li Keqiang acknowledged “growing pains” in the relationship, and the need to “assure our African friends in all seriousness that China will never pursue a colonialist path like some countries did, or allow colonialism, which belongs to the past, to reappear in Africa.”

China takes our primary goods and sells us manufactured ones. This was also the essence of colonialism.”

real issue, though, is not the volume of problems, but the interactions among them. Here we find a core lesson from the bees that we ignore at our peril: the concept of synergy, where one plus one equals three, or four, or more.

the most sophisticated data set available for any species about synergies among pesticides, and between pesticides and disease. The only human equivalent is research into pharmaceutical interactions, with many prescription drugs showing harmful or fatal side effects when used together, particularly in patients who already are disease-compromised.

We discovered that crop yields, and thus profits, are maximized if considerable acreages of cropland are left uncultivated to support wild pollinators. Continue reading the main story 98 Comments Continue reading the main story Recent Comments Clyde Wynant 26 minutes ago There is no precedent in the short history of mankind for the toxic soup of chemical we all ingest from birth to death, in our food supply,... Carolyn Egeli 37 minutes ago Thank you for this thoughtful piece on the demise of the honeybees. The clear message is we have a problem the increasing use of pesticides... phyllis 58 minutes ago Bzzzzzzzzz! A very good reminder of the dying huge numbers of honeybee colonies and the also the plants they pollinate . We must always... See All Comments Write a comment A variety of wild plants means a healthier, more diverse bee population, which will then move to the planted fields next door in larger and more active numbers.

In October, in his keynote address to the 2014 National Bioneers Conference in San Rafael, California, he told the assembled crowd, “In the light of a collapsing world, what better time to be born than now? Because this generation gets to rewrite history, gets to leave our mark on this earth.… We will be known as the generation, as the people on the planet, that brought forth a healthy, just, sustainable world for every generation to come. … We are the generation of change.”In December, HBO will debut the music video “Be the Change,” by Martinez’ hip-hop group, Voice of Youth.

Russian speakers are on average 124 milliseconds faster than English speakers at identifying when dark blue shades into light blue. A French person is a tad more likely than an Anglophone to imagine a table as having a high voice if it were a cartoon character, because the word is marked as feminine in his language.This is cool stuff. But the question is whether such infinitesimal differences, perceptible only in a laboratory, qualify as worldviews — cultural standpoints or ways of thinking that we consider important. I think the answer is no.

In Mandarin Chinese, for example, you can express If you had seen my sister, you’d have known she was pregnant with the same sentence you would use to express the more basic If you see my sister, you know she’s pregnant. One psychologist argued some decades ago that this meant that Chinese makes a person less sensitive to such distinctions, which, let’s face it, is discomfitingly close to saying Chinese people aren’t as quick on the uptake as the rest of us. The truth is more mundane: Hypotheticality and counterfactuality are established more by context in Chinese than in English.

But if a language is not a worldview, what do we tell the guy in the lecture hall? Should we care that in 100 years only about 600 of the current 6,000 languages may be still spoken?The answer is still yes, but for other reasons.