Recent discussions of the way ahead for agriculture have tended to centre around the frequently incompatible claims of the proponents of technological agriculture, now further developed through inputs from biotechnology , and ecological agriculture, of which organic farming is the best known example.There is a need for the claims made for these two versions to be put into a broader scientific a...

PLoS ONE is five years old this month. Though still young in age, the journal has grown up remarkably rapidly, to the extent that it is now the largest peerreviewed journal in the world. In the past five years, it has both garnered huge respect and support from authors, readers, and editors, and drawn the criticism and ire of many commercial publishers and establishment figures still fighting t...

D ramatic changes accompany the death of cells. Attempts to align these changes into cognate groups and identify the mechanisms responsible for them have led to substantial and sometimes surprising insights into cell biology. One such constellation of structural and functional changes is associated with apoptosis (a death process found in development, atrophy, the targets of cell killing by the...

In a paper called Definiteness and Knowability, Timothy Williamson investigates the question of whether one must accept that vagueness is an epistemic phenomenon if one adopts classical logic and a disquotational principle for truth. Some have thought that one must not, and have argued that classical logic and the disquotational principle can be preserved without accepting that vagueness is an ...

So, what is ‘One Health’? How does this concept help us think through, and perhaps solve, public health problems? One Health places disease, particularly infection, in a broad ecological context. Many agents of infection target hosts beyond humans, and One Health seeks to understand and explain the public health implications of broad host ranges. OneHealth is a modern restatement of the old epi...