The Birmingham Brief - intelligent thought on policy issues.
- Description
- As the crisis in Libya unfolds and as the US, France and the UK get potentially sucked ever deeper into yet another disastrous military intervention, policy debates and decisions appear to be driven primarily by humanitarian concern. Unsurprisingly, supporters and opponents alike use the humanitarian argument—one side seeks to stop a murderous dictator from slaughtering his own people, the other is concerned about the inevitable civilian casualties and 'collateral damage' caused by airstrikes, no matter how sophisticated the military technology behind them might be.
- Date:
- Tuesday 22nd March 2011
- Categories:
- Research, Social Sciences
- Description
- The tragic events at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant constitute the worst nuclear disaster in more than two decades. Whilst the human cost is of paramount importance and rightly dominates the headlines there will also be significant implications for the future of the world wide nuclear industry, which suffered a 20 year decline after the partial core meltdown at Three Mile Island and the disaster at Chernobyl. Both events reinforced the negative public perception toward nuclear power that had emerged over the course of the 1970s.
- Date:
- Friday 18th March 2011
- Categories:
- Engineering and Physical Sciences, Life and Environmental Sciences, Research
- Description
- The current demographic trends show that the UK's population is becoming older. As this happens the incidence of neurodegenerative conditions like Alzheimer's, dementia and Parkinson's disease is also increasing. This has huge social, economical and political implications – further evidence that understanding how the brain works both in health and disease is a challenge that we need to address urgently before the problem of neurodegeneration becomes more evident.
- Date:
- Monday 14th March 2011
- Categories:
- Medical and Dental Sciences, Research
- Description
- Few can have been unaffected by the disturbing scenes following the devastating earthquake in Haiti in January. More than one million displaced survivors are now housed in camps around the capital, Port-au-Prince, with squalid sanitation facilities and little access to clean drinking water. Poor sanitation is known to give rise to disease and so it is unsurprising that, at the time of writing, there are more than 2,600 known cases of cholera in Haiti, with more than 250 people having lost their lives.
- Date:
- Wednesday 17th November 2010
- Categories:
- Engineering and Physical Sciences, Research