The issue of academic integrity has gained considerable prominence in the last couple of decades. In this article I will attempt to summarize what I see as some key issues, cite a few authoritative articles, and communicate some impressions formed from personal experience as an academic.1 I left India for the first time to join the physics program at Stony Brook University, New York. Everything was new and exciting at this time, especially for someone coming from India, and the formative impact of these five years on me cannot be overemphasized. My first PhD guide, Daniel Z. Freedman, imparted a valuable lesson to me on the importance of honesty and transparency in research. While working on my first research project under his guidance, I came to know that a postdoctoral fellow in the same department was working on something closely related. Freedman instructed me to meet this person, tell him unconditionally what I was doing and how far I had reached, and ask him to respond similarly. This went very well and we ended up publishing independent papers using different methods but with overlapping results. I learned the virtue of transparency, though of course I was fortunate that the other party also acted responsibly. I did not give conscious thought to academic ethics in those days, and it rarely came up as a subject of discussion in my presence beyond the occasional anecdote about some specific scientist. I do not remember any case of paper retraction for misconduct, or even of copying in examinations, during my five years at Stony Brook. This continued to hold true in the initial years following my return to India in 1984 as a postdoctoral fellow and then faculty member at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR). Explore the full InterDialogue with Sunil Mukhi....

Earth’s Memory, Part One Abstract Every rock carries a fragment of Earth’s memory. Collectively, these fragments preserve an extraordinary geological record spanning more than 4.5 billion years of planetary evolution. This article traces that record through the deep-time history of our planet—from the formation of Earth’s earliest crust and the Great Oxidation Event, when microbial life transformed the planet’s atmosphere, to the five great mass extinctions that repeatedly reset the trajectory of life, and the Snowball Earth episodes, when our planet experienced its most extreme glaciation. Drawing on more than two decades of fieldwork across Himalaya and Peninsular India, among ancient rocks, minerals, and fossils that bear direct witness to these planetary transformations, it explores how geologists reconstruct Earth’s early history from evidence preserved in the geological archives. Taken together, these geological events reveal a recurring pattern: Earth is a dynamic system in which every major crisis has also created the conditions for new and often more complex forms of life to evolve. That pattern, written into rocks billions of years old, continues to shape the planet today.    I first learned to listen to rocks long before I had the words to describe what that meant.  It began in the Himalaya, the youngest mountain range on Earth, still rising, still deforming, and still recording the ongoing collision between continents. During my early fieldwork, I spent long days mapping folded strata, tracing fault scarps, and trying to understand how landscapes preserve evidence of processes operating across vastly different geological timescales. At that time, I often felt that the mountains were trying to say something in a language I had not yet learned. Over time, through fieldwork, mapping, and countless hours spent among rocks and sediments, I began to decipher that silent language.  The lesson deepened across many other landscapes of India....

In the context of risk management and in the face of environmental and economic challenges such as climate change, coastal erosion, water insecurity, and the accelerated loss of biodiversity, among others, the concept of Nature-based Solutions (NbS) has emerged. Over the past decade, this appealing concept has been consolidated as an integrative approach that seeks to address socio-environmental challenges through the sustainable management of socio-ecological systems.  The United Nations Environment Assembly defines NbS as “actions that protect, sustainably manage, and restore natural or modified ecosystems to effectively and adaptively address societal challenges, simultaneously providing benefits for human well-being and biodiversity.” In this way, NbS represents a paradigm shift from traditional solutions based exclusively on grey infrastructure, which are now insufficient in facing many large and complex contemporary challenges. The relevance of NbS resides in their capacity to generate multiple, synergistic benefits through ecosystem services and the strengthening of socio-ecological resilience. This approach recognizes the interdependence of nature and culture, and much of its success depends on how communities perceive and acknowledge the multiple benefits socio-ecological systems provide for human well-being. Therefore, NbS must emphasize the need for participatory, equitable, and inclusive processes to ensure their legitimacy and long-term sustainability. NbS encompass actions for the protection, restoration, and sustainable management of ecosystems. Although they offer multifunctional and cost-effective benefits, their implementation faces diverse challenges. Several international frameworks acknowledge NbS as priority strategies to confront climate change and biodiversity loss, promoting guidelines for their adoption at different scales. Among these frameworks are the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (1992), the Convention on Biological Diversity (1992), the Sendai Framework (2015–30), and the Paris Agreement (2015). However, it is not enough to only secure financing or display technical feasibility. It is also necessary to establish a coherent legal framework, generate open and...

Earth Observation technologies are becoming increasingly valuable for understanding our changing world. They are also critical for formulating policies to protect ecosystems and support local communities. The availability of imagery taken from satellites, airplanes, and drones offers opportunities to detect deforestation, glacier melting, crop productivity, hurricane alerts, ocean temperatures, and much more. These applications have become wide-spread and are commonly featured in the news and on social media; an informed public can now be acutely aware of the significant effects that humans have on the landscape. However, other processes of land use change are too complex to be detected and understood solely from space. For example, detecting rich minerals, tracking illicit land activities (e.g., coca farming), and monitoring water salinity. For these and other complex land changes, the imagery itself might not be enough to understand the processes shaping these changes in the landscape. New ways of addressing these are needed. About 26 years ago, Jacqueline Geoghegan and her co authors wrote a chapter in the book People and Pixels: Linking Remote Sensing and Social Science, titled “Socializing the Pixel and Pixelizing the Social in Land-Use and Land-Cover Change.” This chapter was a pioneering step forward in extracting more information from images and linking them with the social processes behind them. It helped me during my PhD studies and subsequent research to develop a strategy for connecting quantitative data from pixels with social mechanisms that impact land change. But how do these two approaches work together? The full Interdialogue with Paulo Murillo. The role of classification in traditional land use science relies on how effectively we can classify elements on the land surface. Classification is the most relevant task in remote sensing. We want to classify or differentiate between forests and agricultural fields or among diverse types of crops using...

Editor’s Note: This semi-technical review article is republished with exclusive permission from The Royal Society Press. It was originally published to the peer-reviewed journal Philosophical Transactions of The Royal Society A. This article has a target audience of researchers and experts in diverse disciplines, though to make the content more understandable and engaging for a wider audience, we have broken apart the pdf version of the article into five parts and interspersed audio clips from Constantino Tsallis on relevant topics being discussed in the article. Explore our full InterDialogue with Professor Tsallis to learn more about the development and interdisciplinary applications of his innovative generalized theory of non-additive “Tsallis” entropy and q-statistics. Listen to Tsallis explain about his diverse cultural background and the early development of non-additive entropy. Explore the full InterDialogue with Constantino Tsallis Listen to Tsallis speak about the early presentations, recognitions and interdisciplinary applications of non-additive entropy, the beginning of his collaboration with Murray Gell-Mann, his entrance into the burgeoning field of complex systems and his founding of the National Institute of Science and Technology for Complex Systems (INCT-SC) in Brazil. Explore the full InterDialogue with Constantino Tsallis Listen to Tsallis explain about some of the very broad interdisciplinary applications and collaborations that have been fostered by non-additive entropy and q-statistics, and why he thinks this is possible, from neuroscience and childhood development, to economics to foundational questions of biogenesis and cosmology, all existing “at the edge of chaos.” Explore the full InterDialogue with Constantino Tsallis Listen to Tsallis explain about how non-additive entropy and q-statistics have been observed in medical imaging and the applications for human health, from neuroimaging in children to electrocardiograms in adults. Explore the full InterDialogue with Constantino Tsallis Banner image: Mandelbrot set. The edge of the Mandelbrot set represents the line between...