Ask farmers about rain, and they will tell you that the timing matters more than how much falls in a given year. In Eastern Africa, the months of the “long rains” or “belgs” are between March and June.

A new study in the journal Climate Dynamics suggests that these months will be much drier in the future in Kenya, Ethiopia and other East African nations because of climate change. Some 17.5 million people in the Horn of Africa already face food insecurity in the region, with stagnating agricultural production, population growth and recent drought.

The study contradicts predictions by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that climate change would lead to more precipitation in the region.

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The $720 million funding gap this year for eradicating polio is a bit closer to being closed. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the UK government announced funding today at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, of $102 million and $63.7m (£40m) respectively.

Their announcements follow a pledge yesterday by the Gates Foundation and the Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi, Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, to give $37 million to vaccinate children against polio in Afghanistan and Pakistan. A spokesman for the World Health Organization, which leads the Global Polio Eradication Initiative, said that money would go to the two countries’ health ministries to hire the approximately 1 million health care workers needed to go into the mountainous regions where both polio and Islamic extremists cause problems. About 35 million kids under the age of five need to be vaccinated.

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The wacky, curvaceous shape of a sea horse makes it easier to catch its prey without having to go to the trouble of swimming very far, a new study in Nature Communications has found.

Seahorses employ a sit-and-wait strategy, hiding behind lush sea grasses till their meal – small shrimp or fish larvae – happen along. At that point, they snap their heads upwards toward the prey and use suction to draw the meal into their snouts.

The tendons of the rotational muscles of the fish are like elastics that snap the head upward remarkably quickly as the prey passes by. The whole process is called pivot feeding and takes about 5 milliseconds. Pipefish and sea dragons, which also fall in the Syngnathid family of fishes, use the same mechanism.

But why the seahorse evolved a head that is bent in relation to the rest of the body in a horse-like manner has been a mystery. Their evolutionary ancestors resembled the pipefish, with their trunk and head in a straight line.

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Declining food prices are a thing of the past, and the world must reform its agricultural system to prepare for increasingly volatile prices, the UK government’s Foresight Programme said today.

“There’s a very large risk of quite substantial increase of food prices over the next 30 or 40 years,” said Charles Godfray, a zoologist at the University of Oxford, at a press conference discussing the report (PDF).

Farmers will have to produce more from their land by harnessing recent innovations, including biotechnology, to feed the 9 billion people who are expected to populate the world by 2050, the report states. It also warns that protectionist trade policies will make price spikes contagious, but greater transparency will help dampen the effects of demand and supply challenges to the global food system.

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