The large-scale disappearance of vultures in India was for years as much of a mystery as it was an apparent irrelevance. Yet recent groundbreaking research has demonstrated the cost of their loss to human health and planetary biodiversity alike — and helped to vindicate ways to measure academic work that aligns with societal impact. Once ubiquitous across the subcontinent, vulture populations plummeted to almost zero in the late 1990s. The decline was subsequently linked to a surge in use by farmers of the veterinary painkiller diclofenac to treat fevers in livestock, once the drug’s patent expired and its price plummeted. Click here to read the full text of the article