A photographic archive has been discovered in Lyon, France, that adds precious detail to what we know about the founding of the world’s first police crime laboratory in 1910 and its creator, Edmond Locard, a pioneer of forensic science…
This article first appeared online in Nature on 5 April 2024. To continue reading, click here.
A male chimpanzee with his eye on alpha status will set aside his usual indifference to infants and go around tickling them, the better to curry favour with their mothers. The vote-winning tactic, variations of which will be on display in town halls everywhere in this super-election year, is one of the many examples of social strategy that the Dutch-American primatologist Frans de Waal documented in his half-century of observing non-human primates…
This article first appeared in The Guardian on 25 March 2024. To continue reading, click here.
MOST of the books written about Covid-19 to date have been journalistic. They did the essential job of capturing the pandemic while we were living through it, but they lacked distance. Now, with the benefit of hindsight and a great deal more data, come the first of the histories. Early out of the starting blocks is Eric Klinenberg, a sociologist at New York University who has made a speciality of what he calls the “social autopsy” of disaster…
This article first appeared in New Statesman online on 26 February 2024, and in the subsequent print edition. To continue reading, click here.
THERE’S a scene in The Simpsons in which Homer’s half-brother Herb unveils his new invention – a machine for translating baby talk – and Homer tells him: “People are afraid of new things. You should have taken an existing product and put a clock in it…”
This article first appeared in The Guardian magazine on 7 January 2023. To continue reading, click here.