Author: lauraspinney
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How does Covid end?
AS Cop26 gets under way in Glasgow this weekend, one collective action problem is taking centre stage against the backdrop of another. Covid-19 has been described as a dress rehearsal for our ability to solve the bigger problem of the climate crisis, so it seems important to point out that the pandemic isn’t over. Instead,…
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Epigenetics, the misunderstood science
A little over a decade ago, a clutch of scientific studies was published that seemed to show that survivors of atrocities or disasters such as the Holocaust and the Dutch famine of 1944-45 had passed on the biological scars of those traumatic experiences to their children. The studies caused a sensation, earning their own BBC…
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What is Covid’s real death toll?
FOR the past 18 months, hunkered down in his Tel Aviv apartment, Ariel Karlinsky has scoured the web for data that could help him calculate the true death toll of Covid-19… This article first appeared in The Guardian on 9 October 2021. To continue reading, click here.
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John von Neumann, not the coldest of cold warriors
IN 1945, while in a state of exhaustion, the mathematician John von Neumann had a kind of stammering premonition. He was in Los Alamos, working on the atom bomb, and he told his wife Klari that the “energy source” he was helping to develop would make scientists “the most hated and also the most wanted…
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Covid lawsuits and inquiries loom
EARLIER this month, proceedings opened in Austria in a civil suit brought against the authorities by the widow and son of a man who died of Covid-19 after staying in Ischgl, the ski resort widely regarded as having hosted a super-spreader event early in the pandemic. The week before, former French health minister Agnès Buzyn…
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Could whistling shed light on the origins of speech?
FOR centuries, shepherds from the small village of Aas in the French Pyrenees led their sheep and cattle up to mountain pastures for the summer months. To ease the solitude, they would communicate with each other or with the village below in a whistled form of the local Gascon dialect, transmitting and receiving information accurately…
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Mismatch of mindsets
SOME years ago, in Afghanistan, the anthropologist Scott Atran asked a Taliban fighter what it would take to stop the fighting, because families on both sides were crying. The fighter replied: “Leave our country and the crying will stop…” This article first appeared in The Guardian on 24 September 2021. To continue reading, click here.
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The latest investigation into Covid’s origins is also inconclusive
US intelligence services have just briefed the president, Joe Biden, on the results of their 90-day investigation into the origins of Covid-19. They were asked to test two hypotheses: that it had a “natural” origin, or that it escaped from a lab. Preliminary reports suggest that their findings are inconclusive… This article first appeared in The…
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The world’s top thinkers 2021
We stopped, they rethought. Meet the outstanding minds who are shaping the future. …In science, we have Tim Spector, who was remaking the science of nutrition before redirecting his efforts into a Covid tracker. And also Laura Spinney, who pursued her own interest in the 1918 Spanish Flu when no one else cared,…
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“12 Bytes” by Jeanette Winterson – review
IN Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein, a scientist creates life and is horrified by what he has done. Two centuries on, synthetic life, albeit in a far simpler form, has been created in a dish. What Shelley imagined has only now become possible. But as Jeanette Winterson points out in this essay collection, the achievements…