Author: lauraspinney
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Make vaccine passports inclusive
WE have arrived at another of those moments, in this pandemic, where it’s critically important that countries respect a central decision-making body rather than go their own way. The issue on the table now is the use of health certificates to regulate international travel… This article first appeared in The Guardian on 15 July 2021. To…
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Why the world doesn’t need more babies
FERTILITY rates are falling across the globe – even in places, such as sub-Saharan Africa, where they remain high. This is good for women, families, societies and the environment. So why do we keep hearing that the world needs babies, with angst in the media about maternity wards closing in Italy and ghost cities in…
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On leaky labs and parsimony in science
THE coronavirus pandemic has raised so many questions as it has continued its inexorable spread across the planet, but perhaps the first of them remains the most contentious: where did Sars-CoV-2 come from…? This article first appeared in The Guardian on 18 June 2021. To continue reading, click here.
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Shaping future cities
YOU have probably seen the annual rankings of the world’s cities by “liveability” or “quality of life”. It is intriguing to discover which come out top – and which bottom. After all, most of us have skin in this game: more than half of people around the world live in urban environments, and that number…
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The elephant vanishes
ONE day in late September 2020, the Kludsky family – Yvonne, a slim, blond woman in her 60s, her husband, George, who is over 80 but still fit and strong, and their son Martyn – led their elephant up a ramp into the 10-metre trailer that constituted her second home. Dumba went willingly, as always;…
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On the surveillance society
HOW is it that we live in a world that is awash with our personal information, where most of us would be shocked if we knew exactly how much we give away about ourselves each day – and yet, when a crisis came along in which that information could have made all the difference, it…
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Are there too many people?
IN 2011, when the global population hit 7 billion, economist David Lam and demographer Stan Becker made a bet. Lam predicted food would get cheaper over the next decade, despite continuing population growth. Becker predicted that food prices would go up, because of the damage humans were doing to the planet, which meant that population…
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Freelancers take the flak
TWO years before reporting on Harvey Weinstein’s serial abuse spawned the global #MeToo movement, Michael Balter, a science journalist, was already covering issues of sexual misconduct in the sciences. He’s pursued several dozen investigations into sexual harassment at major scientific institutions, published in Science magazine, The Verge, and his own blog, where he works for…
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Brace for the surge
IS there one pandemic, or two? That was a question being asked a year ago, when wealthy countries accounting for only 15% of the global population had 80% of the Covid deaths. Could it be that the rich world was more vulnerable, somehow, because its populations were older, or more individualistic, or had forgotten to…
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On pandemic time
LAST week, 15 volunteers descended into a cave in south west France, where they will remain for 40 days and 40 nights, without sunlight or watches, in an experiment designed to probe the dislocation in time that has characterised life with Covid… This article first appeared in The Telegraph on 23 March 2021. To continue reading,…