THE Big Bang was spectacularly mis- named, having been “the quietest firework of all time”. Sound waves need matter to propagate through, so the explosion that created it can’t have made a din…
This article first appeared online in Nature on 4 February 2025 (and in the following edition in print). To continue reading, click here.
IN 2000, the cognitive neuroscientist Eleanor Maguire published the study that would bring her worldwide fame. It showed that a brain region called the posterior hippocampus was larger in London taxi drivers who had acquired the Knowledge – a mental map of the British capital complete with streets, routes and landmarks – than in people who lacked those navigational skills. The longer the cabbie’s career, the bigger the posterior hippocampus…
This article first appeared online in The Guardian on 17 January 2025. To continue reading, click here.
IN an institute in Germany, scientists are growing “Neanderthalised” human brain cells in a dish. These cells form synapses and spark as they would have done in a living Neanderthal as she (they are female cells) foraged or breastfed or gazed out of a cave mouth at dusk. That is the spine-tingling opening gambit of a book co-authored by one of the directors of the institute, Johannes Krause, and the information that sets it apart from a host of popular science books that attempt to predict humanity’s future based on our evolutionary past…
This article first appeared online in The Guardian on 27 December 2024. To continue reading, click here.
IN East Germany, during the communist period, people would sometimes join a queue on the basis that if others were waiting, there must be something worth having at the end of it. Siegfried Wittenburg, whose images accompany this article, photographed this waiting-for-I-know-not-what in his home town of Rostock. It was safer to take photos than to criticise the regime in words, but only just…
This article first appeared in The Guardian on 28 November 2022. To continue reading, click here.
SEX and gender have come to represent one of the hottest fronts in the modern culture wars. Now, on to this bloody battlefield, calmly dodging banned books, anti-transgender laws and political doublespeak, strolls the distinguished Dutch-American primatologist Frans de Waal, brandishing nearly half a century’s worth of field notebooks and followed, metaphorically speaking, by an astonishingly diverse collection of primates…
This article first appeared in The Guardian on 17 April 2022. To continue reading, click here.