Author: lauraspinney
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The flawed brilliance of J.B.S. Haldane
TOWARDS the end of his life, J.B.S. Haldane was inseparable from a pebble that had been found in the Valley of Elah in Israel, where David felled Goliath with a similar projectile. A king-size man who towered over British biology for several decades in the middle of the 20th century, Jack Haldane—the “half-Dane”—was a more…
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Phylloxera – a pest’s genome reveals its past
A CENTURY and a half ago an alien insect alighted in Europe. It displaced millions, ruined local economies and forced scientists, politicians and ordinary folk into a frenzy of defensive activity. Phylloxera, a member of the group known to entomologists as Hemiptera, or “true” bugs (as opposed to all the other critters known colloquially as…
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‘It’s not over’: intimate diaries from the eye of the UK’s coronavirus storm
WHEN the Oxford team working on a Covid-19 vaccine first started holding weekly catchups in early February, Christina Dold, a 35-year-old senior postdoctoral researcher, jokingly referred to them as “Cobra” meetings. But it was in one of these early sessions that she found out how many volunteers they would be immunising daily, once the vaccine…
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Drugs, money and misleading evidence
IN the race to find treatments and a vaccine for COVID-19, it’s more essential than ever that society can trust drug companies seeking regulatory approval. The Illusion of Evidence-Based Medicine is the latest in a long line of books that caution us not to hold out much hope… This article was first published in Nature on…
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Body consciousness
PARTS of Ann Arbor bring The Truman Show to mind, with their wood-frame houses and white picket fences. Home to the University of Michigan, the city oozes middle-class prosperity and security. So, while doing research there a decade ago, Sarah Garfinkel was shocked to discover that young veterans of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan felt…
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Europe’s first farmers
EIGHT thousand years ago small bands of seminomadic hunter-gatherers were the only human beings roaming Europe’s lush, green forests. Archaeological digs in caves and elsewhere have turned up evidence of their Mesolithic technology: flint-tipped tools with which they fished, hunted deer and aurochs (a now extinct species of ox), and gathered wild plants. Many had…
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Poison centre cases rise under Covid-19
THE official US advice has been to disinfect high-touch surfaces to minimise the spread of Covid-19. Taking that advice to the extreme, Lisa filled a sink with a mixture of 10% bleach solution, vinegar and hot water and soaked her vegetables and other food in it. Soon, she noticed a powerful odour of chlorine in…
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Are we underestimating how many people are resistant to Covid-19?
DURING the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic, cities were in general affected worse than smaller conurbations or rural areas. Yet in Italy, Rome was relatively spared while the villages of Lombardy experienced very high rates of sickness and death. Then again, one Lombard village – Ferrara Erbognone – stood out for not recording a…
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Interview: Covid-19 expert Karl Friston
NEUROSCIENTIST Karl Friston, of University College London, builds mathematical models of human brain function. Lately, he’s been applying his modelling to Covid-19, and using what he learns to advise Independent Sage, the committee set up as an alternative to the UK government’s official pandemic advice body, the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage)… This article…
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Covid-19 and the grassroots
PANDEMICS hand power to the people. Leadership is necessary, for an optimal outcome, but essentially it’s up to us what happens next. It’s in times like these that grassroots political movements can come into their own – if they know how to adapt to the circumstances… This article first appeared in The Guardian on 15 May…