Author: lauraspinney
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History as a giant data set
IN its first issue of 2010, the scientific journal Nature looked forward to a dazzling decade of progress. By 2020, experimental devices connected to the internet would deduce our search queries by directly monitoring our brain signals. Crops would exist that doubled their biomass in three hours. Humanity would be well on the way to…
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Who owns life?
NEXT week, delegates will gather in Rome to discuss a question that could have profound implications for global biodiversity, food security and public health. Stripped of technical language, it boils down to this: who owns life? … This article was first published in New Scientist on 6 November 2019. To continue reading, click here (paywall).
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Tongue twisters
IN 1882, linguists were electrified by the publication of a lost language—one supposedly spoken by the extinct Taensa people of Louisiana—because it bore hardly any relation to the languages of other Native American peoples of that region. The Taensa grammar was so unusual they were convinced it could teach them something momentous either about the…
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PAUSE for thought
THE UK might have been too busy refusing visas to the children of foreign academics to have noticed that academic freedom is under threat again – but France has been paying attention. Last week its minister for higher education, research and innovation announced that she was putting more money into supporting scholars fleeing repressive regimes……
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Right to know v. right not to know
IN THIS information-saturated age, what happens when the right to know comes up against the right not to know? The ease of genetic testing has brought this question to the fore. Genes, some of which contain disease-causing mutations, are shared within families, meaning the results of a test for a genetic condition inevitably affect more…
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Royal women revisited
ELEANOR of Aquitaine is often portrayed as one of the most powerful queens in history. Wife, mother and counsellor of kings, crusader, landowner, patron of the arts, her power eventually grew so great – at least in the eyes of one royal husband, Henry II of England – that he chose to lock her up.…
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Disaster memories fade fast
AFTER Hurricane Betsy pummelled New Orleans in 1965, causing damage so severe that “Betsy” was retired from the rotating list of names given to Atlantic hurricanes, the Governor of Louisiana, John McKeithen, pledged that nothing like it would happen in his state again. Exactly 40 years later Hurricane Katrina brought even greater destruction to the…
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Cosy up with the Neanderthals
PUT Matt Pope in a valley apparently untouched by humans and he can tell you where Neanderthals would have built their home. “It’s about a third of the way up a slope, with a really good vista and a solid bit of rock behind,” he says. Anyone who goes camping will recognise these preferences: this…