Author: lauraspinney
-
The Pope and Huntington’s disease
FRANKLIN Soto will develop Huntington’s disease (HD), a lethal genetic disorder that causes progressive mental and physical deterioration and for which there is no cure. His two sisters already have it. His wife died of the disease last year, and his three-year-old daughter has a 75 per cent chance of developing it. Franklin’s was among…
-
The tantalising truth about twins
MY godson George, aged eight, is a non-identical twin. He’s not alone. That’s not a gag from #kidswritejokes. He obviously has his twin William to keep him company, not to mention their younger brother Henry who, as George put it, “would have been a triplet if Mum hadn’t put him in a special fridge”… This…
-
Identity crisis
WHAT is the essence of you? What is it about you that makes you, well, you? These are no mere academic questions for armchair philosophers, but practical ones with real consequences. Take a police artist sketching a suspect from an eyewitness description, or a profiler writing up the behavioural idiosyncrasies of a particular “perp”.…
-
Monuments to catastrophe
THE history of humanity is punctuated with purges. Large numbers of people have died in short periods of time as a result of wars, disease and natural disasters. Once these have passed, it falls to the survivors to count the dead. This is never easy, but it is harder for some kinds of disaster than…
-
How high is the sea?
SEA levels are rising; it is one of the great worries of our age. But what are they rising relative to? Why, sea level of course. But how high is that…? This article first appeared in New Scientist on 8 February 2017. To continue reading, click here (paywall).
-
How crowds affect your health
GLASTONBURY 1997, the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, the pilgrimage to Lourdes in 2008: what do they have in common? All three were the backdrop to outbreaks of communicable disease, and so of interest to doctors working in mass gathering medicine. The goal of this relatively young field is to address the specific health…
-
Wax lyrical
IMAGINE a murder case in which the investigators decide to discount all scientific evidence. Fingerprints, palm prints, hair – all are packed away in crates and consigned to the basement while the detectives get on interrogating suspects and witnesses…. This article first appeared in New Scientist on 17 December 2016. To continue reading, click here (paywall).