Author: lauraspinney
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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”.…
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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…
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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).
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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…
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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).
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Spheres of influenza
WHEN it comes to infectious diseases, Ebola and Zika have hogged the headlines of late. But the rise of exotic pathogens does not make more familiar ones less dangerous. Epidemiologists are therefore keeping a close eye on two versions of influenza, known as H5N1 and H7N9 (the “H” and the “N” refer to proteins in…
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Mapping the uncanny valley
ON THE face of it, The Polar Express was a sure-fire winner: starring Tom Hanks, it told the charming story of a boy’s magical train journey to the North Pole. But when the movie came out in 2004, there was a problem: the ultra-realistic animation gave some viewers the creeps. Five years later, when James…
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History lessons
“MY NAME is Ozymandias, king of kings: look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!” So run the famous lines of Percy Shelley’s poem about Ramses the Great, a pharaoh who ruled Egypt’s New Kingdom in the 13th century BC, when it was the world’s most sophisticated society. But the poem’s theme is the transience…
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Twins on NHPR
Talking with New Hampshire Public Radio’s Word of Mouth presenter Virginia Prescott about the twin boom on 19 September…