Author: lauraspinney
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Worried about Australian flu?
WHAT is it with us and the blame game? This year, Australia is taking the rap for sending us flu, a disease that has been endemic in humans for at least 10,000 years, and that grips much of the globe every flu season (the clue’s in the name)… This comment piece first appeared in The Guardian…
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Notes from underground
ON 3 November 1793, in the thick of The Terror, the porter of the disaffected Val-de-Grâce abbey in Paris took advantage of the general commotion to slip into a stairway that led into the network of tunnels under the capital, and set off in search of treasure… This article first appeared in The Idler around 1…
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Vaccine wars
A new law takes force in France on 1 January to up the number of mandatory childhood vaccines to 11 from three. It has provoked a polemic, but the law is sound. If there is a problem here, it is the neglect by officials of the main drivers of vaccine hesitancy… This article first appeared…
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Playing the long game
IN the long grass beyond the last hut, slabs of greyish-white shark meat dry on wooden racks in the sun. This village, which I’m visiting as the paying guest of an ecotourism company, lacks electricity, has a single fresh water pump and is inaccessible by road. Like many others along the west coast of Madagascar,…
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We don’t want to know what will kill us
WHEN, in 1996, French nun Mariannick Caniou found out she didn’t have Huntington’s disease, the lethal, degenerative genetic disorder, she fell into a depression. Throughout her life, she had been convinced that she would develop the illness that had killed her mother and grandmother. So convinced, in fact, that all her most important decisions had…
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The AI composer
COMPUTER scientist Luc Steels uses artificial intelligence to explore the origins and evolution of language. He is best known for his 1999–2001 Talking Heads Experiment, in which robots had to construct a language from scratch to communicate with each other. Now Steels, who works at the Free University of Brussels (VUB), has composed an opera…
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The anatomy of terror
WHAT makes someone prepared to die for an idea? This is a question that concerns anthropologist Scott Atran of the University of Oxford’s Centre for Resolution of Intractable Conflicts. Research he has led in some of the most embattled regions of the world, including in Mosul, suggests the answer comes in two parts. Jihadists fuse…
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Pope Francis champions Huntington’s disease
YOSBELY Soto Soto shares a corrugated iron hut with her two sons on the shores of Venezuela’s Lake Maracaibo. The heat inside has been unbearable since her husband left her a few years ago, taking the air conditioner with him. The 32-year-old has to beg for food to feed herself and her children, something made…
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Radio New Zealand on Pale Rider
Radio New Zealand’s Kim Hill picked up on Pale Rider for her Saturday Morning show on 22 July 2017. To listen click here: Laura Spinney – Pale Rider