Laura Spinney

Author: lauraspinney

  • Covid – five years in

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    ONCE, we all respectfully listened to what epidemiologists said. We queued up for vaccines, observed distancing lines and confidently asked unmasked passengers on public transport to cover their faces. A tyrannical virus ruled over us, and we did everything in our power to limit its ravages…   This article first appeared in The Guardian  on 9…

  • Celtic mystery

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    SAINT Patrick, whose feast day is celebrated on 17 March, left behind two short works in Latin, but he probably spoke a Celtic language. By the time he was saving Irish souls in the fifth century AD, linguists are pretty sure that Celtic was spoken throughout Britain and Ireland. When Celtic first arrived in those…

  • Silence is elusive

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    THE Big Bang was spectacularly mis- named, having been “the quietest firework of all time”. Sound waves need matter to propagate through, so the explosion that created it can’t have made a din… This article first appeared in Nature on 4 February 2025. To continue reading, click here.  

  • Obituary: Eleanor Maguire

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    IN 2000, the cognitive neuroscientist Eleanor Maguire published the study that would bring her worldwide fame. It showed that a brain region called the posterior hippocampus was larger in London taxi drivers who had acquired the Knowledge – a mental map of the British capital complete with streets, routes and landmarks – than in people…

  • Proto – coming soon

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                  The epic tale of how one ancient language went global, and the scientific quest to trace it back to its roots. As the planet emerged from the last ice age, a language was born between Europe and Asia, by the Black Sea. This ancient tongue, which we call…

  • DNA from dirt

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    IT was an otherwise ordinary day in 2015 when Viviane Slon had her eureka moment. As she worked at her computer, the results revealed the sample she was examining contained human DNA. There was nothing so unusual about that in itself: at the time, the ancient DNA (aDNA) revolution was in full swing, and surprising…

  • Review: the Homo derby

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    IN an institute in Germany, scientists are growing “Neanderthalised” human brain cells in a dish. These cells form synapses and spark as they would have done in a living Neanderthal as she (they are female cells) foraged or breastfed or gazed out of a cave mouth at dusk. That is the spine-tingling opening gambit of…

  • Marie Curie rides again

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    MARIE Curie carried out some of her most pathbreaking work under an actual glass ceiling and the toxic particles that swirled beneath it eventually killed her. What Dava Sobel wants to convey to us in this unabashedly feminist account of the great woman’s life is that the metaphorical glass ceiling was just as toxic to…

  • Democracy 42.0

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    MANY of us entered this so-called super-election year with a sense of foreboding. So far, not much has happened to allay those fears. Russia’s war on Ukraine is exacerbating a perception that democracy is threatened in Europe and beyond. In the US, Donald Trump, a presidential candidate with self-professed autocratic tendencies, has faced two assassination…

  • Interview: Audrey Tang

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    IN 2014, the approval rating of Taiwan’s government was less than 10 per cent. Popular dissatisfaction culminated in the Sunflower Movement, with students occupying legislative buildings to protest a proposed trade deal with China. Three weeks later, their demands were met. A decade on, this is seen as a turning point in Taiwanese democracy… This…