Author: lauraspinney
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Swiss canton braces for tsunami
THE land of chocolate and clocks could soon be known for something quite different: tsunamis. Authorities in Nidwalden, a canton in landlocked Switzerland, are factoring the risk of a tsunami in Lake Lucerne into their hazard plans. It is the first official acknowledgement of such a threat in Europe’s Alpine region — and comes…
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You never listen to a word I say
A CONVERSATION in which neither party is listening to the other was dubbed a “duologue” by Abraham Kaplan, a philosopher who died in 1993. A duologue, he suggested, is more than a monologue but less than a dialogue… This article was first published in the Economist on 14 August 2014. To continue reading, click here.
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Wonder food
IN April 1789, Lieutenant William Bligh set off from the Pacific island of Tahiti to sail halfway round the world to Jamaica. Twenty-three days into the voyage, his crew mutinied. They set him adrift in the Bounty’s launch, along with 18 men who were loyal to him, and dumped the ship’s cargo overboard. That cargo…
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The forgetting gene
ONE day in 1991, neurologist Warren Strittmatter asked his boss to look at some bewildering data. Strittmatter was studying amyloid-β, the main component of the molecular clumps found in the brains of people with Alzheimer’s disease. He was hunting for amyloid-binding proteins in the fluid that buffers the brain and spinal cord, and had fished…
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Subtle effects
MANGANISM has been known about since the 19th century, when miners exposed to ores containing manganese, a silvery metal, began to totter, slur their speech and behave like someone inebriated. The poisoning was irreversible, and soon ended in psychosis and death. Nowadays, the doses workers are exposed to are far lower and manganism is rare.…
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Don’t cramp my style
FROM music to medicine is an unusual career path, but Victor Candia is an unusual man. In 1993, when he was preparing to graduate as a guitarist from the University of Music in Trossingen, Germany, he noticed that the fingers of his left hand were starting to curl up as he played. It felt to him…
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Twilight zone
ONE day in September 2005 Sarah Tomkins went to the top of the stairs to wave her daughter Caitlin off to the village school. Still in her pyjamas because she was feeling under the weather, she suddenly felt lightheaded. Before six-year-old Caitlin knew what was happening, her mother was lying at the bottom of the…
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Karma of the crowd
ON February 10, 2013, overcrowding at a railway station in the northern Indian city of Allahabad led to a stampede that killed 36 people. The city was full at the time. Very full. It was hosting the world’s largest religious gathering, the Maha Kumbh Mela, and the authorities estimated the number of pilgrims in the…
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White War
AT first glance Peio is a small alpine ski resort like many others in northern Italy. In winter it is popular with middle-class Italians as well as, increasingly, Russian tourists. In summer there’s good hiking in the Stelvio National Park. It has a spa, shops that sell a dozen different kinds of grappa, and, perhaps,…
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Rita Levi-Montalcini
THE advantage of living to a very great age is that you tend to have the last word. Rita Levi-Montalcini saw her scientific discoveries sniffed at throughout the 1950s and 1960s, only to win the Nobel prize for physiology in 1986… This article was first published in the Economist on 5 January 2013. To continue…