Author: lauraspinney
-
The real Sherlock?
A photographic archive has been discovered in Lyon, France, that adds precious detail to what we know about the founding of the world’s first police crime laboratory in 1910 and its creator, Edmond Locard, a pioneer of forensic science… This article first appeared online in Nature on 5 April 2024. To continue reading, click here (paywall).
-
Obituary: Frans de Waal
A male chimpanzee with his eye on alpha status will set aside his usual indifference to infants and go around tickling them, the better to curry favour with their mothers. The vote-winning tactic, variations of which will be on display in town halls everywhere in this super-election year, is one of the many examples of…
-
How innovation works
THERE’S a scene in The Simpsons in which Homer’s half-brother Herb unveils his new invention – a machine for translating baby talk – and Homer tells him: “People are afraid of new things. You should have taken an existing product and put a clock in it…” This article first appeared in The Guardian magazine on 7…
-
Big brother
IN East Germany, during the communist period, people would sometimes join a queue on the basis that if others were waiting, there must be something worth having at the end of it. Siegfried Wittenburg, whose images accompany this article, photographed this waiting-for-I-know-not-what in his home town of Rostock. It was safer to take photos than…
-
Death and the Artic char
TO the east of Amsterdam lies a tract of reclaimed marshland, the site of an epic rewilding project called the Oostvaardersplassen. It is sometimes nicknamed the Dutch Serengeti because of the profusion of large herbivores that graze there. But during the bitterly cold winter of 2017-18, deeply shocking images began to emerge. Thousands of deer,…
-
From crime lord to Michelin award
KRISHNA Léger is confident he is the only person to have smuggled fresh fish into Les Baumettes in Marseille, one of the most notorious prisons in France. With the fish he made bouillabaisse, the famous Marseillais soup. One of his fellow inmates – also from Marseille – said it was the best he had ever…
-
Covid origins
ANGELA Rasmussen studies the interactions between hosts and pathogens and how they shape disease. Before the pandemic, she worked on the emerging viruses that cause Middle East respiratory syndrome (Mers), Ebola, dengue and avian flu. Then, when Covid-19 erupted, the American virologist, who works at the University of Saskatchewan in Canada, was drawn into the…
-
Going viral
FIRST the pharaoh changed his name, from Amenhotep IV to Akhenaten. Then he decreed that a new capital should be built far away from the old one. And in this city, one god should be worshipped, forsaking all others: the sun god Aten… This article first appeared in New Scientist on 19 July 2022. To continue…
-
The big idea: could the greatest works of literature be undiscovered?
WHEN the great library at Alexandria went up in flames, it is said that the books took six months to burn. We can’t know if this is true. Exactly how the library met its end, and whether it even existed, have been subjects of speculation for more than 2,000 years. For two millennia, we’ve been…