Author: lauraspinney
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Bill Gates on the pandemic
IN 2015, the American technologist and philanthropist Bill Gates warned that humanity wasn’t ready for a pandemic. Seven years on, as the world emerges (hopefully) from a pandemic for which it wasn’t ready, he thinks we have it within our power to make sure this one was the last. There will be more disease outbreaks,…
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Interview: Frans de Waal, primatologist
SEX and gender have come to represent one of the hottest fronts in the modern culture wars. Now, on to this bloody battlefield, calmly dodging banned books, anti-transgender laws and political doublespeak, strolls the distinguished Dutch-American primatologist Frans de Waal, brandishing nearly half a century’s worth of field notebooks and followed, metaphorically speaking, by an…
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AI triumphs at bridge
AN artificial intelligence has beaten eight world champions at bridge, a game in which human supremacy has resisted the march of the machines until now… This article first appeared in The Guardian on 29 March 2022. To continue reading, click here.
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From zero to hero
IT was the alt-history, the policy that didn’t get enacted. No-Covid, zero-Covid or elimination aimed to stamp out community transmission of Covid-19 in a given area, rather than just reduce it to “manageable” levels. Most of the world eschewed it, and it got bad press from the start. Only autocratic regimes could pull it off,…
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On pandemics and reciprocity
LAST November, having alerted the world to the new and highly transmissible Omicron variant of the Sars-CoV-2 virus, South Africa-based scientist Tulio de Oliveira saw that country hit with travel bans. Already smarting at what he saw as wealthier nations’ hoarding of vaccines, antiviral drugs and test reagents, his frustration spilled over. “If the world…
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The big idea: should other species have their own money?
ONLY about 120,000 orangutans remain in the wild, and despite the whopping $1bn that has been spent on protecting them since 2000, their numbers continue to decline. The orangutan is the most endangered great ape, but the picture is only marginally less grim for the others – except us, of course – and the trend…
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Zoom trials and kitten lawyers
ON 18 May 2020, Judge Emily Miskel heard a run-of-the-mill case concerning a disputed insurance payout for wind and hail damage to a building. Normally she would have expected little public interest, but that day around 1,200 people observed deliberations in Collin County, Texas – not from inside the courtroom, which was closed by the…
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Womanland
THERE can be few myths as ingrained in our consciousness as that of the Amazons, an ancient caste of warrior women whose marksmanship struck fear into the hearts of their enemies, who chose sexual partners freely and who sacrificed their male offspring to preserve the matriarchy… This article first appeared in New Scientist on 9 February…
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Covid vaccines deserve our trust – but big pharma doesn’t
LAST week, a commission set up by Stanford University and the Lancet found that the devastating opioid crisis in North America could happen again, and not just there. The unethical practices that Patrick Radden Keefe documented in his prize-winning 2021 book, Empire of Pain, were not restricted to one company, Purdue Pharma, and the part…