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).
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 pandemic, but via YouTube. The case had been billed as the world’s first virtual jury trial, with all participants communicating via Zoom…
This article first appeared in New Statesman on 19 February 2022. To continue reading, click here: https://www.newstatesman.com/technology/2022/02/zoom-trials-and-kitten-lawyers-inside-the-e-justice-revolution
AROUND 6200 years ago, farmers living on the eastern fringes of Europe, in what is now Ukraine, did something inexplicable. They left their neolithic villages and moved into a sparsely inhabited area of forest and steppe. There, in an area roughly the size of Belgium between the modern cities of Kiev and Odessa, they congregated at new settlements up to 20 times the size of their old ones…
This article first appeared in New Scientist on 27 February 2021. To continue reading, click here (paywall).
BY the end of March, one week into the UK’s first lockdown, recorded crime in Lancashire had dropped by a startling 40% compared with the four-year average. “At first there was some mild panic,” says DCI Eric Halford, of Lancashire Constabulary. “Most senior officers expected a surge in demand…”
This article first appeared in The Guardian on 27 December 2020. To continue reading, click here.
BATS in the frontier regions of south and south-west China harbour other coronaviruses that already have the capacity to cross over to humans, a prominent Chinese scientist has said…
This article was first published in The Guardian on 4 December 2020. To continue reading, click here.