Laura Spinney

Category: Journalism

  • Subtle effects

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    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.…

  • Don’t cramp my style

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    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…

  • Twilight zone

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    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…

  • Karma of the crowd

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    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…

  • White War

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    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,…

  • Rita Levi-Montalcini

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    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…

  • Searching for Doggerland

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    WHEN signs of a lost world at the bottom of the North Sea first began to appear, no one wanted to believe them. The evidence started to surface a century and a half ago, when fishermen along the Dutch coast widely adopted a technique called beam trawling. They dragged weighted nets across the seafloor and…

  • Tsunami in Lake Geneva

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      IN 563AD a tsunami devastated Geneva. Two accounts of the disaster, one by Gregory of Tours and the other by Marius of Avenches, have survived. What caused the wave, and the extent of the damage that resulted, have been matters of conjecture for centuries. But over the past decade several groups of scientists have…

  • The progress illusion

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    WHEN Admiral Zheng He led his fleet out of the eastern Chinese port of Suzhou in 1405, it must have been a sight to behold. The largest of the several hundred ships under his command were the size of modern aircraft carriers and housed 500 men apiece. The fleet made seven expeditions in all, to…

  • Human cycles

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    SOMETIMES, history really does seem to repeat itself. After the US Civil War, for example, a wave of urban violence fuelled by ethnic and class resentment swept across the country, peaking in about 1870. Internal strife spiked again in around 1920, when race riots, workers’ strikes and a surge of anti-Communist feeling led many people…