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 January 2023. To continue reading, click here.
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 to criticise the regime in words, but only just…
This article first appeared in The Guardian on 28 November 2022. To continue reading, click here.
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, cattle and horses lay dead or dying of starvation. Desperate onlookers threw bales of hay over fences in an effort to help – clearly something had gone badly wrong…
This article first appeared in New Scientist on 18 October 2022. To continue reading, click here (paywall).
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 tasted…
This article first appeared in The Guardian on 20 August 2022. To continue reading, click here.
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 debate over where it came from. She has been among the most vocal scientists on Twitter defending a “natural” origin, as opposed to a lab leak. Last month, she and 17 co-authors published findings in Science that they feel should silence all rational critics on the question…
This article first appeared in The Observer on 14 August 2022. To continue reading, click here.