A MAN walks confidently towards an open gate but instead of going straight through he raises his knee very high as if he were stepping over a low wall. He strides forward, reaching out to shake a friend’s hand. But again he misjudges, and his friend draws back in alarm to avoid being punched in the nose…
This article was first published in New Scientist on 11 October 2014. To continue reading, click here (paywall).
THE land of chocolate and clocks could soon be known for something quite different: tsunamis. Authorities in Nidwalden, a canton in landlocked Switzerland, are factoring the risk of a tsunami in Lake Lucerne into their hazard plans. It is the first official acknowledgement of such a threat in Europe’s Alpine region — and comes in step with findings that the risk of tsunamis in the area, which is home to around 13 million people, is much higher than previously thought…
This article was first published in Nature on 4 September 2014. To continue reading, click here.
A CONVERSATION in which neither party is listening to the other was dubbed a “duologue” by Abraham Kaplan, a philosopher who died in 1993. A duologue, he suggested, is more than a monologue but less than a dialogue…
This article was first published in the Economist on 14 August 2014. To continue reading, click here.
IN April 1789, Lieutenant William Bligh set off from the Pacific island of Tahiti to sail halfway round the world to Jamaica. Twenty-three days into the voyage, his crew mutinied. They set him adrift in the Bounty’s launch, along with 18 men who were loyal to him, and dumped the ship’s cargo overboard. That cargo included 1000 breadfruit plants destined for the Jamaican sugar plantations, whose owners were clamouring for a cheap and reliable source of food for their slaves…
This article was first published in New Scientist on 28 June 2014. To continue reading, click here (paywall).
ONE day in 1991, neurologist Warren Strittmatter asked his boss to look at some bewildering data. Strittmatter was studying amyloid-β, the main component of the molecular clumps found in the brains of people with Alzheimer’s disease. He was hunting for amyloid-binding proteins in the fluid that buffers the brain and spinal cord, and had fished out one called apolipoprotein E (ApoE), which had no obvious connection with the disease…
This article was inspired by an Ernst Strüngmann forum on brain diseases in March 2014 and first published in Nature on 6 June 2014. To continue reading, click here.