This month, and again in January, hundreds of scientists in Antarctica will set up their instruments to mark the 100th anniversary of the first explorers to reach the South Pole. Most people will see the centenary as the end of a very romantic race between Roald Amundsen’s dog-sledding Norwegian and Robert Scott’s man-howling Brits. Yet […]
In 1977, two jumbo jets collided at an airport on the island of Tenerife. The highly respected pilot of the KLM aircraft was under pressure to depart, and ignored several signs and warnings that the Pan Am Jumbo had not yet cleared the runway. They took off in the fog without proper clearance and 583
It is Mental Health Awareness Month in the United States, and next week is Mental Health Awareness Week in the United Kingdom. And awareness is certainly increasing. Already this year, reports, surveys and studies have documented psychological experiences experienced by the aged, young, school children, men, women, soldiers, immigrants and refugees, football players, dancers, actors,
Nearly 20 years ago, a student at Peking University in Beijing alleged that she was sexually assaulted and raped by a professor. His case had little impact at the time, but it is happening now. The issues it raises highlight two points of view on how the #MeToo movement is now operating on the campuses
On Wednesday, November 30, 2016, crowds of Cubans took to the streets of Havana to pay their last respects to Fidel Castro. On the same day, fans gathered to watch Spanish football stalwart Hercules surprise Barcelona one-on-one in their Copa del Rey match. And to test a central feature of quantum mechanics, a crowd of
Since the late 1990s, the number of countries contributing clinical-trial data used by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to approve drugs has nearly doubled (see ‘Going Global’). Yet this global expansion of study locations has not been accompanied by a similar increase in the racial diversity of those enrolled. In 1997, 92% of
The number of new papers on the pandemic is doubling every two weeks, and shows no signs of slowing down. Many of these papers are first published on preprint servers, meaning they are made public before peer review. This makes it difficult to judge their qualifications. Now, a start-up company says its platform — called
My first paper rejection came as a shock. When it came to submissions, I was feeling pretty confident as my supervisors and colleagues were happy. We can’t all be wrong about our paper – can we? Eight years later, I still remember opening that rejection e-mail alone in my office in Zurich, Switzerland. I felt
The flood of e-mails started on Sunday 15 March. All schools in Switzerland were closed because of the pandemic, and teachers were sending instructions about what they would ask me to teach their eight- and nine-year-old sons in the coming weeks. The next set of e-mails provided a list of homework assignments, which were to
