This week The World Economic Forum are highlighting 4 top stories – green steel that could help save the planet, a device that allows you to feel the Metaverse with your bare hands, a wind turbine that fits in your backpack and jet packs for paramedics on mountains.
Timeline: 00:15 Green Steel 02:09 Feeling the Metaverse 03:10 Backpack Wind Turbines 04:46 Jet Packs for Paramedics
London Review of Books, May 26, 2022 –
LettersHugh Pennington, Anna Swan, Thomas Ciantra, Nicholas Blanton, David Howell, Oren Margolis, Peter Thonemann, Michael Gray, Nick Rampley, Bernard Richards, Tom WellsClare JacksonElizabeth Stuart: Queen of Hearts by Nadine AkkermanJames ButlerShort Cuts: Limping to Success
Times Literary Supplement, May 20, 2022 – This week’s @TheTLS, featuring @wmarybeard on Roman souvenirs; @EdwardDocx on Boris Johnson and contempt; @pwilcken on Operation Car Wash; @AdamSJFoulds on music and conflict; @_Poots_ on Leslie Thomas QC – and more
We have the latest on Russia’s invasion as Ukraine ends its fight for Mariupol. Plus: crisis simmers in Sri Lanka, a look at Cuba’s new penal code and the latest news from the world of tech.
June 2022 – Volume 326, Issue 6
Neural activity probes your physical surroundings to select just the information needed to survive and flourish
By György Buzsáki
Paid parental leave and high-quality child care improve children’s brain development and prospects for a better future
By Dana Suskind and Lydia Denworth
They scurried in the shadows of dinosaurs for millions of years until a killer space rock created a new world of evolutionary opportunity
By Steve Brusatte
Twenty years after their initial detection, enigmatic blasts from the sky are starting to deliver tentative answers, as well as plenty of science
By Adam Mann
Booklist Magazine, May 15, 2022 – From a barrier-leaping African American woman in the Gilded Age to a military coup in Guatemala and the woman bookseller who first published James Joyce’s Ulysses a century ago, the most radiant historical novels of the past 12 months illuminate many lives and times.
A selection of three essential articles read aloud from the latest issue of The Economist. This week, the forces that stand to transform India’s economy over the next decade (11:06), how surveilling workers could enhance productivity (21:07), and full-genome screening for newborn babies is now on the cards.
We discuss the possibility of unilateral action on the Northern Ireland protocol and hear the latest on the conflict in Ukraine from Kharkiv. Plus: Yemen’s Sana’a airport finally reopens, and it’s the first day of the Cannes Film Festival.
John Goodall’s The Castle: A history is the much slimmer companion to his magisterial The English Castle, (2011). Partly an attempt to bring the fruits of his research to a wider audience, Goodall’s new book uses extracts and quotations as the foundation of a historical account: each short chapter features an excerpt from a primary source that seeks to illustrate a particular moment. Rather than offering an architectural or conventional narrative history, Goodall explores the concept of the castle as it has been imagined, remade and contested over time. Important castles such as the Tower of London, Kenilworth and Windsor feature throughout.
Will COVID controls keep controlling us?
In January 2022 I came down with mild symptoms of something or other. I was already triple-vaxxed, with a French vaccine passport (“pass vaccinal”) on my iPhone to prove it, and like a true pioneer I had already suffered through a bout of COVID-19 long before, in March 2020.
