Was Lucy the mother of us all? Fifty years after her discovery, the 3.2-million-year-old skeleton has rivals
Flexible fiber electronics couple with the human body for wireless tactile sensing
It will disappoint China’s people and anger the rest of the world
That will make inflation trickier to handle in future
Donald Trump’s threat to dump allies would risk a nuclear free-for-all
Copper-containing ‘nanoclusters’ form glasses with an orderly structure and unusual properties.
The operation’s early success has made researchers hopeful that clinical trials for xenotransplanted organs will start soon.
The Simons Observatory will search for signs of gravitational waves that originated from the Big Bang.
Times Literary Supplement (April 3, 2024): The ‘The Art Issue’ features ‘Miss Lonelyhearts’ – Tom Seymour Evans: Carson McCullers’s unruly life; Violence and Climate Change; Posing for John Singer Sargent and Huckleberry Jim – Mark Twain’s escaped slave wrests control of his story…
Carson McCullers: a novelist of the marginalized and ‘those struggling to understand who they are’
Mark Twain’s escaped slave wrests control of his story
Percival Everett’s wry, provocative novel on the publishing world brought to the screen
By Colin Grant
The Guardian Weekly (April 5, 2024) – The new issue features ‘Lone Star’ – Have the UN vote and questions about its conduct in Gaza left Israel isolated?; Liz Truss bids for political resurrection; Will IS strike again?; Nick Cave’s devilish change of direction…
Islamic State has stalled in Iraq and Syria but officials believe it has been planning new attacks on the west for years, reports Jason Burke; while Angelique Chrisafis writes that France’s interior minister has met intelligence services to assess the terrorist threat to the country ahead of this summer’s Olympic Games
Nusantara is billed as a state-of-the-art capital city that will coexist with nature – but not all residents of Borneo’s Balikpapan Bay are happy, find. By Rebecca Ratcliffe and Richaldo Hariandja
Liz Truss trashed the economy as Britain’s shortest-serving prime minister. But she is back, launching a new conservative movement and spreading her ideology across the world. You just can’t keep a bad politician down, argues David Runciman
In the past nine years, Nick Cave has lost two sons – an experience he explores in a deeply personal new ceramics project. He discusses mercy, forgiveness, making and meaning with Simon Hattenstone
A new wave of Indigenous architects are behind a series of stunning buildings embracing tribal identity in Aotearoa New Zealand, Oliver Wainwright discovers
Country Life Magazine – April 3, 2024: The latest issue features:
The reawakening of Nature has inspired artists from Botticelli to David Hockney and beyond. Michael Prodger revels in the artistic beauty of the season
Few can match the twists and turns of Adrian Fisher’s stellar career. Deborah Nicholls-Lee meets the maze designer behind the chilling climax of Saltburn
Poet Laureate Simon Armitage celebrates an annual explosion of pink and white blossom with excerpts from his new book
Kate Green on how Sir Joseph Banks sowed the seeds of Kew
In the second of two articles, John Goodall puts the spotlight on the superb school buildings of Lancing College, West Sussex
Discover why a thunderous start to the month suggests a good harvest as Lia Leendertz delves into the weather lore of spring
Green is the natural choice for a kitchen, as Amelia Thorpe and Arabella Youens discover
Caroline Donald marvels at the rapid transformation of the charming seven-acre garden at Charlton Farm in Wiltshire
Melanie Johnson puts British asparagus — a verdant harbinger of spring — back on the menu
The president of the Army Bene-volent Fund chooses a wonderful depiction of the Battle of Waterloo
Carla Carlisle attempts to sort the tragedy from the farce in the baffling world of modern politics
Matthew Dennison charts the rise and fall of fashion label Biba
Mesmerising opals are having a moment — Hetty Lintell dives in
150 years of the Impressionists
AIs will make health care safer and better, reports Natasha Loder. It may even get cheaper too
What happens when a niche clinical concept becomes a ubiquitous cultural diagnosis.
When Leah started dating her first serious boyfriend, as a nineteen-year-old sophomore at Ohio State, she had very little sense that sex was supposed to feel good. (Leah is not her real name.) In the small town in central Ohio where she grew up, sex ed was basically like the version she remembered from the movie “Mean Girls”: “Don’t have sex, because you will get pregnant and die.”
It’s now thought that they could illuminate fundamental questions in physics, settle questions about Einstein’s theories, and even help explain the universe.
Black holes are, of course, awesome. But, for scientists, they are more awesome. If a rainbow is marvellous, then understanding how all the colors of the rainbow are present, unified, in ordinary white light—that’s more marvellous. (Though, famously, in his poem “Lamia,” John Keats disagreed, blaming “cold philosophy” for unweaving the rainbow.) In recent years, the amount of data that scientists have discovered about black holes has grown exponentially. In January, astronomers announced that the James Webb Space Telescope had observed the oldest black hole yet—one present when the universe was a mere four hundred million years old. (It’s estimated that it’s now 13.8 billion years old.) Recently, two supermassive black holes, with a combined mass of twenty-eight billion suns, were measured and shown to have been rotating tightly around each other, but not colliding, for the past three billion years. And those are just the examples that are easiest for the public to make some sense of. To me, a supermassive black hole sounds sublime; to a scientist, it can also be a test of wild hypotheses. “Astrophysics is an exercise in incredible experiments not runnable on Earth,” Avery Broderick, a theoretical physicist at the University of Waterloo and at the Perimeter Institute, told me. “And black holes are an ideal laboratory.”
Artificial intelligence holds huge promise in health care. But it also faces massive barriers
Better diagnoses. Personalised support for patients. Faster drug discovery. Greater efficiency. Artificial intelligence (ai) is generating excitement and hyperbole everywhere, but in the field of health care it has the potential to be transformational. In Europe analysts predict that deploying ai could save hundreds of thousands of lives each year; in America, they say, it could also save money, shaving $200bn-360bn from overall annual medical spending, now $4.5trn a year (or 17% of gdp). From smart stethoscopes and robot surgeons to the analysis of large data sets or the ability to chat to a medical ai with a human face, opportunities abound.
After the energy crisis, Europe faces surging Chinese imports and the threat of Trump tariffs
Ukraine must prepare
Melting ice sheets do more than raise sea levels
Scientists identify a molecule that halts cholesterol production in the liver when dietary consumption is high. Research Highlight
House prices drop by 1% if wind turbines are close and visible, but they rebound quickly. Research Highlight
Data from billions of proton collisions reveal that subatomic particles called W+ and W− bosons keep company with a photon .Research Highlight
Scientists turn waste wood into an ‘ink’ that can be printed into a variety of structures.
