Sieve-toothed seals may be whales in the making
Nov 21st 2020LAKE BAIKAL, near Russia’s border with Mongolia, is, by volume, the biggest body of fresh water on Earth. At 1.6km, it is also the deepest. Several unusual animals call it home, including the world’s only species of freshwater seal.Baikal’s seals are abundant. There are about 100,000 of them. But the lake is nutrient-poor,…
Colliding stars
Nov 21st 2020THIS PICTURE shows the 5,000-year-old aftermath of a merger between two stars—though the light that created it took a further 6,000 years to reach Earth’s neighbourhood. It was published in this week’s Nature by Keri Hoadley of the California Institute of Technology and her colleagues. It is a composite of three images taken…
Green investors are embracing litigation
Nov 21st 2020KATHLEEN O’DONNELL is a 23-year-old Australian law student whose holdings of her government’s bonds mature in 2050, by which date carbon emissions may well have pushed global warming past the 1.5°C goal enshrined in the UN Paris agreement. In July Ms O’Donnell filed a court case against the Australian government for failing to…
Why 2020 has been rotten for quant funds
Nov 21st 2020WHAT IS IT like to lose to a machine? In 1997 the world’s best chess player, Garry Kasparov, was beaten by Deep Blue, a $10m super-computer made by IBM. Twenty years later he wrote “Deep Thinking”, a book about the experience. What comes across vividly is how exhausting each game was. Chess players,…
South Korea’s government is making it easier to get an abortion
THE WORST thing about it was the shame. “I worried about how other people would judge me for doing something illegal, what my parents and my friends would say if they found out,” says Kim Min-kyoung, a 24-year-old student from Seoul who decided to terminate a pregnancy last year. The second-worst thing was paying: how…
Pakistan’s opposition takes on both the government and the army
ELECTIONS AMID the craggy splendour of Gilgit-Baltistan are usually of interest only to its residents—if them. The region at the northern tip of Pakistan is home to five of the 14 mountains in the world that exceed 8,000 metres, but contains only 1% of Pakistan’s population. The pragmatic locals tend to vote for the party…
Much of the Arab world is short of doctors
FOR THOSE with money, Lebanon’s health-care system was once the envy of the Middle East. Private clinics and hospitals were staffed by doctors trained at top places in the West. Wealthy patients from across the Arab world jetted in for treatment. Today, though, it is the doctors getting on planes. One surgeon says his salary,…
The latest chatter about Iranian plots in Africa
Nov 21st 2020“I’M NOT IN the business of making threats,” said Javad Zarif, Iran’s foreign minister, immediately before making one. When asked in September whether Iran was still considering retaliating for America’s assassination in January of General Qassem Suleimani, Iran’s most prominent military commander, Mr Zarif was clear: “The books are not closed.”Ever since President…
Why Bitcoin Sells at $17,000, A Record High, Even in a Pandemic
Published on Nov 18, 2020 by Anne Investors are up for a treat after Bitcoin, which is a type of cryptocurrency, sells at a record high of $17,000. This is the first time in the last three years that the price of the cryptocurrency reached such levels. The Coronavirus pandemic is still devastating a huge…
Man sells meteorite that plunged through his roof for $1.85 million
One afternoon a man, 33, discovered a piping hot meteorite just outside his house after it smashed through the roof of his residence. According to reports, the rock from space, which weighed roughly 4.63 lbs, turned out to be worth around S$2.48 million ($1.85 million USD). Josua Hutagalung, a casket producer, was working on Aug.…