From Kenya's Tree of Life to a Svalbard glacier, these stunning photos are taken from a new book by Yann Arthus-Bertrand, whose The Earth From Above was a smash hit 25 years ago
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The New Scientist Book Club read Silvia Park's near-future sci-fi novel Luminous in May, and had lots of good things to say (along with a few complaints)
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The Secrets of Our DNA Turi King UK, Doubleday; US, Transworld Digital
In 1993, a 62-year-old woman in the town of Idar-Oberstein in Germany was found strangled with florist wire. DNA found on a coffee cup suggested that two people were present besides the victim and that one of the apparent killers was a woman.
In 2001, the suspected female murderer’s DNA turned up again in Germany, this time on the body of a strangled 61-year-old man in Freiburg. Then her DNA started appearing at crime scenes in France and Austria, too.
In 2007, the mysterious woman hit the headlines when two police officers were shot – one fatally – in their car in the German city of Heilbronn, and her DNA was found in the back seat. These killings sparked a major hunt for “the Phantom of Heilbronn”, as she became known.
But the Phantom proved elusive, despite being linked to 41 crimes via her DNA. In some cases, her accomplices were caught, but they denied that any woman was involved. Police started to consider the possibility that the phantom was transgender. It wasn’t until 2009 that the Phantom was finally identified – as a woman who worked in a factory that made swabs for DNA testing. The Phantom of Heilbronn really was a phantom – police had wasted years chasing a non-existent killer.
“There are definitely instances when DNA is not the silver bullet people think it is,” writes Turi King in The Secrets of Our DNA: How genetics has changed the world .
King studied archaeology initially, but switched to genetics after being enthralled by a lecture describing how DNA was used to show that a man who drowned in Brazil in 1979 was, in fact, Josef Mengele, the Nazi doctor known as the Angel of Death.
“What has always hooked me about DNA has been the stories, the cases where the DNA was the key to answer a question, solve a mystery, help someone answer a long-held family mystery, provide information as to their propensity for genetic disease, exonerate someone, help convict someone, or hel…
Feedback is New Scientist’s popular sideways look at the latest science and technology news. You can submit items you believe may amuse readers to Feedback by emailing feedback@newscientist.com
We asked, you answered. Feedback wondered what adjective would best describe the Wikipedia page for the Ship of Theseus paradox. As a reminder, the paradox asks whether it’s the same ship if every single component has been replaced, and the Wiki page for it has been edited so much that nothing of the original remains, making it an exemplar of the thing it describes.
Sifting through the resulting mailbag, we see a great many suggestions, ranging from Tim Moulsley’s “autoparadigm” to Bryn Glover’s “autocausative”.
Martin Bastone was one of many readers who took inspiration from the British comedy Only Fools and Horses , in which the dim-witted road sweeper Trigger gets a medal for saving the council money, thanks to his having used the same broom for 20 years – with the minor caveat that it has had 17 new heads and 14 new handles . Martin therefore suggests the Ship of Theseus Wiki page be described as “triggering”.
However, it seems there may be a correct answer. It was identified by Peter Jeffery and Peter Gutfreund (who sounds nice), among others, and it is “autological”. An autological word “expresses a property that it also possesses”, according to Wikipedia. Peter Thomson offers some examples of autological words: “‘noun’ is a noun, ‘sesquipedalian’ is sesquipedalian”.
There is some question as to whether autological can be used to describe only individual words, in which case, we can’t apply it to the entire Wikipedia article. So if “we need a distinct word for articles”, says Philip Penton, “may I propose ‘autobroomian’.”
Mairi McKissock also got the answer, and then went deeper. “Digging into this then led me to the opposite term: heterological (a word that does not describe itself),” she writes. For instance, the word “monosyllabic” is distinctly polysyllabic…
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