Новости за 11.04.2017

He was a doctor, a political radical, a pioneering geologist, and a champion of the poor. But James Parkinson is best known for discovering the disease which bears his name. It was in 1817 that he wrote his Essay on the Shaking Palsy. And the symptoms he described so precisely two centuries ago are still used to diagnose Parkinson’s disease today.

Off to robojail? Shutterstock

This is where we are at in 2017: sophisticated algorithms are both predicting and helping to solve crimes committed by humans; predicting the outcome of court cases and human rights trials; and helping to do the work done by lawyers in those cases. By 2040, there is even a suggestion that sophisticated robots will be committing a good chunk of all the crime in the world. Just ask the toddler who was run over by a security robot at a California mall last year.

The official opening of the League of Nations, 15 November 1920. Wikipedia/A. Frankl - National Library of Norway

Brexit has few precedents in international history.

China is generally considered the only major ally of North Korea, a regime viewed around the world as cruel, evil, and backward. But whatever the government in Beijing might think of its troublesome neighbour on the other side of the Yalu River, many Chinese people have developed a rather cooler attitude.

China is generally considered the only major ally of North Korea, a regime viewed around the world as cruel, evil, and backward. But whatever the government in Beijing might think of its troublesome neighbour on the other side of the Yalu River, many Chinese people have developed a rather cooler attitude.

Since the Doctor Who series was rebooted in 2005 the television show has consistently presented the Doctor as a moral leader, a key element of which is his respectful relationship with other species. The Doctor expresses admiration and wonder for others, even when they threaten him or his human companions. Christopher Eccleston, who played the first relaunched Doctor, told the BBC that the new show retained “the central message of love for life in all its forms”. If this is the case, we have wondered, why isn’t the Doctor a vegan? Читать дальше...

Denys Prykhodov/Shutterstock.com

Fake news has become an important focus for news foundations, democratic interest groups and various journalism academics and researchers, following claims that the US presidential elections may have been influenced by anti-Clinton propaganda created by Russia and shared on social networks.

The abandoned medieval village of Wharram Percy, where fears of the walking dead were acted out. Historic England Archive

Zombies have long been an object of fascination: horror film director George Romero has championed the zombie film since Night of the Living Dead almost 50 years ago, and recent revivals have meant that talk of the “zombie apocalypse” is common even today.

Green politics is associated with the left these days, but that doesn’t rule out an eco-friendly turn at the opposite end of the spectrum. After all, nationalist worries over finite resources and talk of “threats to tradition” have been echoed throughout the history of the green movement.

Route forward? Oregon was the first place to license doctors to supply lethal drugs to terminally-ill people. Christopher Boswell/Shutterstock.com

Six states in the US and four countries in Europe have legalised some form of assisted dying. Meanwhile, in December 2016, Andrew Barclay – who suffered from advanced multiple sclerosis – became the latest person from the UK to travel to Switzerland to end his life. Barclay is one of more than 244 terminally-ill Britons who have had to travel abroad to end their life, legally. Читать дальше...

Rachel Dolezal speaking at Spokane rally, May 2015. Arkathman/Wikipedia, CC BY-SA

Rachel Dolezal, the former branch president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) who gained global notoriety in 2015 after being “outed” as a white woman pretending to be black, is back with a new book on race. Dolezal, who is ethnically German, now claims that she is “transracial”, a condition she compares to transgenderism. By this she means that although she was born white, she identifies with being black... Читать дальше...

Daniel Prudek/shutterstock

High-profile disasters such as Chernobyl and Fukushima have given nuclear power a bad name. Despite 60 years of nuclear generation without major accidents in many countries including Britain and France, many people have serious concerns about the safety of nuclear energy and the impact of the radioactive waste it generates. The very high capital cost of building a plant is also seen as a significant barrier, particularly given recent low oil prices. Plans to build a new... Читать дальше...

In the 1950s, Reggio Calabria on the toe of Italy, was a dangerous place to grow up. lyonara/flickr, CC BY-NC

The province of Reggio Calabria on the toe of Italy is a hotspot for natural disasters. As a humanitarian reaction to severe floods in 1951 and 1953, thousands of Calabrian children were displaced and sent to live with other families or in summer camps, military bases or Church-sponsored institutions across Italy.

from www.shutterstock.com

Waiters and restaurateurs across Europe could be forgiven for being a little quick with the bill, after large-scale “eat and run” incidents in Spain have left two restaurants thousands of euros out of pocket. In what the Spanish authorities believe were related incidents, hundreds of diners fled without paying on two separate occasions, just a few weeks apart.

And they're off... the finalists. BBC Two/PA

Eight days after Britain’s famous annual Boat Race, the Oxford-Cambridge final of the BBC2 quiz show University Challenge took place amid a surge of media and social media interest – particularly centred around Wolfson College Cambridge’s Canadian team captain, Eric Monkman, a highly talented contestant of rare facial expressions and vocal intonations.

Paula Bailey/Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA

Pea tart might be the key to winning hearts and minds in the war against poor nutrition. We are deluged with advice and guidance about what we should eat and in what volumes, but still adults and children alike struggle to introduce enough fruit and vegetables into their diet.

The TARDIS. Babbel1996/wikipedia, CC BY-SA

There’s no denying that we’ve seen some absolutely staggering accomplishments in physics in the past year or so, particularly in our ability to measure space and time with unprecedented levels of detail. But being a lifelong “Whovian” excited about Doctor Who returning to our screens once again, I wondered how these accomplishments stacked up to those of the fictional Time Lords.