Новости за 12.04.2017

Ancient dragon. Mark Witton/Natural History Museum

What did the ancestors of dinosaurs look like? For decades, our knowledge of close dinosaur relatives has been based largely on animals like the Triassic Period reptile Marasuchus, a tiny, squirrel-sized critter that moved rapidly on two legs.

When the Turkish government announced its plans to transform itself into an executive presidency, no-one was particularly surprised. This plan, which has been described as “the most radical political change since the modern republic’s foundation in 1923”, is the culmination of a steady drift towards authoritarianism in Turkey which began a decade ago.

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Platforms like eBay, Uber, Airbnb, and Freelancer are thriving, growing the digital economy and disrupting existing business. The question is how to ensure that the transformations they entail have a positive impact on society. Here, universal basic income may have a role to play.

In recent weeks, tensions over European immigration and liberal values have culminated in a direct attack on the Central European University in Budapest.

South Sudanese refugees at the Bidi Bidi camp in Uganda. Trocaire/flickr.com, CC BY

Uganda now has around a million refugees. To put this in perspective, the East African country is the physical size of the UK and yet hosts more refugees than arrived in all 28 EU member states in 2015, the peak of the European refugee “crisis”.

In the run-up to Easter, it is customary for Egypt’s Coptic Christians to go to church every evening. Churches are packed with worshippers – as they were on Palm Sunday, April 9, 2017, when a suicide bomber blew himself up at the altar in a Coptic church in Tanta, about 90 miles north of Cairo, killing 29 people and injuring 71 – some of them gravely.

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The idea that selfies are somehow damaging our mental health is spreading. There is concern that there may be a link between an apparent recent rise in mental health concerns in millennials and taking, editing and posting selfies online.

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You may not be aware that in the NHS there are people with roles that are like doctors and nurses, but they are neither. Depending on your view, these people can be either “super nurses” or “sub-doctors”. But do they work?

Tom Morris, CC BY-SA

To say that people living around the UK think there is something of a London-centric bias in the British media would be an understatement. Although the capital represents 13% of the UK population, all of the country’s national English-language newspapers and broadcasters are based there – a level of concentration that is hard to justify on either economic or cultural grounds.

Donald Trump has at last been won over to the consensus that grips the Washington foreign policy establishment: Bashar al-Assad must go.

Easter this year is a festival to particularly savour for Christians around the world. In a relatively rare occurrence, Eastern and Western traditions find that their liturgical calendars coincide, with Easter Sunday happening on the same date. It won’t happen again until 2034.

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Russia’s relationship with the West is on a knife edge, with multiple allegations of Russian involvement in the affairs of other countries. But are these the beginnings of “Cold War II”? And can Cold War history provide potential lessons for today’s politicians?

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Emotional intelligence can mean the difference between behaving in a socially acceptable way and being considered to be way out of line. While most people will have heard of emotional intelligence, not many people really know how to spot it – in themselves or in others.

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Researchers have been keen to establish whether you can reduce the effects of autism on a child’s development if you intervene early enough. A new study with autistic babies claims that you can.

Material from the James Ossuary, which some believe carried the remains of Jesus' brother, is currently being sequenced by geneticists. English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA

It was the first stop on an extraordinary journey. On a bright but bitterly cold January afternoon earlier this year, I found myself on a small island in the Black Sea, just off Sozopol on the east coast of Bulgaria. Sveti Ivan has long been a destination for travellers: it boasted a temple of Apollo in ancient times. But I was there... Читать дальше...