Новости за 29.08.2017

The future, bright. Channel 4

Do you know the freezing point of water in degrees kelvin? (It’s 273.) Or who led the committee of public safety in revolutionary France? (It was Robespierre.) Does it matter if you do? It mattered to Rahul Doshi, a 12-year-old boy from London, who recently won the latest series of Child Genius, a British television show which tests the knowledge of exceptional children. It also clearly mattered to his parents.

Transomania which is a foot race from the Arabian Sea to the Indian Ocean is one of the most extreme marathons. shutterstock

From The Race Across America, a 3,000-mile 12-day cycle demanding more than 20 hours per day in the saddle, to the Iditarod Trail Invitational, where participants run, bike, sled, or ski their way across 1,000 miles of Alaskan snow, ultra endurance sporting events are becoming increasingly popular.

Drilling a groundwater well by hand, near Lahore, July 2017. A_noina / Shutterstock

More than 50m people in Pakistan are at risk of arsenic poisoning from contaminated groundwater. That’s according to a study recently published in the journal Science Advances, based on samples from 1,200 wells across the country. Arsenic cannot be removed from groundwater through common processes such as boiling or filtration – instead it requires expensive procedures such as reverse osmosis which are beyond the reach of most poor people. Читать дальше...

In his magnus opus 100 Years of Solitude, the late Colombian Nobel laureate, Gabriel García Márquez, warned his compatriots that “it is easier to begin a war than to end it”. And true enough, the country’s decades-old conflict with the FARC, preceded by another bloodshed simply referred to as La Violencia (the Violence), prove the point, as Colombia leapt from one violent episode to the next. But suddenly there’s optimism in the air.

The Maldives: beautiful, but vulnerable. Shutterstock

Thinking of booking a luxury holiday to a developing country so you can experience the authenticity of a culture untouched by Western influences? And are you hoping to help the underprivileged in the country to “lift them out of poverty” through your tourist spending? It’s worth exploring just how ethical such a trip might be.

Weather and climate don’t cause disasters – vulnerability does. Perhaps counter-intuitively, this means that the widespread discussion as to whether the Hurricane Harvey disaster was caused by climate change or not becomes a dangerous distraction.

Upper jaw of Paranthropus robustus, which lived 1.2-1.8m years ago. Ian Towle, Author provided

Old tools and bones can reveal a lot about our ancestors. But when it comes to what was going on inside their bodies – such as what they ate and how healthy they were – nothing can really beat a well-preserved row of teeth.

Unbalanced. shutterstock.com

Every three years, all Nobel Prize winners in economics are invited to gather in the tranquil setting of the German island of Lindau to meet a selection of bright young economists and discuss the state of their profession. But this year such tranquility was challenged by worrying political developments across the globe. Perhaps unexpectedly, one of the central themes of the meeting became what to do about inequality.

In a quiet side street of one of San Salvador’s infamous northern districts, lies a small community centre. All day, it is filled with small groups of children playing, paying little attention to how precarious their surroundings are.