The Isdalen valley is an unforgiving place. It sits in the shadow of the largest of a group of mountains overlooking the Norwegian city of Bergen, its rocks whipped bare of grass by bracing
It is the depths of night over Europe in February 1992. The darkness across the continent is deepened by a thick, seemingly impenetrable layer of cloud. Suddenly, a shaft of light cuts
It all starts with a plume of smoke on the horizon. Wispy and ethereal, the twisting, blooming columns of white and grey belie the danger and devastation to come. Within moments, the
If you happened to scan a map of Tennessee in the early 1940s, your finger would inevitably pause over the recognisable urban centres of Memphis, Nashville or Knoxville. A seemingly unremarkable settlement
A mass spectrometer is a complex mixture of wires, electrodes, metal piping and whirring machinery. Inside, chemical compounds are ionised, accelerated and deflected by powerful electric and magnetic fields, separating according to
Highly Unpredictable On 6 February 2020, a woman living in Daegu checked herself into hospital following a minor traffic accident. Despite a high fever, she continued about her day-to-day life in between visits
As the long summer days in San Antonio, Texas draw to a close and the residents bed in for a sweltering evening, the majority of its inhabitants are just waking up. Just
As the coronavirus pandemic continues to evolve, scientists around the world are continuing to attempt to understand the nature of the virus, using the data pouring out of affected countries. Teams of
The number of worldwide cases of SARS-CoV-2 edged passed 100,000 on 6 March 2020, having been officially identified two months earlier, on 7 January. It took 12 days for the second 100,000
Mankind is, to a large extent, a man-made species. Biological evolution gave our species our intelligence, but we have facilitated our own social evolution. Humanity as we know it today is just
In his 1972 book, Natural History of Infectious Disease, esteemed microbiologist Sir Macfarlane Burnet made a bold prediction about the risk that infectious diseases posed to humanity: “The most likely forecast about
