Новости за 07.11.2018

Teeth in its head and a sting in its tail

THE IDEA of underwater mining is not restricted to the ocean floor (see article). High water tables submerge many terrestrial deposits, too. At minimum, this means doing a lot of pumping to make them workable. Sometimes, it makes those deposits altogether inaccessible. Flooding also adds to the cost of re-opening closed mines. The team behind VAMOS hopes to do something about this.

The Viable Alternative Mine Operating System, to give its full name... Читать дальше...

Lover of the light

MOST SPIDERS avoid light because, besides being predators, they are also potential prey. But there is a set of circumstances in which living beside a powerful light is an advantage. This is when you are a web-weaving spider. Moths and other insects are attracted to sources of illumination such as streetlights. Those are found predominantly in cities. It would therefore make sense if urban web-spinning spiders had lost their photophobia, so that they could more easily set up shop beside such lights. Читать дальше...

WELL BEGUN, half done. That proverb, ascribed to Aristotle, seems an apt description of the art market—at least it is if a study of artistic careers, published this week in Science, is to be believed. In this study Albert-László Barabási, a physicist at Northeastern University in Boston, and Samuel Fraiberger, a data scientist at the Harvard Institute for Quantitative Social Sciences, deconstruct almost half a million artistic careers. They conclude that for artists, professional success seems... Читать дальше...

Pondering the cardinal sins

AS AN FBI agent for 29 years, Philip Scala led the operation that jailed John Gotti of Cosa Nostra and raided an al-Qaeda bomb factory. Mr Scala, now a private investigator, took on Hells Angels, rioting prisoners and Russian mobsters. Next on his list? The cardinals of the Roman Catholic church.

A new lay group, Better Church Governance (BCG), has hired Mr Scala to probe the lives of the 224 men who advise Pope Francis (including their sex lives, if any). Читать дальше...

WHEN THE manhunt was on for Whitey Bulger, on the lam for 16 years and the FBI’s second-most-wanted after Osama bin Laden, officers would often check bookshops. He liked books. In his shabby apartment in Santa Monica, California, where he turned up living as Charlie Gasko behind thick black curtains, he had 200 books. True, they hid the holes in the walls where he stashed guns and $800,000 in cash. But he read them, too.

DIVA AMON, a researcher at the Natural History Museum in London, spotted her first whale skull in 2013, during an expedition to the Clarion Clipperton Zone (CCZ) in the tropical Pacific. It sat on beige silt, some 4,000 metres beneath the sea’s surface, and was entirely covered in a black coating. Her find was twice notable. First, the skull’s coating meant it was millions of years old, for it was made of the same slowly accumulating metallic oxides as the potato-like ore nodules that are drawing miners to the area. Читать дальше...

A new documentary shows the human cost of the illegal wildlife trade

They have a long list

Their victory puts an end to President Donald Trump’s hopes of enacting further conservative legislation