Liam Shaw is a Wellcome-funded research fellow at the MacLean Lab in Oxford, researching bacterial genetics. He is writing a book about the history of antibiotics.
Afew hours after Jean-Paul Sartre was injected with mescaline by his friend Daniel Lagache, a psychiatrist at the Sainte-Anne Hospital in Paris, Simone de Beauvoir phoned to check in on the first-time tripper. Her call came as a reprieve. As Sartre told her in a scrambled voice, she had interrupted a losing battle against a mass of octopuses. He had been promised a safe experience. An...
We have an eyewitness account of the 1646 eruption in the form of a letter from the governor of Tenerife, Alonso de Yclan y Valdès, to the king of Spain. I consulted the copy in the British Library; it was almost like reading the news.
What little we know about individual mammoths is often constrained to their last moments, based on where their skeletons were found – a struggle in the sticky tar – or the record of violent trauma inflicted by human weapons. But recent developments in isotope dating allow for longer narratives.
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