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2015
The sweet smell of sweat
Everyone knows that animals use odours to communicate. Now a growing body of research suggests that humans do, too.
“We reach a young audience that no longer buys newspapers”
Marten Blankesteijn, co-founder of Blendle, the new Dutch start-up whose app is already being referred to as the iTunes of the press.
Augmented humans? Not so fast!
Human augmentation elicits reactions that are not unanimously positive.
“Understanding the target is key”
David Becker, the co-founder of Swiss-based Zkipster, explains how his firm became a micro multinational with eight employees on three continents.
7 ways to hack for profit
Cybercrime has gone mainstream – to the distress not only of individuals but also of targets as large as American cities.
Too little, too much
To guarantee an uninterrupted flow of electricity, Europe must improve its storage capacity and build a super grid.
The sins of peer review
More than one million scientific articles are published every year. The process that was established to control their quality is increasingly being called into question.
A tank full of sunshine
Solar energy won’t fulfil its potential until the storage problem is solved. Here’s how.
“A Swiss Army knife for genetic engineering”
Prize-winning French biologist Emmanuelle Charpentier explains her revolutionary discovery.
Master of fragrances
The exclusive creator of Hermès perfumes Jean-Claude Ellena revisits his brilliant career, revealing a glimpse of his perfumer’s palette.
The DNA gold rush
Thousands of labs and hospitals are eagerly awaiting the portable sequencers that will make bedside genetic analysis a reality.
Humans, dogs – and now e-noses
Canines still take the lead when it comes to sniffing out smells. But the latest research shows that machines are closing the gap.
The high price of inaction
For more than 40 years – ever since the Great Oil Crisis of 1973 – scientists, governments and media have been warning that the world must reduce its dependence on fuels derived from hydrocarbons. Initially, the main worry was supply – would the world run out of oil and gas before we found alternatives? But by the 1980s, an even greater danger came to the fore: climate change, aggravated by the massive amounts of CO2 being spewed into the atmosphere by oil-derived fuels.