Hurray! I can finally share the cover of my upcoming book - The Long View: Why We Need To Transform How The World Sees Time
It'll be out in March 2023... so there's a little while to wait, but please do pre-order if you take the long view of your reading plans :) hachette.co.uk/titles/richard…
...we're also now sharing review copies, so if you are interested in a proof, please let me or @joe_thomas25 know.
A "long-term science" story I like: In the 1700s, people living on the coast of the Baltic Sea noticed a curious thing... the sea level appeared to be inexplicably falling. Why? 1/9
One day, Anders Celsius - the man who gave his name to the temperature scale - had an idea that would allow him to investigate what was happening. It involved seeking out so-called "seal rocks" along the Baltic coast. 2/9
Seals like to bask on rocks accessible from the water – in other words, close to sea level. These rocks, Celsius realised, also had records of ownership that stretched back to the 1500s. (People knew the rocks were a fruitful place to hunt the animals.) 3/9
Where did the words 'deep time' come from? Deep time was popularised in the 1980s by John McPhee in his geology book Basin & Range, but there are a couple of mentions earlier...
First usage, which I learnt from @David_Farrier's book Footprints, was Thomas Carlyle in 1832 speculating whether the work of English writer Samuel Johnson would last the ages "...who shall compute what effects have been produced, and are still, and into deep Time, producing?"
But one other I didn't know until today was a 1926 poem by the US modernist poet Archibald Wheeler called Signature for Tempo. I'm not a poetry expert, but it seems to be a reflection on the transience of human life within the passage of time...
A good technical overview in Nature of where we are with #COVID19 vaccine development. I'll try to summarise some of the key points nature.com/articles/s4158…
With nine candidates in Phase III already, and encouraging data from others in Phase I-II, things are looking cautiously positive, writes @florian_krammer. Effective and safe vaccines within months, not years, are possible. But there are unknowns ahead.
Data so far suggests that most vaccines will only protect from lower respiratory tract infection but might not induce "sterilizing immunity". That means they will protect people from illness, but could still allow for transmission to the unvaccinated.
It's 1976, and with a pandemic looming, a US president announces a warp-speed effort to vaccinate every man, woman and child in the country. The mistakes that followed hold lessons for today. bbc.com/future/article…
After reporting this story, I believe that there's much to learn from what happened in 1976, for policymakers, public health researchers and journalists. It shows what can go wrong when politics, science and media meet – each with differing goals, incentives and language.
If you want to dive deeper, there are a few papers written by those closely involved in the events of 1976, about what was learnt, including:
How many people has coronavirus killed? We won't know with certainty for many years, perhaps ever. Really interesting analysis of 'excess deaths' data and why it's a blunt tool nature.com/articles/d4158…
Seems the data will take a long time to unpick eg Bulgaria has seen *negative* excess deaths so far. Despite the virus, fewer people have died this year than expected. Perhaps fewer road deaths during lockdown or hygiene practices that help to quash other infectious diseases.
And in UK, deaths from conditions such as asthma or diabetes jumped after lockdown, perhaps because people were reluctant to seek treatment or hospitals overwhelmed. Dementia and Alzheimer's deaths also spiked.