Fires have raged across southern Europe during the exceptional heat of this summer but in Greece, where they have been particularly severe and widespread, they caught the authorities by surprise. They have been occurring over weeks from late June in the forests of the north to Crete in the south. They are doubly troubling because of Greece's dramatic biodiversity — more than 25 per cent of an e...

This paper, abstracted from the final report of the Kampuchea Inquiry Commission, analyses the population losses in Cambodia prior to 1979 and goes on to describe some of the unwanted side effects of the international relief programmes in both Thailand and in Kampuchea. The paper concludes that various opposition movements to the present Vietnamese backed regime in Kampuchea have been strengthe...

On 13 March six men were admitted to intensive care at Northwick Park Hospital, London, after suffering severe reactions while taking part in a phase 1 clinical trial of an experimental drug in a research unit run at the hospital by US-owned Parexel International, a contract research company. Two days later, the story hit the front pages, as successive editions of the London Evening Standard an...

Individual success in group-structured populations has two components. First, an individual gains by outcompeting its neighbours for local resources. Second, an individual's share of group success must be weighted by the total productivity of the group. The essence of sociality arises from the tension between selfish gains against neighbours and the associated loss that selfishness imposes by d...

Problem: In the study of conflicts, both economists and evolutionary biologists use the concepts ‘tragedy of the commons’ and ‘public goods dilemma’. What is the relationship between the economist and evolutionist views of these concepts? Model features: The economics literature defines the tragedy of the commons and the public goods dilemma in terms of rivalry and excludability of the good. In...

Traveling through the global computing community, we tend to see fundamental uniformity and super cial variation. Our international colleagues solve the same kinds of problems that we do. Our devices can link to the local Wi-Fi network, even though some people pronounce it “wee-fee.” Our data and programs slip into distant countries without even slowing for a customs inspection at the border. W...

A tragic car crash has killed two distinguished British researchers. Dame Anne McLaren and Professor Donald Michie died when their car came off the motorway between Cambridge and London last month. Anne McLaren was a leading geneticist who became the first female official of the Royal Society and Michie was a researcher in artificial intelligence who worked as part of the British codebreaking g...