MAXLab Freiburg—the virtual reality (VR) arm of the criminology department at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Crime, Security, and Law in Freiburg, Germany—is at the forefront of a movement to use VR technology to understand, deter, and prevent crime.
Read and watch our BBC Future series Stopping The Next One, with Harriet Constable and The Pulitzer Center.
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If restitution advocates have their way, Berlin’s new Humboldt Forum may mark the beginning of the end of an era in which western museums served as humble custodians of other peoples’ things.
“Hermann Baumann wasn’t yet a Nazi when he set sail to Angola in search of Chokwe treasure.”
Read the full feature story: Tortoise
Pyrethrum contains a potent chemical that is made into an environmentally friendly insecticide. Photos by Vito Fusco
GILGIL, KENYA–The deadliest flower in the insect world is soft to the touch. Each morning in the hills above Kenya’s Great Rift Valley, the white petals of the pyrethrum plant become laden with dew. To the people who pick them, the flower is utterly harmless. But bugs beware: Its yellow center contains a natural toxin that can kill them in seconds.
Read: National Geographic
Eight-year-old Trizah Makungu sits on the bed she shares with her parents, protected by a mosquito net. These nets, which cost about $5 in the local market, have helped save millions of lives. / Lena Mucha
While most of the world is focusing on new vaccines for the coronavirus, thousands of Kenyan children are finally receiving a longed-for malaria vaccine, 37 years after development on it started.
Read: New Scientist
May 1, 2021 edition
With Support from the European Journalism Centre
Drive along the dusty dirt road that winds through Kenya’s Hell’s Gate National park, past the zebra, gazelles and giraffes, and you’ll see a plume of steam shooting skyward in the distance. Vehicles must sometimes swerve to avoid running over warthogs as they enter a vast valley dotted with dozens of steam vents – a factory of clouds.
Blasts of steam billow loudly, releasing heat from deep within the Earth. But even more powerful is the steam you don’t see: that which twists through miles of tubes to push past turbines, generating a type of clean energy that won’t run out for millions of years.
Read: BBC Full Steam Ahead
Move over, Covid-19. Another, far more lethal disease is in danger of erupting once again. Yellow fever infects some 200,000 people and kills 30,000 of them each year–more than terrorist attacks and plane crashes combined. Stopping the next outbreak from jumping from monkeys to humans may require a novel approach: vaccinating our hairy, banana-loving brethren.
Part of our BBC Future series, Stopping The Next One, with Harriet Constable and The Pulitzer Center.
Read: BBC
Floods and the economic fallout from COVID-19 are pitting hungry fishermen against hungry hippos—with deadly results.
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Photos by Brian Otieno.
Photography for BBC, The Coronavirus 10 Times Deadlier than Covid-19. Part of the Pulitzer Center-supported series, Stopping The Next One.
In northern Kenya, researchers are working to prevent a dangerous coronavirus – MERS – from jumping from camels to humans. But climate change is complicating their task.
Part of our BBC Future series, Stopping The Next One, with Harriet Constable and The Pulitzer Center.
READ: BBC
The discovery of a novel mosquito on Guantanamo Bay reveals how globalization is threatening to unleash the next pandemic. Part of our BBC Future series, Stopping The Next One, with Harriet Constable and The Pulitzer Center.
READ: BBC
A senior member of the Medellín cartel conned American and Swiss authorities, framed the Mexican president’s brother, destroyed a private Swiss bank, and brought down the Attorney General of Switzerland.
And they let him walk free.
In fact, they paid him to do it. Law enforcement agencies across the globe are giving millions of dollars to criminal informants, creating a system where–for big fish like José Manuel Ramos–crime truly does pay.
Read: The Economist’s 1843 Magazine
A Vespucci Story, with Swiss journalist Daniel Ammann
