Heritage
On Poisons & Policies
After decades of wars and violence, from the Vietnam War to the Killing Fields of Cambodia, peace now reigns across Southeast Asia. Even in Myanmar, war-torn for decades, peace negotiations are underway. But one war stubbornly remains: It is brutal and merciless, backed with the harshest laws and toughest police action, but is nevertheless apparently intractable and unwinnable. This is the drug war.
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Heritage
A History of Violence
You have heard of Alexander the Great and Hannibal, but it’s likely that the greatest general and military strategist of all has passed you by. Subotai led the largest and most devastating horse-borne force ever seen, and conquered territories stretching from Hungary and Syria in the West, to Vladivostok and the Sea of Japan in the East.
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Heritage
Lighting the Way of Faith
Before Abraham and what we know as the three Abrahamic faiths, there were already those who worshipped one god: the Zoroastrians, or Parsis, as many of the modern-day adherents of the religion are known. A small community, who traditionally marry amongst themselves and have no doctrinal requirement to proselytise, their history and the tenets of their faith are poorly understood by outsiders. But the impact of their ideas over the past 3,000 years has been nothing short of revolutionary.
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Travel and Adventure
Into the Wild
The past 13 years have taken me on several journeys through many parts of India. These opportunities to experience the rich biodiversity of Nature on the subcontinent has led me to return again and again, begging for more.
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Culture
Early Human Imprints
Rock art dated to a minimum age of almost 40,000 years has been discovered in the Maros region of southern Sulawesi, Indonesia. This is an incredible finding, first published in Nature in 2014, because one of the biggest challenges in rock art research is dating.
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Culture
From Spirits to Superfans
If nothing else, 2016 has demonstrated the unexpected power of a popular mythology to capture people’s hearts, minds, and wallets. Among the more demonstrations of this fanaticism is Pokémon Go, a GPS-based, augmented reality smartphone game that rebooted the global pop culture phenomenon of Pokémon.
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Environment
The Tree of Life
This is a story about our little branch on the tree of life. Let us journey out on a figurative limb, balancing our way along the branch we share with the primates, and then onto the smaller branch we call Homo. Thanks to advances in genetic technology, working in tandem with fragments of fossil evidence, we are starting to get a sense of where, geographically, this strand began.
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