Paola Magni didn’t plan on getting involved in her most infamous case. As a forensic entomologist, she researches how insects and related creatures found at crime scenes can help investigators solve mysteries. She frequently works with public health officials and coroners, who, perhaps surprisingly, are often repelled by vermin, critters and crawlers. “Pathologists hate bugs,” she says of the doctors who examine corpses. But her comfort with these widely loathed creatures, combined with a talent for communicating forensic concepts to the public in press interviews and on social media, have propelled her to the forefront of innovations in forensic biology. She has consulted on dozens of homicide cases and suspicious deaths all over the world. In association with the local health service, she established Italy’s first forensic entomology laboratory, then housed in the Turin morgue. A smartphone app she created called SmartInsects, which helps investigators identify bugs and guides them in how to collect samples, has been downloaded more than 40,000 times, mainly by pathologists, law enforcement officers and students. And by applying her expertise to all the living organisms that arrive opportunistically at crime scenes like uninvited party guests, from flies to barnacles, Magni has become a leading figure in the burgeoning field of aquatic forensics, which extends the science of criminal investigations to evidence found in bodies of water.
But in 2012, before she became an international figure, she was still completing her doctorate in biology in her native Turin, in northern Italy.
Experts say they do not want to limit the booming space economy. But they fear that the steady march of science will move slower than the new space race — meaning we may understand the consequences of pollution from rockets and spacecraft only when it is too late. Already, studies show that the higher reaches of the atmosphere are laced with metals from spacecraft that disintegrate as they fall back to Earth.
“We are changing the system faster than we can understand those changes,” said Aaron Boley, an astronomer at the University of British Columbia and co-director of the Outer Space Institute. “We never really appreciate our ability to affect the environment. And we do this time and time again.”
But as satellites fill the skies, astronomers who planned to rely on the Rubin telescope for scientific discovery are concerned.
“The whole point of Rubin is to open up this new window into the universe to find things that we didn’t even know to look for,” Dr. Rawls said. “And if instead we’re going to look through the equivalent of a windshield of bugs, you don’t know what you’re not going to see.”
A small number of northern long-eared bats have learned to avoid fungi-infested cave colonies, tapping into a previously unknown behavior to roost in trees that grow near the Atlantic Ocean. By escaping the risks posed by mountain life, these bats are confronting a new mortal threat: coastal developers. This problem goes beyond South Carolina and is likely much bigger than bats.
Today, white-nose syndrome is wiping out an entire branch of the bat family tree in America’s Southeastern forests. Northern long-eared bats landed on the federal endangered species list in March; scientists anticipate at least two more bat species could soon end up on the list, spurring protective measures that could put the brakes on development to ensure their survival.
No machine could deliver the surprises, the tonal shifts and the blend of empathy and irony that make it so satisfying. And it is, not incidentally, evidence that Fitzcarraldo is fashionable because it continues to pursue its own vision through work as singular as this.
Love and time. Each is commonly said to have the power to heal, but “Inverno” is all about that other power they share: to annihilate. As the narrator finds herself “running behind something or someone that is leaving forever,” the reader finds herself slowing down, the better to savor Zarin’s allusive, evocative prose. To see the chaos of suffering shaped into something beautiful is one of the main reasons we turn to art. There is not a banal sentence or purple patch to be found in this book, which only a poet could have written.
And while Enrigue’s interpretation of this brutal period of history doesn’t rectify any of the atrocities that follow, it is a thoughtful reminder of the dangerous power that accompanies self-deception and the ideas of chivalric romantic bullshit that all empires are built on.