| |
|
|
|
|
|
|
| |
|
Editor's note
|
|
Over the past year Rio de Janeiro has seen a sharp increase in reports of religiously motivated crimes, in particular attacks on “terreiros” – the temples belonging to the Candomblé and Umbanda faiths. Robert Muggah points out that the current wave of violence coincides with the rapid rise of hard-line charismatic Christianity in the city. Now even drug traffickers claim they’re spreading the evangelical gospel – and they’re doing it through violence, when necessary.
Animators can happily design the four-headed, six-legged dragons you see in sci-fi and fantasy movies. But can animation also be used to recreate extinct species? Yes, explains Brendan Body. Where paleoartists, who illustrate extinct species based on their fossils, focus on the look of the species, animators are more concerned with using their skills to show how these long-gone creatures moved.
The Universe, writes Emily Thomas, is a mind-scrunchingly big place. We know this because of numerous astronomical discoveries made over the last few centuries. But how have these revelations changed the way humans think about and understand religion?
|
Catesby Holmes
Commissioning Editor
|
|
|
Top Stories
|
Robert Muggah, Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio)
As hard-line Pentecostalism spreads across Brazil, some drug traffickers in gang-controlled areas of Rio de Janeiro are using religion as an excuse to attack nonbelievers.
| |
Brendan Body, University of Dundee
One animator combined his skills with paleontological evidence to breathe movement into a dinosaur fossil to eye-catching effect.
|
Emily Thomas, Durham University
Religions tend to portray God as deeply concerned with humans, yet we seem hugely unimportant in the vast scheme of things.
| |
Daniel Wojcik, University of Oregon; Robert Dobler, Indiana University
Many in the Western world lack the explicit mourning rituals that help people deal with loss. On Day of the Dead, two scholars describe ancient mourning practices.
|
|
|
Environment + Energy
|
Erta Ale in eastern Ethiopia.
mbrand85
William Hutchison, University of St Andrews; Juliet Biggs, University of Bristol; Tamsin Mather, University of Oxford
Satellite research in Ethiopia is opening up a new frontier in the hunt for geothermal power.
|
An Antarctic icebreaker sails past a penguin. But conservationists are still waiting for their own breakthrough.
John B. Weller
Cassandra Brooks, University of Colorado
Australia is among nations calling for a 1 million square km marine park off East Antarctica. But Russia and China remain opposed, and a recent summit yet again failed to seal the deal.
|
Politics + Society
|
-
Dan Paget, University of Oxford
Tanzania’s President John Magufuli has brought dramatic change and his intolerance for corruption won him worldwide admiration. But his repressive means to stay in power are being questioned.
-
Oscar Berglund, University of Bristol
The situation in Catalonia is ripe for widespread civil disobedience against the Spanish government.
-
Piers Steel, University of Calgary
What makes for a thriving nation and happy citizens? Values. A nation's institutions need people with supporting underlying values to perform at their best.
-
Yvan Guichaoua, University of Kent; Andrew Lebovich, Columbia University
If the US, simply focuses on trying to hunt down jihadist leaders in Niger it will be missing an opportunity to address the underlying causes of violence in the region.
|
|
Business + Economy
|
-
Lorenzo Fioramonti, University of Pretoria
The problem with Africa's model of industrial growth is that it privileges the formal at the expense of the informal and big corporations at the expense of small businesses.
|
|
Science + Technology
|
-
Ian Haydon, University of Washington
By exploiting the way yeast cells mate, researchers have figured out a quicker, easier way to identify on- and off-target drug interactions.
|
|
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
|
|
|
|
|
|
| |
