Cholera would often turn its victims’ skin a bluish grey.
Wellcome Collection
There is a sad precedent of pandemic disease threatening the residents of care institutions – and of authorities not heeding the dangers.
Going underground: heading into an Atlas Shelter in Dallas, Texas.
Bradley Garrett
To ‘preppers’ getting ready for a global cataclysm, the COVID-19 pandemic is a mere ‘mid-level’ event.
Daryan Shamkhali/Unsplash
We can lock in these changes to build sustainable cities out of the coronavirus crisis – here’s how.
A Royal Air Force De Havilland MosquitoI in flight on September 30 1944.
wikimedia/ww2incolor
The second world war offers a possible blueprint for confronting the ventilator challenge.
Gary He/EPA-EFE
The airline industry has faced many crises before. But these pale in comparison to the economic hit that airlines are currently facing.
Thomas Peham/Unsplash
Most people in the West are used to some form of solitude from time to time. But this is a fairly new normal.
Yi Xin/EPA-EFE
We could use this crisis to rebuild, produce something better and more humane. But we may slide into something worse.
Gettyimages
The consequences will be far more severe and long lasting in poorer countries.
MarcoVector/Shutterstock
Behind every government announcement, there is an army of epidemiologists predicting how the virus will spread, and how to beat it.
Piyal Adhikary/EPA
There are no criminal provisions around slavery in 49% of world nations, groundbreaking new legal research finds.
Dickens After Death, John Everett Millais, June 10 1870.
Charles Dickens Museum
How two ambitious men put their own interests ahead of the great writer and his family in an act of institutionally-sanctioned bodysnatching.
Arindambanerjee/Shutterstock.com
The voices of young victims in Haiti can now be heard for the first time thanks to a groundbreaking new research project.
Image from ‘Criminal man, according to the classification of Cesare Lombroso’ (1911).
Internetarchivebookimages/Flickr
We may think tattooing is a modern phenomenon, but the reasons for its popularity are not dissimilar to those seen in the prisons and convict ships of the Victorian era.
A protester wearing a Guy Fawkes mask flashing a victory sign in Beirut in November 2019.
EPA-EFE/WAEL HAMZEH EPA-EFE/WAEL HAMZEH
Wars don’t produce winners and losers – they never really did.
Jakob Fischer/Shutterstock.com
These inspirational food sharing initiatives around the world demonstrate that sustainable food system can – and should – be democratic.
A young girl is inoculated with typhoid, Texas, 1943.
Wikimedia Commons
We’ve known how to control typhoid for over 100 years. The rapid current increase of drug-resistant variants in both rich and poor countries is down to decades of short-sighted global health policies.
Demonstrations in Ecuador turned sour.
Rolando Enriquez/EPA
Climate change is already worsening the chaos attendant on resource shortage – and, therefore, death rates.
Valentin Valkov/Shutterstock.com
The design of the global money game is the real antagonist in the fight against climate change. But the call to arms tends to be directed at the players who have had best luck with the dice.
We need more blue-sky thinking. Yolanda Sun/Unsplash
From mobile phones to artificial wombs: what a breathtakingly visionary set of predictions from a century ago can teach us about our attempts to forecast the future today.
NASA
Realising the silence of outer space was what made us appreciate our precarious position down on this pale blue dot – so beginning our obsession with extinction.