Andrew Robinson reviews five of the week’s best science picks.
The pesticide DDT reduced typhus and malaria during the Second World War; its discoverer won the 1948 medicine Nobel prize. After the war, it was widely used in the United States to kill vermin, and city children played in the mist of trucks spraying it, notes historian Elena Conis in this complex, disturbing study. The chemical’s toxicity to wildlife became notorious with Rachel Carson’s book. In 1972, the United States banned it.
A biologist might think of worker bees giving aid to their queen; an economist of how many dollars a student will donate to a stranger in an experiment. Psychologist Stephanie Preston focuses her analysis on the “altruistic urge”, defined as the compulsion of an animal or person “to approach a vulnerable victim in immediate need of aid”, for example when rescuing a stranger from a burning building.
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