erected by environmental campaigners to suggest the company had known about the science of climate change but had failed to act - did not last too long.

a company that has fended off efforts to make it toe the line on climate change for a quarter of a century.

misled investors and the public about the true state of climate science and will be fined, condemned and buried in the very ground from which it extracts its evil fuels.

Well, thanks to the rise of on-demand talent marketplaces, the so-called "gig economy" is fast becoming a reality.

Cloud-based platforms are making it easier for firms to find the people they need from a global talent pool, and for freelancers to advertise their skills.

And in the US, around 54 million people are now freelance, roughly a third of all workers.

the profusion of “everything” spins the head. “This tiny pig dancing in the grass is everything.”

religiously and philosophically inclined take to Facebook and Tumblr to pronounce their dictums:

Everything” is a fudge, a word we apply to the unknowable.

2013 the world contained about 4.4 zettabytes (4.4 trillion gigabytes) of data. By 2020, it expects this to have risen tenfold.

History, in other words, has gone online

But anyone who's seen their photo or music collections wiped out, knows how easily digital files can be lost.

The technique is being hailed as a breakthrough in understanding how the trillions of complex cells in a body are descended from a single egg.

The human body has around 40 trillion cells, each with a highly specialised function. Yet each can trace its history back to the same starting point - a fertilised egg.

The molecular tape recorder developed by Prof Shendure's team at the University of Washington in Seattle, US, is a length of DNA inserted into the genome that contains a series of edit points which can be changed throughout an organism's life.

especially given the steep price at which it was bought. Humans’ outsized, power-hungry brains suck up around a quarter of their body’s oxygen supplies.

. It was simply humanity’s good fortune that those big sexy brains turned out to be useful for lots of other things, from thinking up agriculture to building internal-combustion engines. Another idea is that human cleverness arose out of the mental demands of living in groups whose members are sometimes allies and sometimes rivals.

human infants take a year to learn even to walk, and need constant supervision for many years afterwards. That helplessness is thought to be one consequence of intelligence—or, at least, of brain size.

Just 31,000 votes averted the election of western Europe’s first far-right head of state since 1945. How had a man who talks of the “Muslim invasion” of Europe come so close?

Austria’s failure fully to come to terms with its complicity in the Third Reich.

The FPÖ has traded its earlier anti-Semitism for Islamophobia; “Vienna must not become Istanbul” runs one slogan.

bbott, of the conservative Liberal Party, had no time for such information. Climate change, he argued in his autobiography, was bunk. It had been “happening since the earth’s beginning.” Therefore it made no sense to “impose certain and substantial costs on the economy now in order to avoid unknown and perhaps even benign changes in the future.”

sometimes the very survival — of countless people depend on them.

” Global warming, he declared, would lead, if unchecked, to “truly catastrophic consequences.”

The general atmosphere embraces feminism, civil rights, egalitarianism and environmentalism, but it is expressed as academic discourse, not as action on the streets.

On the spiritual side they hunger for a vehement crusade that will fulfill their moral yearnings and produce social justice.

The identity politics the students have produced inverts the values of the meritocracy. The meritocracy is striving toward excellence; identity politics is deeply egalitarian.