Antony Blinken, 59, is one of U.S. President Joe Biden’s closest confidants. He first worked for Biden as a Senate staffer and then rose to become deputy national security adviser and deputy secretary of state in Barack Obama’s administration. Blinken is considered a proponent of an active U.S. foreign policy and believes his country has […]

In April, Howard University announced that it was dissolving its classics department, a move that punctuates a heated debate about whether Greco-Roman history should be taught separately or differently from the history of other ancient societies. A new wave of scholars, such as Princeton’s Dan-el Padilla Peralta, view the discipline as inextricable from the imperialist mind-set that created […]

DER SPIEGEL: We are apparently living in the golden age of astronomy. Genzel: Absolutely. It is unbelievable all that is going on at the moment. And it will continue. Take just exoplanets, for example. We are currently experiencing a downright explosion in knowledge. And GRAVITY, our interferometer at the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile is part […]

Dorfman, 64, of University College London, is founder and chair of the Nuclear Consulting Group, a collection of experts and activists working on nuclear energy and radiation medicine, nuclear proliferation and the sustainability of energy systems. Qvist, 34, completed his Ph.D. in nuclear engineering at the University of California at Berkeley and has since been […]

DER SPIEGEL: You advised the Trump administration in 2017 to increase its pandemic preparedness. Did you see a pandemic like this coming, a scenario like this with worldwide lockdowns, overflowing hospitals and a rather violent social disruption? Fauci: Well, the answer is, I predicted and anticipated an outbreak of a new infectious disease, because we’ve had so […]

The European Commission would like to spend three-quarters of a trillion euros to combat the crisis set off by COVID-19. The Commission would like two thirds of the money to be disbursed as grants to severely affected countries. Not everyone approves, with the loudest criticism coming from the so-called “frugal four,” made up of Austria, […]

Frank Snowden, 73, is a professor of the history of medicine at Yale University and author of the book “Epidemics and Society: From the Black Death to the Present.” Almost 50 years ago, he lived through a cholera outbreak in Rome while doing research there, and he is now stuck in the Italian capital again […]

James Lovelock is a British scientist and inventor. He is also 100 years old. His research extends into the fields of medicine, biology and geophysiology and he has filed more than 50 patents. DER SPIEGEL: Mr. Lovelock, how are Earth’s chances of survival? Lovelock: Gaia is in double jeopardy. On the one hand, our sun […]

What are the underlying forces at work in the 2020’s? Haim Israel:   We identified 28 underlying forces in three categories. The first is innovation: Big Data, artificial intelligence, robotics, cybersecurity, privacy, genomics, all that stuff. Second is people: aging, silver economy, Gen Z, Gen Y, millennials, education, inequality, everything that has to do with demographics. […]

Even if our world is lucky enough to save itself from self-annihilation in the coming decades by avoiding a nuclear war, Diamond believes an end point may still come from a more obvious threat: climate change. The starting point of this issue comes down to the increase of the world’s population – reaching 9.8 billion […]