If you walk through the Puerta del Sol, you might be forgiven for avoiding the crowd gathered here. At first, I found their story hard to believe. They say that hospital and adoption officials colluded to steal babies and traffic them throughout Spain for decades.
This 28-minute radio documentary, produced by Overtone Productions, and which I reported and presented, first aired on BBC Radio 4 on March 25th, 2019: [streaming link].
It is the second of a two-part documentary called Spain’s Lost Generations. The first part, which aired March 18th, focuses on the recovery of people executed by the regime of Francisco Franco.
Cattle may be at home on the range, but modern ranchers need to be able to find their wayward cattle, and inefficiencies in tracking cost the cattle industry around US $4.8 billion a year. At a recent conference about connected devices in Amsterdam, Jan Willem Smeenk of the Dutch company Sodaq and Thomas Telkamp of the startup Lacuna Space talked about connecting cattle into a future Internet of bovines.
This news story first appeared in the March 2018 issue of IEEE Spectrum [html] [pdf].
People are just now, in 2018, recovering the remains of family members lost after the Spanish Civil War, almost eighty years ago…
This 28-minute radio documentary, produced by Overtone Productions, and which I reported and presented, first aired on BBC Radio 4 on March 18th, 2019: [streaming link].
Whisky auctioneer Isabel Graham-Yooll was examining a seller’s collection in London last year when she noticed some of the liquors were slightly off-color—and several bottles seemed a little too full. She called the police, who arrested the seller for fraud. If the case goes to court, prosecutors may be able to count on more than just Graham-Yooll’s knowledge of fine whiskies; emerging laboratory techniques could help identify the liquors in question.
Whisky researchers are finding themselves at the forefront of the burgeoning science of food fraud detection. The spirit is a handy test substance because of its complexity: its main components–water and barley or other cereals–and its production method create unique chemical and biological signatures. And the time whisky spends in a wood cask helps to impart its golden color and unique aromas. “If [a new testing] technique works for whisky, then we can be sure it works for other spirit categories,” says Shona Harrison, the analytical services manager of the Scotch Whisky Research Institute (SWRI) in Edinburgh, whose work is funded by several liquor companies. Harrison and other researchers are fighting food and beverage fraud on multiple fronts—from monitoring global trade data to adapting laboratory-detection tools for use in the field.
