homunculus

Who’s afraid of nanoparticles? Lots of people, it seems. They have the potential to become the new DDT or dioxins or hormone mimics, the inv...

To boldly go…? My Nature article on NASA’s manned spaceflight program has drawn some flak , as I suspected it might. That’s good – it is o...

Get lucky William Perkin did 150 years ago, when he discovered the first aniline dye. (Luck had little to do, however, with the commercial s...

Platinum sales We all know that platinum is a precious metal, but paying close to $3 million for a few grams of it seems excessive. Yet that...

Science, voodoo… or just ideology? The past few weeks have been a time of turmoil for economic markets. They have been lurching and plunging...

Weird things in a bucket of water That's all you need to punch a geometric hole in water. Take a look . When the bucket is rotated so fa...

The return of Dr Hooke Yes, he seemed pleased to be back at the Royal Society after 303 years – though disconcerted at the absence of his po...

Are chemists designers? Not according to a provocative article by Martin Jansen and Christian Schön in Angewandte Chemie. They argue that ...

The Big Bounce The discovery in 1996 that the universe is not just expanding but accelerating was inconvenient because it meant that cosmolo...

Myths in the making Or the unmaking, perhaps. It was such a lovely story: a mysterious but very real force of attraction between objects cau...

Swarms That's the title of an exhibition at the Fosterart gallery in Shoreditch, London, running until 14 May. The work is by Farah Sy...

It’s flat, it’s hot, and it’s very weird Graphene, that is. I have been talking to some fellows about this new wonder-stuff, which wowed the...

Condensed matter A couple of brief items from the Institute of Physics Condensed Matter and Materials Physics meeting in Exeter, based on pr...

All the old stuff It’s on my web site . Here you’ll find writings on chemistry, physics, nanotechnology, science and art, alchemy, materials...