homunculus

One small step: NASA’s first date with China Here’s my latest latest article for muse@nature.com, pondering on the implications of the vis...

Latest Lab Report Here is my Lab Report column for the October issue of Prospect . And while I’m about it, I’d like to mention the excellent...

Unbelievable fiction In telling us “how to read a novel”, John Sutherland in the Guardian Review (2 September 2006) shows an admirable will...

Tyred out Here’s my Materials Witness column for the September issue of Nature Materials. It springs from a recent broadcast in which I par...

Star treatment Am I indulging in cheap ‘kiss & tell’ by musing on news@nature about my meeting with Madonna ? Too late now for that kin...

Numerology … is alive and well, and living somewhere between Chartres cathedral and Wall Street. I am one of the few remaining humans not to...

Genetic revisionism Is it time for a thorough re-evaluation of how the genome is structured and how it operates? Recent work seems to be hin...

Stormy Starry Night Did Vincent van Gogh have a deep intuition for the forms of turbulence? That's what has been suggested by a recent m...

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...