homunculus

In defence of consensus If I were to hope for psychological subtlety from soap operas, or historical accuracy from Dan Brown, I’d have only ...

Decoding Da Vinci, decoded I’m hoping that anyone who feels moved to challenge my dismissal of Fibonacci sequences and the Golden Mean in na...

Paint it black I don’t generally tend to post my article for Nature ’s nanozone here, as they are a bit too techie. But this was just such ...

A sign of the times? The ETC Group, erstwhile campaigners against nanotechnology, have launched a competition for the design of a ‘nano-ha...

When it’s time to speak out [The following is the unedited form of my latest article on muse@nature.com. The newsblog on this story is wort...

Physics gets dirty [This is my Materials Witness column for the November issue of Nature Materials .] My copy of The New Physics , published...

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...