homunculus

Wise words from the Vatican? [ I’m no fan of the pope. And what I don’t say below (because it would simply be cut out as irrelevant) is that...

Can Aladdin’s carpet fly? [Here’s a seasonal news story I just wrote for Nature , which will appear (in edited form) in the last issue of th...

Surfers and stem cells [This is the pre-edited version of my Lab Report column for the January issue of Prospect .] Just when you thought th...

Money for old rope … except without the money. At no extra work to myself, I appear in a couple of recent books: The Public Image of Chemist...

We’re only after your money There is a very sour little piece in this Saturday’s Guardian from Wendy Cope on copyright. I should say first...

Beyond recycling [This is my Materials Witness column for the January 2008 issue of Nature Materials .] It is surely ironic that global warm...

Why 'Never Let Me Go' isn't really a 'science novel' I have just finished reading Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go . Wha...

Listen out Let me now be rather less coy about media appearances. This Wednesday night at 9 pm I am presenting Frontiers on BBC Radio 4, lo...

Salt-free Paxo No one can reasonably expect Jeremy Paxman to have a fluent knowledge of all the subjects on which he has to ask sometimes re...

War is not an exact science [This is my latest muse column for news@nature.com] General theories of why we go to war are interesting. But th...

Schrödinger’s cat is not dead yet [This is an article I’ve written for news@nature. One of the things I found most interesting was that Schr...

Not natural? [Here’s a book review I’ve written for Nature , which I put here because the discussion is not just about the book!] The Artifi...

Astronomy: the dim view One Brian Robinson contributes to human understanding on the letters page of this Saturday’s Guardian with the foll...

Is this what writers’ studies really look like? Here is another reason to love Russell Hoban (aside from his having written the totally wond...

Minority report Here’s an interesting factoid culled from the doubtless unimpeachable source of Wllson da Silva, editor of Australian scienc...

Lucky Jim runs out of luck (at last) [This is also posted on the Prospect blog .] Jim Watson seems to be genuinely taken aback by the furor...

Swiss elections get spooky [This is my latest column for muse@nature.com.] High-profile applications of quantum trickery raise the question ...

How tortoises turn right-side up [This is a story I’ve just written for Nature ’s news site. But the deadline was such that we couldn’t incl...

We’ll never know how we began [ This is the pre-edited text of my Crucible column for the November issue of Chemistry World. ] Oddly, it is ...

Time to rethink the Outer Space Treaty [This article on Nature ’s news site formed part of the journal’s “Sputnik package”.] An agreement fo...