homunculus

On hobbits and Merlin [ This is my latest Lab Report column for Prospect. ] In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. But the rest of th...

More burning water [Here is my latest Crucible column for Chemistry World (April). I’m not sure if I’m one of the “unscientific critics who...

Enough theory One of the side-effects of James Wood’s widely reviewed book How Fiction Works (Jonathan Cape) is that it has renewed talk in...

Can a ‘green city’ in the Middle East live up to its claims? [Here’s my latest piece for Nature’s Muse column.] The United Arab Emirates ha...

Heart of Steel Birth of an Idea Chemical art with heart [ Here’s my latest Crucible column for Chemistry World , which appears in the March ...

Engineering for the better? [This is the pre-edited version of my latest Muse column for Nature News.] Many of the grand technological chal...

Ye Gods Yes, as the previous entry shows, I am reading Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods . Among the most trivial of the issues it makes m...

There’s no place like home … but that won’t stop us looking for it in our search for extraterrestrials. [This is the pre-edited version of m...

The hazards of saying what you mean It’s true, the archbishop of Canterbury talking about sharia law doesn’t have much to do with science. ...

Waste not, want not [This is my latest Muse column for Nature News.] We will now go to any extent to scavenge every last joule of energy fr...

Risky business [My latest Muse column for Nature online news…] Managing risk in financial markets requires better understanding of their com...

No option There is an excellent article in today’s Guardian by the author John Lanchester, who turns out to have a surprisingly (but afte...

Scratchbuilt genomes [ Here’s the pre-edited version of my latest story for Nature’s online news. I discuss this work also in the BBC World...

Differences in the shower [This is how my latest article for Nature ’s Muse column started out. Check out also a couple of interesting paper...

Groups, glaciation and the pox [ This is the pre-edited version of my Lab Report column for the February issue of Prospect.] Blaming America...