homunculus

Fuelling the sceptics? [Here’s the long version of my Lab Report column in the June issue of Prospect .] Has the Intergovernmental Panel on...

Why we should love logarithms [More Musement from Nature News.] The tendency of 'uneducated' people to compress the number scale fo...

Making Hay It’s a rotten cliché of a title, but you can’t avoid the irony when the scene was pretty much like that above – I don’t know if t...

Me, me, me Well, what do you expect in a blog, after all? Here, then, is some blatant advertising of forthcoming events at which I’m speakin...

Mixed messages Last night I drove into the traffic hell that is Canary Wharf to see a play by the marvellous Shifting Sands in a rather nice...

When worlds collide [This is the pre-edited version of my latest Muse article for Nature News.] Worries about an apocalypse unleashed by pa...

Talking about Chartres There’s a gallery of images and a vodcast for my book Universe of Stone now up on the Bodley Head site: you can find...

Buddha in oils? [This is the pre-edited version of my latest news story for Nature.] Painters on the Silk Road may have been way ahead of t...

Journeys in musical space [This is one of the most stimulating things I’ve read for some time (not my article below, published on Nature ’s ...

NASA loses its (science) head, Pfizer loses its case [ This is my Lab Report column for the May issue of Prospect. ] The resignation of NASA...

On their way to a bookshop near you Well look, you don't seriously think I'm going to go to all this effort if I do not allow myself...

Radio sweat gland - 90 GHz [ Given that part of the point of this blog is to add a bit of value to stuff I publish elsewhere, I thought it w...

Astrology’s myopia [Do I make rods for my own back? I suspect astrologers will respond to this piece, just published as a Muse column for N...

Medieval instrument suggests astronomical knowledge was widespread [Here’s a story I picked up on a recent visit to the wonderful Museum of ...

Science made simple Starting, I think, on 14 April, the UK's Independent newspaper is issuing a series of booklets called 'Science ...

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...