homunculus

Birds that boogie [I reckon this one speaks for itself. It is on Nature News . I just hope Snowball can handle the fame.] YouTube videos of ...

Fly me to the moon? Last Monday I took part in a debate at the Royal Institution on human spaceflight: is it humanity’s boldest endeavour o...

A sound theory? [Here, because it will soon vanish behind a subscriber wall, is my latest Muse .for Nature News.] A new theory suggests a na...

Beauty and function Brian Appleyard has a nice blog about my book Universe of Stone . He says “Ball, in preferring earlier, starker Gothic ...

You’re not a molecule, but sometimes you’re a statistic The editorial in the latest issue of Nature , written by me, could in its edited fo...

Yes, I do read my reviews ‘When the laws of physics defy the science of storytelling’ says the headline. Whoops, I’m in for it. But not comp...

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...