homunculus

Here's my Crucible article for the December issue of Chemistry World , which arose when I chaired a recent talk by John Emsley at the R...

The chorus of disapproval that greeted Howard Flight’s remark about how cuts in child benefits will encourage ‘breeding’ among the lower so...

This Sunday I appear on the BBC World Service’s ‘ideas’ programme The Forum . In principle I am there to discuss The Music Instinct , but it...

Here’s my Crucible column for the November Chemistry World . It gets a bit heavy-duty towards the end – not often now (happily) that I have...

I have been slack with my postings over the past couple of weeks, so here comes the catching up. First, a Muse for Nature News on a curious...

Here’s a neat idea that I’ve written up for my Material Witness column in the November issue of Nature Materials. It’s a commonpl...

I’ve just put up a more expansive comment on the Prospect blog about the demise of the Science Book Prize. Sob.

I was recently sent this striking photo of a pattern in melting ice by Georg Warning in Konstanz. He asked if I’d seen anything like it in...

Hurrah for Nick Lane, whose Life Ascending won the Royal Society Science Book Prize last night. If anyone there was in doubt that Nick’s b...

There was a nice conference on ‘music and the brain’ here in London last weekend, and I have a report on it on Nature News. Here’s the lon...

Somehow I suspect that Jonathan Franzen doesn’t need me to feel his pain. But all the same, I do. He has just demanded the shredding of s...

About 18 months ago I went to Chartres for the filming of a documentary about the Gothic cathedrals for Nova. The documentary is now fini...

Here’s the full-cream version of my Lab Report for Prospect in October. The IPCC is in a bind. There are good arguments for reforming...

My review of Hawking’s new book has now been published, although you’re unlikely to stumble across it unless you live in Abu Dhabi. Sinc...

I have a comment on the Prospect blog about the way the media has been hyperventilating (see here and here (Graham Farmelo being char...

Here’s the pre-edited version of my latest Muse for Nature News. ********** Does money make you happy? It depends what you mean by hap...

Bit of overmatter from my Prospect Lab Report this month, as the top story below blew up shortly before it went to press, so the last tw...

In his review of my trio of books Nature’s Patterns in the TLS , Martin Kemp makes a start on a question that I leave more or less unto...

I’m excited. Really. I have just discovered that my friend Mark Miodownik is going to deliver the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures ...

OK, my article on agent-based modelling of the economy is now out in the Economist – you might be able to get it here , but if firewalls...