homunculus

I have agreed, with some trepidation, to review volume 2 of Richard Dawkins’ autobiography, this one called Brief Candle in the Dark . I gue...

One of my esteemed colleagues recently finished a nice piece on careers in science by quoting Samuel Beckett: “Ever tried. Ever failed. No m...

That I can be fairly relied upon to put my foot in it was confirmed after a talk I gave at the Royal Society last week. The Q&A seemed t...

I have just presented one of BBC Radio 4’s Science Stories, a new series looking at episodes in the history of science. This one tells the ...

Sam Leith’s comment on the trend in non-fiction publishing is spot-on, and Toby Mundy’s analysis of it typically insightful. (And I’m not s...

Blimey. That Tim Hunt then. It feels like any single point of view is not enough; I need a superposition of states here. I read Athene Donal...

Necessarily cut from my piece in Nautilus on water and astrobiology was a paragraph of very early history, in which Christiaan Huygens ant...

It seems quite a lot of folk liked to hear about the old chemistry sets that I discussed in my article in Chemistry World . It was certainl...

My tribute to the late, great B. B. King for my “music cognition” column in the next issue of Sapere . __________________________________...

Here is an extended version of my latest piece for Nature News. There are of course more details about lots of the things discussed here i...

The story about demands (on my publisher) for royalties for quoting Goebbels raises fascinating issues. It is all the more complex because ...