homunculus

Here is a review of Melinda Baldwin’s basically sound and thoughtful “biography” of Nature . It was destined for the Observer , but scheduli...

The impressive experiments described in a preprint by Ronald Hanson at Delft and colleagues have been widely reported (for example, here a...

Can a crowd write a song? That’s what an online experiment by computer programmer Brendon Ferris in the Dominican Republic is hoping to det...

Here, a little belatedly, is my July column for Nature Materials , which considers the issues around bioprinting of fake rhino horn. ____...

Here’s my latest column for Nature Materials . _______________________________________________________________________ The ability of co...

I was perhaps a bit cryptic in tweeting about my New Statesman piece on “the immortality business” (which I’m afraid I can’t put up here, b...

That the computer scientist Charles Simonyi has endowed a professorial chair at Oxford for the Public Understanding of Science seems a rathe...

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...