Science & Technology

This​ is an essay about hands and handwriting. I think of handwriting as a way to organise thought into shapes. I like shapes. I like organising them. But because of recent neurological changes in my...

All fossil fuel projects are politically constituted. Either they are state projects, controlled and administered by state-owned enterprises such as Equinor, Saudi Aramco or Sinopec, or they depend on...

Five thousand Leningraders died of distrofia on Christmas Day 1941. One of them was Aleksandr Shchukin, a 58-year-old botanist found dead at his desk at the All Union Institute of Plant Breeding just...

An honest account of energy history would conclude not that energy transitions were a regular feature of the past, but that what we are attempting – the deliberate exit from and suppression of the energetic...

The only certainty about the picture is that it shows Francis Williams. No one has ever been able to discover who painted it, when, where or why. And then, a few months ago, everything changed.

It’s true that hackers are usually intelligent and highly educated. Yet the success of a hack relies less on mathematical prowess or coding pizzazz than on a keen understanding of human psychology. We...

In early modern England, numbers were something you could touch. On tally-sticks and abacuses, counting boards and jettons, arithmetic was a feat of hand-eye coordination. Thinking numerically was a matter...

How has the widespread assumption of water’s neutrality come about? Who gets to say what water does taste like, how it ought to taste, whether its sensory aspects do or do not testify to its quality?...

The nightingale’s song is punctuated by rich, almost painful pauses. In the silence, one imagines the bird has come to the end of a verse and is considering, with the ease and confidence of a seasoned...

What if dark matter is just ordinary matter locked inside black holes – from which, after all, light cannot escape. Such massive, dark objects would trundle around the cosmos, nudging the motion of visible...

The liminal terrain of Gulag medicine complicates the popular binary between ‘perpetrators’ and ‘victims’ in states that use terror against their citizens. Alexander Solzhenitsyn would have it...

As the shadow of the Moon swept across the surrounding cornfields, engulfing the crowd that had gathered to watch the total solar eclipse, we were transported, briefly, to a place unlike anywhere else...

When it’s capitalism that’s the problem, and not markets, the only alternative is post-capitalism. But the central fact of the climate crisis is that there is very little time, and the scale of the...

Across the life sciences in the 19th century, sleep was generally considered to be a vestige of our deep evolutionary past with no present value. Given its obvious disadvantages so far as economic productivity...

A great deal of importance seems to be attached to preventing models from generating harmful content if used inappropriately, but many of the most worrying consequences of AI will stem from it being used...

A recycling centre is a good place to go for a glimpse into the 21st-century industrial sublime. Standing above the maze of conveyor belts, you can watch as the relics from a thousand domestic scenes –...

Artificial life could be both mechanical and magical. The term ‘automaton’, referring to a self-moving machine, was first used in Europe in 1531 in a catalogue of magic, De Occulta Philosophia. Automata...

Linnaeus’s personal contradictions do not make him a historical chimera. If he sounds odd to those who hold a view of Enlightenment science as rational and orderly, perhaps that’s because real Enlightenment...