‘Their aim is that we accept a capacity of ten thousand separative work units which is equivalent to ten thousand centrifuges of the older type that we already have,’ Ali Khamenei,...
The argument over breast cancer screening has been going on for decades and concerns not just the efficacy of the screening itself but its potential to do harm as well as good.
In 1739, Captain Charles Le Moyne was marching four hundred French and Indian troops down the Ohio River when he came across a sulphurous marsh where, as Elizabeth Kolbert puts it,...
My problems began in 1984 when I wrote letters to Francis Pym and Sarah Kennedy about the Falklands War and Sir Robin Day’s part in it. Sarah was presenting a radio programme and I thought she was talking...
The issue is whether the pain inflicted on the few is worth the gain for the many.
My immediate reaction – shit, I’ve had a stroke – was followed immediately by a second: thank God we have health insurance.
It isn’t so much that vegetarians remind us of the slaughterhouse as that they make a mockery of our unthinking preferences.
Before stethoscopes were invented, physicians would listen to their patients’ hearts by laying one ear directly onto the skin of the chest. We’re accustomed to laying our heads...
The Large Hadron Collider at Cern is an extreme machine. As you go round the Science Museum’s new exhibition, Collider (until 5 May), you’re constantly reminded that it’s one...
Like rats or cockroaches on land, jellyfish are perfectly poised to capitalise when ‘ecosystems wobble’. They kill off all the competition, and because they have so few predators, they are largely...
The Austrian polymath Ernst Mach exhorted his fellow physicists in the early 1880s to recognise that all was not well with their discipline. Two hundred years earlier, Isaac Newton had bequeathed...
Jeff Bezos thinks of himself as a great man, and why shouldn’t he?
When Ferran Adrià, the Spanish maestro who is undisputedly the most influential chef of the last two decades, gave up cooking at his restaurant El Bulli, he announced that he was going to...
What do we learn about the human mind from evolutionary theorising? One might think that evolutionary psychology is predominantly a backward-looking science that sketches the historical processes...
Benoit Mandelbrot, who died in 2010, was a Polish-born, French-educated mathematician who flourished and became famous in America. His special genius was his ability to disregard disciplinary...
The beehives buzzing quietly in the boot, I drove up the motorway. The bees thrived in the Ashdown Forest in late summer. Transplanted to East London, perhaps they would feel hemmed in by tarmac...
The life of Isaac Newton falls into two halves, and the main problem for Newton studies is how to fit them together. In the first half he was a sulky Cambridge mathematician who, at the age of...
There’s a scene in Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction in which John Travolta’s character, a hitman called Vincent Vega, who has escorted his boss’s wife home after an evening out,...