My first patient on Monday morning was ten minutes late. I was just about to call in my second when I saw that the first had just arrived. I hate it when this happens. The second patient will...
In the winter of 1609-10, Galileo Galilei made a series of astronomical observations that added to the growing list of anomalies threatening the stability of the earth-centred Ptolemaic cosmos....
What goes on in stock markets appears quite different when viewed on different timescales. Look at a whole day’s trading, and market participants can usually tell you a plausible story...
In the summer of 2007, Jay Smith, who teaches history at the University of North Carolina, was in Paris collecting information for a book about a mysterious beast that terrorised the remote...
An expedition to a hidden valley in Papua New Guinea in 2009 discovered a habitat whose living creatures had never been catalogued, a place so remote that even the people who live in the local...
One of the unheralded heroes of the end of the Cold War was General Y.P. Maksimov, the commander in chief of the Soviet strategic rocket forces during the hardliners’ coup against Gorbachev...
Aristotle affirmed the essential difference between the sexes: men’s brains were bigger, women were more inconstant, emotional and compassionate, at least in part because they do not...
While John Kasarda shares the title page of this scientific romance masquerading as a work of urban theory, Aerotropolis was written by Greg Lindsay alone. Kasarda, a professor at the University...
On 11 November 1855, a massive earthquake and tsunami destroyed most of Japan’s capital city, Edo, the precursor of modern Tokyo. Roughly 7000 people were reported dead or injured, and the...
Nurses are tough subjects for biography. Their ethos of compassion and, sometimes, self-sacrifice can lead to hagiography or – when times change – invite satire. It’s hard to...
When I was a boy – on this evidence, a miserable, maudlin sort of child – I used to kill time by calculating the value of a human life. Not the value of your soul or your contribution...
‘I don’t own a computer, have no idea how to work one,’ Woody Allen told an interviewer recently. Most of us have come to find computers indispensable, but he manages to have a...
Aneurin Bevan argued like someone willing to go to the wall for what he was saying. He spoke belligerently. He spoke as though to oppose what he was saying would be to offend against common...
Twenty years ago, the science writer Dennis Overbye published a marvellous book, Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos, in which he traced the development of cosmology – the scientific study of the...
Some years ago Stephen King announced that he would put his new book online before publication, for anyone to read freely. His publishers were spitting dollar signs and the fans delighted. In my...
To anyone attacked by a wild boar the advice from ancient and modern authorities is unanimous: do not run. Baden-Powell, the founder of the Scout Movement, estimated that a horse and rider would...
The Kalashnikov automatic rifle is light, portable and cheap. It scarcely ever jams, even in the most extreme conditions – tropical heat, Arctic cold, bogs, deserts. It can be disassembled...
Bedbugs can hitch-hike long distances and ride about town. But how good they are at very local travel remains undetermined. Urban myths have been around for a long time. ‘Bedbugs are popularly credited...